Design a Real‑Time Video Playback Analytics Service
Our video streaming product wants to understand how users are watching content in near real time. We need a system that captures playback events from millions of devices, aggregates metrics, and surfaces them for dashboards and automated incident detection. Sketch the high‑level architecture and data flow.
This brief is incomplete on purpose, as it would be in a real interview. Ask the interviewer about the users, the features, the targets and the traffic. Whatever you uncover is added below.
Nothing uncovered yet.
Nothing uncovered yet.
Nothing uncovered yet.
- high‑level component diagram
- data flow for ingest → aggregation → alerting
- partitioning and replication strategy for the event store
- exactly‑once processing approach
- observability instrumentation plan
Shows clear stages (ingest, buffering, processing, storage, alerting) with appropriate technology choices, and explains how data moves end‑to‑end.
Identifies title‑or region‑centric hot spots, proposes sharding, composite keys or adaptive routing, and explains trade‑offs.
Describes the mechanism (idempotent writes, transactional processing, deduplication) and why it satisfies the guarantee.
Specifies metrics, traces, logs, dashboards, and alert correlation needed to detect and debug anomalies quickly.
Demonstrates capacity planning, autoscaling, buffering, and how the design survives a 5× traffic surge without loss.
Quantifies end‑to‑end latency, identifies bottlenecks, and proposes mitigations to keep alert generation within the required window.
Every functional requirement in the brief is visibly served by something on the board, and the non-functional targets are addressed rather than ignored.
Components are labelled, data flows are drawn as connections between them, and the direction of each flow is unambiguous.
Focus on the data pipeline, storage choices, and how you would surface observability signals. Do not dive into video encoding, CDN delivery, or client UI details. Assume the core streaming service already exists.
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