Design a Video Streaming Service
Last updated: September 7, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Dropbox
September 7, 20257
11
4,848 solved
Design a event-driven video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Onsite at Dropbox. 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. Dropbox values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
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
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- User Authentication: Users must authenticate to access their video libraries.
- Video Uploading: Users can upload videos in various formats, with support for t...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming 10 million active users with an average of 2 video uploads per month and 1 hour of streaming per user per day:
- Video Uploads: 10,000,000 users x 2 uploads = 20,000,000 uploads/month = ...
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