Design a large-scale File Storage Platform
Last updated: October 9, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
JPMorgan
October 9, 2025108
6
2,093 solved
Design a event-driven file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
JPMorgan 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
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- User authentication and authorization for secure file access.
- File upload and download functionalities with support for various file types.
- Versioning of ...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming a user base of 1 million active users, if each user uploads and downloads files 10 times a day, we can estimate:
- Total Requests: 1,000,000 users * 10 requests/user = 10,000,000 requests...
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