Design a large-scale Video Streaming Platform
Last updated: March 16, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Zoom
March 16, 2026296
3
371 solved
Design a real-time video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ML system design at Zoom goes beyond model selection. This Onsite question evaluates your ability to design end-to-end ML pipelines, from data collection to model serving, while considering production constraints like latency and reliability.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Design the full ML lifecycle from data collection to model monitoring
- Address cold start, exploration/exploitation, and model freshness
- Discuss multi-objective optimization and ranking systems
- Plan for model debugging, fairness, and bias mitigation
- Design the feature store and training pipeline for scale
- Address model versioning, canary deployments, and rollback strategies
- Discuss the data flywheel and long-term system evolution
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 ensure fairness and reduce bias in the model?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in prediction requests?
- How would you debug a model that works well offline but poorly online?
- How would you run A/B tests on different model versions?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Real-time Video Streaming: Support live video streaming for millions of concurrent users.
- User Interaction: Allow users to interact with video streams (chat, re...
Capacity Estimation
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Zoom targets 10 million concurrent users during peak times:
- Video Bitrate: Average bitrate is 1.5 Mbps (for HD quality).
- Total Bandwidth Needed:
- 10 mi...
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