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 Clarification
Before diving into the architecture, clarify the scope with the interviewer. For Video Streaming Infrastructure for global users, key functional requi...
Capacity Estimation
Estimate the scale to drive design decisions. Assume 100M DAU with an average of 10 actions per user per day = 1B requests/day ~ 12K QPS average, ~36K...
Submit Your Answer
