Build a high-throughput Image Processing Pipeline
Last updated: October 15, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Morgan Stanley
October 15, 202538
12
276 solved
Design a high-throughput image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Technical Screen at Morgan Stanley. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Morgan Stanley values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Image Upload: Users must be able to upload images through a secure API endpoint.
- Image Processing: The system should support various image processing tas...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Morgan Stanley handles 10 million image processing requests per day:
- Requests per second (RPS): 10 million requests / 86400 seconds = ~115.7 RPS.
- Concurrent Users: Assuming pe...
Submit Your Answer
