Design Video Streaming Infrastructure for global users
Last updated: October 17, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Airbnb
October 17, 202515
12
605 solved
Design a event-driven video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Technical Screen at Airbnb. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Airbnb values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
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
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Users should be able to upload, stream, and share videos seamlessly.
- The system should support live streaming for events.
- Users should be able to add comment...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Airbnb has an average of 10 million active users daily, and each user streams 1 hour of video daily:
- Total Streams: 10 million streams/day
- Peak Load Estimation: Assuming peak usag...
Submit Your Answer
