Infrastructure and Database Systems Questions

Fundamental infrastructure and database engineering concepts relevant to analytics platforms and general backend systems. Topics include relational and non relational database architecture indexing strategies query optimization replication and consistency trade offs sharding and partitioning approaches caching systems design message queues and event streaming systems and how these components integrate to meet performance reliability and cost objectives. Candidates should be able to reason about capacity planning high availability disaster recovery backup strategies and operational concerns such as monitoring alerting and graceful degradation under load.

HardTechnical

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A primary database crashed, the system failed over to a replica, and you discover some transactions were lost and a split-brain occurred due to a network partition. You're oncall. Provide an incident response plan: triage steps, containment to prevent further divergence, data recovery strategy to reconcile missing transactions, stakeholder communication, and long-term fixes to prevent recurrence.

EasyTechnical

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Write a Python 3 script that reads a newline-delimited JSON logfile events.jsonl where each line is like {"timestamp": "2025-11-30T12:34:56Z", "level": "ERROR", "message": "..."}. Output per-minute counts of ERROR events for the last 24 hours to stdout. The script should be memory-efficient and handle malformed lines gracefully.

EasyTechnical

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Define SLI, SLO, and SLA. For a read-heavy database-backed API that needs 99.95% availability and p95 latency under 250ms, how would you design SLOs and error budget policies (measurement windows, burn rate alerts, and automated responses) to balance reliability and new feature rollout?

HardSystem Design

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RPO=0 and RTO=5 minutes are required for write traffic across regions but synchronous cross-region replication is too slow. Propose a hybrid disaster-recovery architecture that approaches zero data loss and supports quick failover. Discuss trade-offs in complexity, latency, cost, and how to detect and trigger failover safely.

MediumSystem Design

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Design a backup and restore strategy for a distributed NoSQL store such as Cassandra to meet RPO of 15 minutes and RTO of 1 hour. Discuss snapshots, incremental backups, commit-log (or WAL) archiving, cross-region replication, restore verification, and testing your restore process.

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