Design Google Maps Street View Storage — Google — Intervues

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Design Google Maps Street View Storage[ OK ] 46 — full content available
[ INFO ] category: System Design  difficulty: hard  freq: medium  first seen: 2026-01-11
[HARD][SYSTEM DESIGN][MEDIUM]System DesignDistributed StorageGeo-Indexingbackend
$ cat problem.md
Design a system that supports Google Maps Street View image storage. Images are uploaded from taxis equipped with cameras.
Background:
Each taxi has a camera taking continuous photos
Images uploaded to the system
Downstream processing: image understanding, display to users, map generation
Requirements:
Handle uploads from thousands of taxis
Efficient storage for petabytes of images
Support downstream processing pipelines
Low latency retrieval for user display
Key Components:
Upload service with authentication and rate limiting
Distributed object storage (GCS/S3)
Metadata database for geo-indexing
Processing pipeline for image stitching and quality checks
CDN for user-facing delivery
Discussion Points:
Authentication design for taxi devices
Handling network issues during upload
Image deduplication and versioning
Geo-spatial indexing for efficient retrieval
user@intervues:~/google$ 