Design a large-scale Video Streaming Platform
Last updated: January 4, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
CrowdStrike
System Design
Software Engineer
CrowdStrike
January 4, 2026Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
127
3
3,064 solved
Design a fault-tolerant video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at CrowdStrike 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
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
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 do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- 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: Users must be able to create accounts, log in, and manage profiles.
- Video Uploading: Users can upload videos with metadata (title, descri...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- User Base: Assume 10 million active users.
- Request Patterns: If each user generates 5 requests per day (uploading, searching, streaming), we have:
- ...
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