Design a large-scale Video Streaming Platform
Last updated: July 13, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
PlanetScale
July 13, 20256
4
1,310 solved
Design a fault-tolerant video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
PlanetScale asks this during the Technical Screen 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
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
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 monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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:
- Users must be able to upload videos in various formats (MP4, AVI, etc.).
- Users can watch videos in real-time with features like pause, rewind, and fast forward. ...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming PlanetScale's video streaming platform expects to serve 10 million users daily:
- Concurrent Users: If we estimate 10% of users are active simultaneously, that's 1 million concurrent user...
Submit Your Answer
