Architecture and deployment patterns for online game backends including dedicated servers, authoritative server models, hosted service architectures and serverless components; regional and multiregion deployment strategies to minimize player latency; session and connection management, state synchronization, tick rate and authoritative state design; load balancing, sharding and matchmaking strategies; scaling techniques including autoscaling, predictive scaling and warm pools; graceful shutdown, handoff and reconnection handling to preserve player experience; networking considerations such as UDP versus TCP, NAT traversal and rate limiting; deployment, CI CD and observability practices for game services, and trade offs between latency, consistency, cost and operational complexity.
MediumTechnical
81 practiced
Design autoscaling rules for match-based game servers where each match runs in a dedicated container. Matches have variable lengths and arrival rates, and spikes are common. Which metrics would you scale on (candidate list such as queue length, pending matches, CPU), what cooldowns would you implement, and how do you prevent flip-flopping (thrashing) during volatile periods?
HardSystem Design
85 practiced
Design a network architecture to mitigate DDoS attacks targeting UDP game servers while preserving low-latency gameplay. Include use of anycast or global load balancers, scrubbing providers, progressive filtering, per-session rate limiting, blacklisting heuristics, and in-cluster defenses. Discuss cost and false-positive trade-offs and how to maintain player experience during mitigation.
HardSystem Design
66 practiced
Design the server architecture for a competitive FPS expecting 200k concurrent players worldwide. Matches are 10v10, require <=80ms median RTT for 95% of players, and average match lasts 20 minutes. Describe region placement, match placement/sharding, matchmaking, autoscaling and warm pools, network topology, cost trade-offs, and how to measure that SLOs are being met.
EasyTechnical
83 practiced
Summarize NAT traversal approaches relevant to multiplayer games: STUN-based UDP hole punching, TURN relay servers, and server relay (game server acting as a proxy). For each approach note typical cost, latency impact, success rates against different NAT types (symmetric vs cone), and when you would choose that approach.
HardTechnical
63 practiced
Design a predictive autoscaling system for game servers that uses machine learning to pre-warm instances. Specify input features (time-of-day, historical demand, marketing events, day-of-week, recent queue growth), candidate model types (time-series, gradient-boosting, LSTM), training and validation pipeline, how predictions map into warm-pool sizing and safety margins, and safe fallbacks when the model underperforms.
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