Design a Video Streaming Service
Last updated: May 24, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Atlassian
May 24, 202630
8
2,389 solved
Design a multi-tenant video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Atlassian 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
- 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
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 do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Authentication: Users must be able to create accounts and log in.
- Video Uploading: Users can upload videos, which will be transcoded into multiple format...
Capacity Estimation
Estimation
Assuming the service will handle:
- 1 million active users
- Each user requests video streaming 5 times per hour
- Total Video Streaming Requests per Hour: 1,000,000 users ...
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