Build a real-time File Storage Pipeline
Last updated: February 10, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
CrowdStrike
February 10, 202650
13
3,185 solved
Design a real-time file storage 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 CrowdStrike. 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. CrowdStrike values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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
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 implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- File Upload/Download: Users must be able to upload files of various types and download them in real-time.
- Metadata Management: Each file must have associated ...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming CrowdStrike expects to handle 1 million users, each making, on average, 10 requests per day (upload/download), we can estimate:
- Total Daily Requests: 1,000,000 users * 10 requests = 10,...
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