Design a Content Delivery for Uber
Last updated: July 13, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Uber
July 13, 202546
10
3,703 solved
Design a high-throughput content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Uber 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
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
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 do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Support for delivering various content types (images, videos, documents) to users globally.
- Ability to handle millions of concurrent requests with low latency. ...
Capacity Estimation
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Assumptions:
- Average daily active users (DAUs) for Uber = 25 million.
- Average content requests per user = 10 requests per day.
- Peak traffic is estimated to be 10x the average.
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**C...
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