Design Image Processing Infrastructure for microservices
Last updated: November 1, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Zscaler
System Design
Software Engineer
Zscaler
November 1, 2025Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
64
15
3,562 solved
Design a multi-tenant image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Zscaler typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
Partitioning and sharding strategies
Message queues and async processing
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
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 migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Multi-Tenant Support: The system must handle requests from multiple tenants, ensuring data isolation and security.
- Image Processing Capabilities: Support vari...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- Requests per Second (QPS): Assuming 10 million images per day, with peak usage during specific hours, we estimate:
- Average: 10,000 requests/hour = ~2.78 req...
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