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System Design questions require understanding of core concepts and practice. PracHub provides solutions with explanations to help you master system design interviews.

What difficulty level is this interview question?

This is a medium difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Technical Screen rounds at Docker.

What role is this question designed for?

This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at Docker during technical interviews.

Design a container image registry | Docker Interview Question

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing large-scale distributed systems for artifact storage and delivery, including storage architecture, content-addressable deduplication, metadata modeling, access control, replication, caching, and observability.

Design a cloud service for storing and distributing container images, similar to a hosted container registry.

The system should support:

Pushing container images from developers or CI/CD pipelines
Storing image layers and metadata
Tagging versions such as latest , v1.2.3 , and commit-based tags
Pulling images efficiently from many clients across regions
Sharing private repositories with teams and controlling access
Avoiding re-uploading or re-downloading layers that already exist
Cleaning up unreferenced data safely

Discuss:

Functional and non-functional requirements
Core APIs and upload/download flows
Metadata schema for repositories, manifests, layers, and tags
Storage design, content-addressable deduplication, and garbage collection
Authentication, authorization, and multi-tenant isolation
Caching, CDN, replication, and scalability strategies
Reliability, consistency trade-offs, and observability

Assume the service must handle millions of images, frequent CI pushes, and large pull traffic during deployments.

Design a container image registry

Quick Overview

Solution

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