Design a large-scale Video Streaming Platform
Last updated: September 24, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Grafana Labs
System Design
Software Engineer
Grafana Labs
September 24, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Easy
39
12
3,224 solved
Design a real-time video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Grafana Labs asks this during the Onsite to assess your understanding of the full ML lifecycle. They want to see how you translate a business problem into an ML objective, design the feature pipeline, and plan for model monitoring and retraining.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Map the business problem to a concrete ML objective
- Propose reasonable features and a baseline model
- Discuss basic model evaluation metrics
- Outline a simple serving architecture
Key Topics to Cover
Model selection and architecture
Model serving and latency optimization
A/B testing and experimentation
Monitoring and model degradation detection
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 is your model retraining strategy?
- How would you handle the cold start problem?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in prediction requests?
- How would you debug a model that works well offline but poorly online?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Authentication: Users must be able to create accounts, log in, and manage their profiles.
- Video Streaming: Users can stream live and recorded videos with...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity, let’s assume:
- User Base: 10 million active users.
- Concurrent Streams: 1 million concurrent users during peak times.
- Video Quality: Average bitrate of 4 Mbps for...
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