Design a File Storage for Microsoft
Last updated: July 22, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Microsoft
July 22, 202529
9
3,534 solved
Design a distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Microsoft 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 would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- File Upload and Download: Users must be able to upload and download files of various sizes efficiently.
- File Metadata Management: The system should manage met...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity, we assume:
- Daily Requests: 10 million requests per day.
- Peak Load: 20% of daily traffic occurs in peak hours, translating to ~1,400 requests per second (RPS).
- **Fil...
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