Design a large-scale Content Delivery Platform
Last updated: July 8, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Uber
July 8, 20258
15
3,930 solved
Design a multi-tenant content delivery 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 Uber. 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. Uber 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
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Multi-Tenancy: Support multiple clients (e.g., Uber, Uber Eats, etc.) with isolated content delivery.
- Content Upload and Management: Allow users to upload, ma...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- Estimated QPS: For Uber’s global operations, assume around 10 million active users, each generating 1 request per minute on average.
- Total QPS: 10M us...
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