Design File Storage Infrastructure for global users
Last updated: October 25, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Grafana Labs
October 25, 202539
8
1,864 solved
Design a fault-tolerant file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Grafana Labs 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
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 would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Users can upload, download, and delete files.
- Support versioning for file uploads to maintain historical data.
- Implement access control to manage user permis...
Capacity Estimation
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Assumptions:
- 1 million users, with an average of 10 file operations per user per day.
- Each file size averages 5 MB.
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Calculations:
- Total Requests per Day: 1,000,000 users *...
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