Design a geo-distributed File Storage System
Last updated: August 21, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Netflix
August 21, 202538
9
3,740 solved
Design a geo-distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from Netflix's Onsite tests whether you can reason about software design at a deep level. The interviewer expects discussion of maintainability, testability, and operational considerations.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- What are the security implications of this design?
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Core Design Principles
For the geo-distributed file storage system, the following core design principles apply:
- Single Responsibility Principle (SRP): Each component of the system should have a single responsibility...
Architecture
The architecture of the geo-distributed file storage system at Netflix can be structured as follows:
- Microservices Architecture: The system can consist of several microservices, including:
- ...
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