System design interview questionEasyBasic System Component

Design a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Design a CDN: cache content at the edge so users download from a nearby PoP instead of always hitting origin.

Interview scope

Client → CDN. Origin behind CDN via Object Storage and/or LB → App. Draw Client → CDN (required).

Functional requirements

  • Serve cached static/media objects to clients.
  • Fetch from origin on cache miss.
  • Support many edge locations at a high level.

Scale and quality goals

  • Low latency for viewers far from origin.
  • Origin must not take every hit at global scale.
  • Large objects live in object storage / origin backends.

Capacity assumption

Design for this scale

Assume ~1B object requests/day (~12k RPS average) with a high cache-hit ratio at the edge.

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