Design Netflix
AdvancedOn the roadmap:Interview Ready · step 7: Practise under pressure
Design a global video streaming service.
Cover the CDN strategy, transcoding pipeline, microservice boundaries, data stores, and multi-region resilience.
Requirements
- Browse a catalogue and get personalised recommendations
- Stream video with adaptive bitrate on any device
- Upload and encode new titles in many formats
- Remain available when a region fails
Scale & constraints
- 250M subscribers
- Peak of tens of millions of concurrent streams
- Video library of petabytes
Hints (try without them first)
- Separate the control plane (APIs) from the data plane (video bytes). Where does each run?
- How do you get video close to users cheaply?
- What happens when a region goes down?