Design Video Streaming Infrastructure for microservices
Last updated: December 17, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Booking.com
December 17, 2025257
3
3,773 solved
Design a multi-tenant video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from Booking.com's Onsite 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
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
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
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
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
Core Design Principles
For the design of the multi-tenant video streaming system at Booking.com, several core design principles come into play:
- Single Responsibility Principle (SRP): Each microservice should handle ...
Architecture
The architecture for the video streaming system will leverage a microservices-based approach, where different functionalities are encapsulated within dedicated services:
- Video Upload Service: H...