ORIGINAL SYSTEM DESIGN QUESTION
Video transcoding pipeline
Upload videos and produce multiple playback renditions with status tracking.
Original exercise · intermediate. Editorial role relevance does not imply a company has asked this question.
Requirements and constraints
- 10,000 uploads/day; average ten-minute video; four output renditions.
- Workers can fail and clients must see partial versus complete readiness.
- State assumptions and justify security, cost, operational ownership and data retention.
Pressure round
Two retries complete the same rendition with different bytes.
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: Workers can fail and clients must see partial versus complete readiness.
Capacity estimates
State assumptions, peak requests/second, data volume and retention. Show your arithmetic and units.
Self-review guidance
Use this workload: 10,000 uploads/day; average ten-minute video; four output renditions. 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 upload version, rendition jobs, checksums and publishing state.
Architecture & data flow
Describe components and request/event paths. Use plain text arrows to sketch your design; explain each responsibility.
Self-review guidance
Use object storage, job queues, isolated media workers and a manifest publisher.
Failures & observability
What happens on overload, duplicate events, partial failures or lost dependencies? Discuss monitoring and recovery.
Self-review guidance
Pressure-test: Two retries complete the same rendition with different bytes. 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 deterministic job identity with versioned output and recomputation costs.
Design guidance describes assumptions and tradeoffs; no architecture has been simulated or benchmarked.
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