Design a distributed Image Processing System
Last updated: March 15, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a distributed image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Oracle
System Design
Software Engineer
Oracle
March 15, 2026Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Medium
9
14
892 solved
Design a distributed image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Oracle 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
- 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
Partitioning and sharding strategies
Message queues and async processing
Database selection and data modeling
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Security and authentication
Consistency models and replication
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 implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Image Upload: Users should be able to upload images in various formats (JPEG, PNG, GIF).
- Image Processing: The system must support operations like resizing, ...
Capacity Estimation
Estimation of Scale:
- User Base: Assume 1 million active users, each making an average of 10 image processing requests per day.
- Requests Per Second (RPS):
- Daily Requests = 1,000...
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