Design a Video Streaming for Airbnb
Last updated: December 10, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Airbnb
System Design
Software Engineer
Airbnb
December 10, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Medium
145
4
3,707 solved
Design a distributed video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Airbnb asks this during the Onsite 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
- 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
High-level architecture and component design
Security and authentication
Message queues and async processing
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 happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Video Uploading: Users can upload videos up to 1 hour in length.
- Video Streaming: Users can stream videos in adaptive quality (SD, HD, 4K).
- **Search and Di...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- Concurrent Users: Assuming an average of 5 million concurrent users.
- Video Requests: Each user might request 1 video per minute, leading to **5 million QP...
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