Design Video Streaming Infrastructure for microservices

Last updated: August 1, 2025

Quick Overview

Design a geo-distributed video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.

HRT
Software Engineering Fundamentals
Software Engineer
HRT
August 1, 2025
Software Engineer
Technical Screen
Software Engineering Fundamentals
Medium

50

4

1,809 solved


Design a geo-distributed video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.

This fundamentals question from HRT's Technical Screen 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
Testing strategies (unit, integration, e2e)
SOLID principles
API design and RESTful conventions
Performance optimization
Design patterns (Factory, Observer, Strategy, etc.)
How to Approach This
  1. Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
  2. Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
  3. Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
  4. Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
  • How would you handle backward compatibility?
  • How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
  • How would this design change if the team size doubled?
  • What testing strategy would you use for this component?
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Sample Answer
Core Design Principles

In designing a geo-distributed video streaming system for HRT, the following core design principles apply:

  1. Separation of Concerns: This principle helps in isolating different functionalities o...
Architecture

The architecture for the video streaming system would follow a microservices design:

  • Service Breakdown: Key services include:
    • Video Upload Service: Handles video uploads and storage. ...

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