Design a Image Processing Service
Last updated: August 30, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Notion
August 30, 20252
10
1,881 solved
Design a real-time image processing 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 Notion. 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. Notion values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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 would you handle a region-wide outage?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Image Upload: Users can upload images in various formats (JPEG, PNG, GIF).
- Real-Time Processing: Images are processed in real-time to apply filters, resize, a...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Notion has approximately 10 million active users:
- Requests per Second (RPS): If each user makes 1 image processing request daily, that’s about 115 RPS (10M/86400 seconds).
- **Peak Load...
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