Code Room
System designHardsd-g247
Subject Blob storeLevel Senior–Staff~50 minCommon in Storage & CDN interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

Design the storage layer of a durable object store (S3-class) targeting 11 nines of durability for exabytes of immutable blobs, optimized for cost. Objects range from tiny (KB) to huge (TB), the workload is write-once-read-many, and a fraction of objects are read constantly while most are nearly cold. Design the on-disk layout, the redundancy scheme, the metadata/index, and how you achieve the durability target affordably.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts — data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes — and name the trade-offs you are making.

Narrate your design
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.