Requirements to Architecture Mapping Questions
Bridges business and customer requirements to concrete architectural or non functional specifications. Candidates should extract throughput, concurrency, availability, latency, durability, security, compliance and budget constraints from scenarios and translate them into measurable goals such as requests per second targets, latency SLOs, durability levels, retention and encryption requirements. The topic includes creating a requirements matrix that directly informs component choices, capacity planning, and trade off justification.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the difference between SLA, SLO, and error budget. Describe how an error budget can affect architectural decisions such as enabling eventual consistency or adding a cache, and give two realistic examples connecting error budget consumption to release or mitigation choices.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Prepare a written justification you would present to a CTO for choosing eventual consistency and asynchronous multi-region replication over synchronous replication for a social feed feature. Include a requirements-to-metrics mapping (latency targets, availability goals), estimated numeric impacts on write latency and availability, a risk assessment including conflict handling and UX anomalies, and mitigation steps such as read-repair and versioning.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Write a Python function required_instances(rps, avg_service_time_ms, concurrency_per_instance) that returns the minimum number of instances needed to meet requests-per-second given average service time in milliseconds and maximum concurrent requests an instance can handle. Assume uniform arrival distribution, no queueing, and ignore startup time. Include a short unit test for rps=1000, avg_service_time_ms=50, concurrency_per_instance=100 and explain the formula you used.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design an observability architecture that lets you measure SLOs with high fidelity across distributed services while minimizing overhead. Cover SLI collection patterns, tracing vs metrics vs logs, sampling strategies, cardinality limits, storage and retention trade-offs, and how to map observability outputs back into a requirements matrix for decision-making.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
You're given a product requirement: 'photo sharing app should support 100k concurrent uploads with median upload time <5s per 1MiB file and data retention 3 years'. As a software engineer, list the measurable requirements (throughput, concurrency, storage), and propose which architecture components (for example CDN, object store, resumable upload service, background transcoder) you'd include. Provide a simple 3-column requirements-to-component matrix mapping business requirement → metric → component.
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