Design a production file storage service

Q: Design a production file storage service

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in distributed systems and storage architecture, covering metadata schema design, concurrency control for atomic per-directory limits and renaming, transaction boundaries and idempotency, storage models for file bytes, large-file handling, consistency and failure modes, scalability and partitioning, observability, lifecycle management, and security. It is in the System Design domain and is commonly asked because it reveals how a candidate reasons about architectural trade-offs and practical implementation concerns; it tests both high-level conceptual design and hands-on practical application.

Q: How do I approach System Design interview questions?

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

Q: What difficulty level is this interview question?

This is a hard difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Technical Screen rounds at Harvey AI.

Q: What role is this question designed for?

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

Question

System Design: Production-Grade File Storage Service

Problem

Design a production-grade file storage service with the following APIs, semantics, and constraints.

APIs

addFile(String path)
- Creates any missing folders and stores a file at a path like "path/to/somewhere/file.txt".
list(String path)
- Returns the immediate children (files and folders) of the directory at the given path.

Constraints and Semantics

Per-directory capacity limit: each directory can contain at most 5 entries (files + folders). Attempts to exceed this limit must be atomically rejected.
Name collision handling: duplicate file names in the same directory are auto-renamed using OS-style suffixes, e.g., base (1).ext, base (2).ext. Inputs that already contain such suffixes must be handled correctly (do not double-suffix; accept if free; otherwise continue numbering).

What to Describe

Overall architecture: API layer, metadata service, content store.
Metadata schema and store choice (relational vs NoSQL).
How to enforce the per-directory capacity limit and renaming atomically under concurrent requests.
Transaction boundaries and idempotency.
Content-addressed vs location-addressed storage and how file bytes are stored (e.g., object storage references).
Handling large files (streaming/resumable uploads).
Consistency model and failure/rollback.
Scalability (partitioning keys, sharding, caching).
Observability and rate/quota enforcement.
Data lifecycle (retention, deletion, versioning).
Security (authn/authz, path traversal protection, encryption in transit/at rest).
Define key SLIs/SLOs.

Assume a single logical namespace with a root directory and multi-tenant users. You may add minimal endpoints (e.g., upload sessions) to make large-file handling realistic.

Design a production file storage service

Quick Overview

System Design: Production-Grade File Storage Service

Problem

APIs

Constraints and Semantics

What to Describe

Solution

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