Streaming and Real Time Systems Questions

Fundamental concepts and design patterns for building systems that process continuous, low latency data flows and real time features. Candidates should be comfortable describing publish subscribe and event streaming paradigms, message brokers and streaming platforms, stream processing versus batch processing, ordering and partitioning strategies, backpressure and flow control, latency versus throughput trade offs, windowing and stateful stream operations, idempotency and delivery semantics, and recovery patterns such as checkpointing and replay. Practical considerations include consumer scaling, message retention, monitoring and observability, and choosing appropriate platforms and guarantees for a given workload.