Design a Distributed File System
Company: Databricks
Role: Backend Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a distributed file system for a cloud service.
The system should support:
- A hierarchical namespace with directories and files.
- File operations: create, read, update, delete, rename, move, and list directory contents.
- Large files that may exceed the capacity of a single machine.
- Many concurrent clients reading and writing files.
- Durability despite machine or disk failures.
- Horizontal scalability to billions of files and petabytes of data.
Discuss the API, data model, storage architecture, metadata management, replication strategy, consistency model, failure handling, and trade-offs.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's competency in distributed systems and large-scale storage design, covering skills such as hierarchical namespace modeling, API and data model design, metadata management, replication and consistency strategies, fault tolerance, and scalable storage architecture.