Design Google Drive
Last updated: November 11, 2025
Quick Overview
Design the architecture for Google Drive. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
Google
System Design
Software Engineer
Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Medium
44
6
2,200 solved
Design the architecture for Google Drive. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
ML system design at Google goes beyond model selection. This System Design Round question evaluates your ability to design end-to-end ML pipelines, from data collection to model serving, while considering production constraints like latency and reliability.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Define clear ML objectives with appropriate loss functions and metrics
- Design a comprehensive feature engineering pipeline
- Discuss model selection with trade-offs (complexity vs interpretability vs latency)
- Plan online and offline evaluation strategies including A/B testing
- Address serving infrastructure: batch vs real-time, latency requirements
- Consider data quality, labeling strategy, and feedback loops
Key Topics to Cover
ML objective formulation and metric selection
Monitoring and model degradation detection
A/B testing and experimentation
Feedback loops and model retraining
Model serving and latency optimization
Model selection and architecture
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 the cold start problem?
- What is your model retraining strategy?
- What would you do if model performance degrades over time?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- File Storage: Users should be able to upload, store, and organize files of various types (documents, images, videos).
- Real-Time Collaboration: Multiple users ...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Google Drive will serve 1 billion users worldwide:
- Files per User: Average 100 files/user.
- Total Files: 100 billion files.
- Average File Size: 1 MB.
- **Total Data Storag...
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