Design a Image Processing Service
Last updated: March 21, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Zillow
March 21, 20264
15
1,996 solved
Design a multi-tenant image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Zillow asks this during the Onsite to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Image Upload: Users can upload images for processing.
- Image Processing: The service should support various operations such as resizing, cropping, watermarking...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Zillow processes around 10 million images per day:
- Requests per second (RPS): 10,000,000 images/day / 86,400 seconds/day = ~115 RPS.
- Processing Time: If each image takes an averag...
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