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Medium Problems

Problems that require real scaling decisions: sharding, caching, fan-out, and consistency tradeoffs across multiple services.

Design Instagram

Instagram shares its feed-and-follow shape with Design Twitter — the fan-out-on-write-vs-read tradeoff from that lesson applies here too, and is worth mentioning rather than re-deriving. What makes this problem genuinely different is what's actually being posted: large binary media (photos and videos) instead of short text, which turns storage and delivery — not feed assembly — into the interesting new problem. Following the framework from How to Answer a System Design Interview Question.