Design Netflix: the video streaming system design interview walkthrough

System design interviews often present simple prompts that mask complex distributed-systems challenges. Designing a key-value store requires managing sharding, replication, and failure recovery for terabytes of data. Similarly, distributed message queues must handle durability and throughput for millions of messages. Video streaming systems, such as Netflix, focus on storage and delivery to minimize latency for millions of global subscribers. These prompts test critical engineering skills regarding partitioning, consistency, and optimizing the request path for scale.