Design a large-scale File Storage Platform
Last updated: September 16, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Cloudflare
September 16, 2025272
4
3,295 solved
Design a high-throughput file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Cloudflare asks this during the System Design Round 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
- 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?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- File Upload/Download: Users can upload and download files of varying sizes (up to several TB).
- File Sharing: Users can generate links for shared access to fil...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Cloudflare's file storage platform will handle:
- 10 million users, with an average of 5 file uploads per day per user.
- This translates to 50 million file uploads per day, which...
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