System designEasysd-g547

Subject Media storageLevel Entry–Mid~25 minCommon in Storage & CDN · Concurrency interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a simple image-thumbnail service for a small blog platform. Users upload an original photo (up to ~5 MB) and the site needs a 200x200 thumbnail to show in post lists. Traffic is modest: a few hundred uploads a day, reads dominated by visitors loading post pages. Walk through the components, where you store the images, and how thumbnails get generated.

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.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.