Design a fault-tolerant File Storage System
Last updated: October 6, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Rippling
October 6, 2025161
5
1,751 solved
Design a fault-tolerant 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 Rippling. 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. Rippling 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 happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- File Upload/Download: Users must be able to upload and download files of various formats (e.g., documents, images, videos).
- File Metadata Management: The syst...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Rippling has 1 million active users, with each user averaging 10 file uploads/downloads per day:
- Total Requests per Day: 1 million users * 10 requests = 10 million requests/day.
- **Req...
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