Scalability and Future Extension Questions
Design systems that scale: handle 10 items, 1000 items, 10,000 items efficiently. Design for future feature additions without major refactoring. Use abstraction and interfaces to allow flexibility. Discuss how your solution would adapt if requirements changed. This shows you think beyond the immediate requirement.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe what a 'stateless' service means in a microservices context and why statelessness aids scalability and future extension. Provide a concrete example of converting a session-backed service that stores in-memory sessions to a stateless design, and explain trade-offs in latency, operational complexity, and failure modes.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
What is idempotency in API design and why is it crucial for reliable, scalable services? Give examples of techniques to achieve idempotency for create and update operations, and design an idempotency key policy that supports retries, garbage collection, and future addition of endpoints that must also be idempotent.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design an API and backend approach for handling bulk imports of up to 10,000 items per request. Explain when to choose synchronous vs asynchronous processing, how to provide progress and per-item status, strategies for partial failures and retries, idempotency considerations, and how to make validation extensible so that new rules can be applied in future without invalidating old imports.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Describe an observability and monitoring plan for a system growing from 10 to 10,000 items per user. Include which metrics you would capture (business and system), tracing strategy for distributed requests, SLOs/SLIs, alert thresholds, dashboards, and runbooks. Explain how observability helps you detect and plan for changes needed to support future extensions.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design an architecture to serve item thumbnails and metadata where items per user grow from 10 to 10,000. The solution must process uploaded images (resize, watermark), store variants on a CDN, and allow adding new image transformations (e.g., new sizes, formats) without downtime. Specify components, workflows, failure handling, and extension points for new transformations.
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