Code Room
System designHardsd-g495
Subject Video streamingLevel Senior–Staff~50 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Computer games, Technology

Question

Design the session orchestration layer for a cloud-gaming (pixel-streaming) service that runs the actual game on a GPU server in a datacenter, encodes the rendered frames in real time, and streams them to the player's device while sending the player's inputs back upstream — all within a <60ms input-to-photon budget so the game feels responsive. You must place a player on a GPU instance near them, capacity-plan an expensive GPU fleet for spiky demand, encode game video with minimal latency, and handle the round-trip control loop.

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.