Distributed Systems Fundamentals Questions

Core principles and theory that underlie distributed computing systems. Includes understanding trade offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance, common consistency models such as eventual and strong consistency, replication and sharding strategies, load balancing and data partitioning, consensus algorithms and their guarantees, scalability and fault tolerance patterns, and how these concepts apply to infrastructure components such as databases, caches, service meshes, and load balancers. Candidates are expected to explain design choices, common failure modes, and how fundamental concepts influence architecture decisions for resilient and scalable systems.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Implement a simple vector clock merge and comparison utility in Python. Provide functions merge(vc1, vc2) returning the merged vector clock and compare(vc1, vc2) returning before, after, or concurrent. Assume vector clocks are dicts mapping node ids to integer counters.

MediumSystem Design

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Design a fault-tolerant model deployment process that supports blue-green and canary deploys. Specify automated rollback triggers based on metrics, how you progressively ramp traffic, and how to rollback gracefully while preserving user assignment during the window.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a real-time feature serving architecture that must support 50,000 requests per second with a p95 latency under 5 milliseconds. Describe major components, their responsibilities, consistency considerations, and how you would handle hot keys and cache warming.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

You observe that a user profile update eventually becomes visible to different services at different times due to asynchronous replication. Describe three concrete downstream risks this eventual visibility may cause for an ML model's predictions and metrics.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Compare Paxos and Raft at a level appropriate for system design decisions. Which would you choose to manage metadata and leader responsibilities for a feature store's coordination service, and why? Discuss developer ergonomics, understandability, and production considerations.

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