Object Storage

What is Tiered Storage for Hot and Cold Data?

Tiered storage places data on different classes of storage medium based on how frequently it is accessed — hot data (frequently read/written) sits on fast, exp…

How Would You Design Instagram?

Instagram is designed around three separable concerns — durable object storage for photos and videos behind a CDN, a metadata service backed by a sharded datab…

How Would You Design YouTube?

Designing YouTube means splitting the system into an upload/transcoding pipeline that converts raw video into multiple bitrates and resolutions, a metadata ser…

How Would You Design Pastebin?

Pastebin is a text-snippet sharing service built around three core pieces: a short unique key generator for each paste, an object store or blob-friendly databa…

How to Design a Music Streaming Service Like Spotify

A Spotify-like music streaming service stores audio tracks as pre-transcoded chunked files in object storage served through a CDN, uses adaptive bitrate stream…

How Do You Design a Video Streaming Platform?

A video streaming platform like YouTube or Netflix is built around an upload-and-transcode pipeline that converts a raw video into multiple bitrate/resolution…

How to Design an Image Upload Service

An image upload service accepts files through a pre-signed direct-to-object-storage upload flow, validates and processes them asynchronously through a pipeline…

How to Design a Thumbnail Generation Pipeline

A thumbnail generation pipeline listens for new-media events, fans out a set of resize/crop/format jobs to a worker pool that processes each size independently…

How Would You Design a Blob Storage System?

A blob storage system stores unstructured binary objects (files, images, videos) by splitting each object into fixed-size chunks distributed across many storag…

How Do You Handle File Uploads on the Web?

Web file uploads are handled by sending file data as multipart/form-data (or via a pre-signed direct-to-storage URL for large files), validating type and size…