System Design Interview: Instagram Reels/ Tiktok/ Youtube Short videos

Short videos are getting exceedingly popular on today’s social media platforms. Although Tiktok and Instagram Reels are the unparalleled industry leaders for video sharing applications, Youtube’s short videos are also admired by a large number of users.

So how would you build a similar online short video sharing system that stores massive videos? Furthermore, how do you handle the expanding load on the platform and prevent it from crashing down?

Read this article to cover some functional requirements to understand how Instagram Reels, Tiktok, and Youtube Shorts are designed.

Functional Requirements

These are the basic features of a video-sharing platform, as this article explains.

• Users should be able to upload the video.
• Storage of videos in multiple formats.

Non Functional Requirements

• High availability
• High consistency
• Low latency between upload and user availability of videos
• Fault-tolerant
• Performance

Maintaining all five non-functional requirements at all times is difficult, especially with the high traffic that the website/app will need to handle. However, different components of the system architecture can have different priorities.