ORIGINAL SYSTEM DESIGN QUESTION
Private photo library
Store private photos, generate thumbnails and support shared albums.
Original exercise · foundation. Editorial role relevance does not imply a company has asked this question.
Requirements and constraints
- Two million users; 100 new photos/user/month; average photo 4 MB.
- Originals and thumbnails must obey the same album permissions.
- State assumptions and justify security, cost, operational ownership and data retention.
Pressure round
A removed album member still has a cached thumbnail URL.
Build and explain the design
Requirements & scope
Who uses it? What must it do? What is explicitly out of scope? State latency, durability and privacy goals.
Self-review guidance
Define the actors, required operations and out-of-scope behavior. Explicit requirement: Originals and thumbnails must obey the same album permissions.
Capacity estimates
State assumptions, peak requests/second, data volume and retention. Show your arithmetic and units.
Self-review guidance
Use this workload: Two million users; 100 new photos/user/month; average photo 4 MB. Convert rates and payload sizes into peak compute/storage assumptions; show units, headroom and what remains unmeasured.
APIs & data model
Describe endpoints/events, entity keys, indexes, authorization, and idempotency.
Self-review guidance
Define asset variants, album membership and share grants.
Architecture & data flow
Describe components and request/event paths. Use plain text arrows to sketch your design; explain each responsibility.
Self-review guidance
Separate metadata authority, object variants and asynchronous thumbnail processing.
Failures & observability
What happens on overload, duplicate events, partial failures or lost dependencies? Discuss monitoring and recovery.
Self-review guidance
Pressure-test: A removed album member still has a cached thumbnail URL. Describe bounded recovery, deduplication, observability and a user-visible failure state.
Tradeoffs & alternatives
Compare two plausible approaches. State the costs, consistency model and what would make you change the design.
Self-review guidance
Compare short-lived signed URLs with current authorization on download.
Design guidance describes assumptions and tradeoffs; no architecture has been simulated or benchmarked.
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