Build a scalable File Storage Pipeline
Last updated: December 26, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ServiceNow
December 26, 20250
6
790 solved
Design a scalable file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at ServiceNow typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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 monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- File Uploading: Users should be able to upload files with various formats (e.g., images, documents) with a maximum size of 5GB.
- File Retrieval: Users must be ...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate the capacity needs:
- Daily Requests: 10 million requests per day translates to approximately 115 requests per second.
- File Size: Assuming an average file size of 100 MB, the tot...
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