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.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
A client will add full-text search for items later. How would you design the initial catalog service so adding search later requires minimal refactor? Discuss decoupling options (emit change events, separate indexing service), where indexing responsibility should live, and how to ensure producers remain simple while supporting eventual search consumers.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Evaluate two approaches for global distributed rate-limiting for a client-facing API: (a) centralized global counters stored in a strongly-consistent store; (b) local per-region token buckets with periodic reconciliation. Discuss accuracy, latency, operational complexity, failure modes, and how you'd evolve the approach to support new policies (per-IP, per-account, per-endpoint). Which would you recommend and why?
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe how load-balancing operates in front of stateless and stateful services. Explain what 'sticky sessions' (session affinity) are and the impact they have on scalability and fault tolerance. As a Solutions Architect, how would you advise a client currently using sticky sessions who plans to scale horizontally and add future features like per-user caching?
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
How would you design a feature-flagging/incremental rollout system to let a client toggle features per user, per-tenant, or globally without code redeploys? Describe the evaluation model (client SDK vs server-side), targeting rules, caching of flags, auditability, and the strategy to ensure performance and consistency at high scale.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You're in a sales meeting; the client worries microservices will increase latency and operational overhead. Draft a concise recommendation comparing a modular monolith vs microservices, covering scaling patterns, operational costs, deployment cadence, team structure, and an incremental migration roadmap with milestones and KPIs you would present to convince them of a pragmatic approach.
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