Build a high-throughput File Storage Pipeline
Last updated: July 22, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Visa
System Design
Product Manager
Visa
July 22, 2025Product Manager
Onsite
System Design
Medium
12
12
1,805 solved
Design a high-throughput file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Visa asks this during the Onsite 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
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
Key Topics to Cover
API design and rate limiting
High-level architecture and component design
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Security and authentication
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
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
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Ability to upload, download, and delete files.
- Support for file metadata (e.g., name, size, type, upload timestamp).
- API for listing files in a user’s storag...
Capacity Estimation
- User Base: Assume 1 million active users.
- File Operations: Each user makes about 100 requests per day (upload, download, delete).
- Total Requests: 1,000,000 users * 100 requests = 100...
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