Build a geo-distributed Image Processing Pipeline
Last updated: December 3, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
TikTok
December 3, 202510
7
3,355 solved
Design a geo-distributed image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
TikTok asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Process and transform millions of images daily for user-generated content on TikTok.
- Support various image processing tasks such as resizing, filtering, and comp...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming an average image size of 2 MB and that each user processes 2 images per day:
- Daily Request Volume: 10 million images/day.
- Total Data Processed: 10 million * 2 MB = 20 TB/day.
Giv...
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