System Architecture and Design Patterns Questions

High level understanding of system architecture and design patterns covers application programming interfaces, service decomposition and the trade offs between microservice and monolithic approaches, data storage and modeling choices, and consistency availability and partition tolerance considerations. Candidates should be able to reason about scalability strategies such as horizontal scaling, sharding and caching, patterns for resilience including retries backoff and circuit breakers, and choices for asynchronous and event driven architectures. Important complementary topics include observability through logging metrics and distributed tracing, security and authentication, deployment and operational practices, and the cost and timeline implications of architecture decisions. Interview assessments typically test the ability to propose architectures, explain trade offs given constraints on latency throughput reliability and cost, and articulate how design choices affect program complexity maintenance and delivery schedule.