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Multi Region Disaster Recovery Questions

Designing systems for resilience and availability across geographic regions, including strategies for cross region replication, failover, and operational recovery. Candidates should understand deployment models such as active active and active passive and the trade offs they imply for availability, consistency, cost, and operational complexity. Discuss replication topologies and the differences between synchronous and asynchronous replication and how those choices affect consistency and the recovery point objective. Cover leader election and failover coordination mechanisms, conflict resolution approaches including last write wins, version vectors, and convergent data types, and implications for transactional guarantees and global transactions. Include global traffic routing and failover techniques such as DNS based routing, global load balancing, health checks, and the impact of routing and time to live on failover behavior. Address data partitioning and cross region latency trade offs, strategies for orchestrating data recovery and region seeding, backup and restore practices, and testing approaches such as planned failovers, rehearsal drills, and chaos testing. Explain how to derive and meet recovery time objective and recovery point objective from business requirements, and consider monitoring, observability, automation, runbooks, cost considerations, and compliance and data residency requirements.

EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe active-active and active-passive multi-region deployment models for a data service. For each model, summarize the impacts on availability, consistency, cost, and operational complexity. Provide one concrete example use case where active-active is the better fit and one where active-passive is preferable.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a global traffic routing strategy using a combination of DNS, global load balancers, and health checks for an API service across three regions. Explain how you would configure health checks, failover priorities, and TTLs to balance failover speed and stability. Also discuss how to handle long-lived TCP or WebSocket connections during failover.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a multi-region architecture to serve a global analytics data lake that must support 200k ad-hoc queries per minute globally and ingest 10 TB/day. Reads should be served from a local region within 100ms median latency; writes are ingested centrally with RPO <= 1 hour. Sketch components, replication approach for data partitions, catalog synchronization and catalog consistency concerns.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) in the context of multi-region disaster recovery for data systems. For a data pipeline ingesting 1 TB/day, provide two concrete examples of business requirements that would map to different RTO and RPO targets (one aggressive, one relaxed). For each example, describe the architectural trade-offs (cost, replication strategy, operational complexity) required to meet those targets.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Discuss high-level data residency and compliance constraints that affect multi-region disaster recovery designs (e.g., GDPR, data sovereignty). As a data engineer, what patterns can you use to meet regional-only storage requirements while still providing resilience and failover?

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