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CAP Theorem and Consistency Models Questions

Understand the CAP theorem and how Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance interact in distributed systems. Know different consistency models including strong consistency such as linearizability, eventual consistency, causal consistency, and session consistency, and how to apply them to different use cases. Be familiar with consensus protocols and distributed coordination primitives such as Raft and Paxos, quorum reads and writes, two phase commit and when to use them. Understand trade offs between consistency and availability under network partitions, patterns for hybrid approaches where different data uses different guarantees, and the product and developer experience implications such as latency, stale reads, and API contract clarity.

HardTechnical
0 practiced
Compare using sticky sessions at the load balancer vs storing session/version metadata at the application layer to provide read-your-writes semantics at scale. Discuss trade-offs for failover, autoscaling, cache efficiency, and developer ergonomics.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Explain how to tune N, R, and W for a quorum system to balance latency and availability. Describe the impact of (a) increasing N, (b) increasing W, and (c) decreasing R on read/write latency and fault tolerance, and give an example configuration for a geo-replicated store.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the CAP theorem from an SRE perspective: define Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance. Describe what guarantees can and cannot be provided during a network partition and give one concrete service-level example where you would favor Consistency over Availability and one where you would favor Availability over Consistency.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Provide an SRE-focused example where you would favor Availability over Consistency during a partition (describe user impact and mitigation), and another example where you must favor Consistency (explain why availability must be sacrificed).
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design the replication and consistency approach for a globally-accessible shopping cart so users rarely lose items and have a pleasant UX. Discuss per-user data locality, conflict resolution, eventual vs strong guarantees, and how to handle offline clients and merges.

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