Design a large-scale File Storage Platform
Last updated: January 6, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Coinbase
System Design
Software Engineer
Coinbase
January 6, 2026Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
142
6
1,048 solved
Design a multi-tenant file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Coinbase typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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
API design and rate limiting
High-level architecture and component design
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
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
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Multi-tenant architecture to support different users and organizations.
- Ability to upload, download, delete, and share files securely.
- Metadata management fo...
Capacity Estimation
- Assume we have 1 million users, each user uploads an average of 10 files per month.
- Total files = 10 million files.
- Average file size = 5 MB.
- Total storage required = 10 million * 5 MB = 50 TB...
Submit Your Answer
Markdown supported