Design a large-scale File Storage Platform
Last updated: March 15, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
SpaceX
System Design
Software Engineer
SpaceX
March 15, 2026Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
327
12
3,052 solved
Design a distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at SpaceX 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
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Message queues and async processing
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
Partitioning and sharding strategies
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 do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- File Upload/Download: Users can upload and download files of varying sizes (from KBs to several GBs).
- File Metadata Management: Store metadata such as file na...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- User Base: Assume 1 million active users.
- File Operations: If each user performs an average of 10 file operations (uploads/downloads) per day, that resu...
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