Multi Region Disaster Recovery Questions

Designing systems for resilience and availability across geographic regions, including strategies for cross region replication, failover, and operational recovery. Candidates should understand deployment models such as active active and active passive and the trade offs they imply for availability, consistency, cost, and operational complexity. Discuss replication topologies and the differences between synchronous and asynchronous replication and how those choices affect consistency and the recovery point objective. Cover leader election and failover coordination mechanisms, conflict resolution approaches including last write wins, version vectors, and convergent data types, and implications for transactional guarantees and global transactions. Include global traffic routing and failover techniques such as DNS based routing, global load balancing, health checks, and the impact of routing and time to live on failover behavior. Address data partitioning and cross region latency trade offs, strategies for orchestrating data recovery and region seeding, backup and restore practices, and testing approaches such as planned failovers, rehearsal drills, and chaos testing. Explain how to derive and meet recovery time objective and recovery point objective from business requirements, and consider monitoring, observability, automation, runbooks, cost considerations, and compliance and data residency requirements.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain how data residency and compliance requirements affect multi-region disaster recovery designs. Provide at least three concrete architectural controls to ensure certain customer data never leaves a given jurisdiction while keeping services highly available.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

You need to implement a fencing mechanism during leader failover to prevent the old primary from accepting writes after a new primary is promoted. Describe design options (lease token, write-ids, epoch numbers), how to enforce fencing at the storage layer, and how to handle clock skew.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

Design an active-passive multi-region failover process for a web service with primary DB in us-east and a passive standby in eu-west. Include replication method, promotion steps, DNS changes, verification checks, and expected RTO/RPO assumptions. Keep the design operational for an SRE team to implement.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain how DNS TTL affects multi-region failover behavior for web services. Provide an example: DNS TTL = 60s, client resolver caches, and primary region fails. What factors determine how quickly traffic moves to a healthy region and how would you design around client-side caching?

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain the difference between Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Given a business requirement: "customer-facing payments must be restored within 30 minutes and data loss no more than 5 minutes", describe how you would translate these SLAs into technical design choices (replication method, backup cadence, monitoring signals) and any trade-offs you expect.

Unlock Full Question Bank

Get access to hundreds of Multi Region Disaster Recovery interview questions and detailed answers.

Join thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.