Design File Storage Infrastructure for mobile apps
Last updated: October 11, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Booking.com
October 11, 20258
5
4,348 solved
Design a scalable file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from Booking.com's System Design Round tests whether you can reason about software design at a deep level. The interviewer expects discussion of maintainability, testability, and operational considerations.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Explain the concept clearly with a practical example
- Discuss when and why to apply this principle
- Identify common mistakes and anti-patterns
- Compare with alternative approaches
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 measure the performance of this component in production?
- How would you document this for other engineers?
- What are the security implications of this design?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
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Core Design Principles
For designing the file storage infrastructure for Booking.com, the following core design principles are critical:
- Separation of Concerns: This principle helps in organizing the system into dis...
Architecture
The architectural approach for Booking.com's file storage system can be a microservices architecture with the following components:
- API Gateway: This will handle incoming requests from mobile ...
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