Design File Storage Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: August 12, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Spotify
August 12, 202510
4
3,644 solved
Design a distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Software engineering fundamentals questions at Spotify test your understanding of core CS concepts and their practical application. This Technical Screen question evaluates how you apply engineering principles to build maintainable, scalable software.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you document this for other engineers?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
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Core Design Principles
For designing the distributed file storage system for IoT devices at Spotify, the following core design principles apply:
- Separation of Concerns: This principle suggests that different compone...
Architecture
The architecture for the file storage system at Spotify could be designed as follows:
- Microservices Architecture: We utilize a microservices approach to ensure that each component (e.g., file ...
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