Design a multi-tenant File Storage System
Last updated: November 25, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Stripe
November 25, 202517
4
453 solved
Design a multi-tenant file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Technical Screen at Stripe. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Stripe values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Multi-Tenant Support: The system must support multiple tenants (clients) securely, ensuring data isolation and access control for each tenant.
- File Operations...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Stripe has around 10 million active users and each user performs an average of 10 file operations per day:
- Total Operations: 10 million users * 10 operations = 100 million operations pe...
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