Architecture and Technical Trade Offs Questions

Centers on system and solution design decisions and the trade offs inherent in architecture choices. Candidates should be able to identify alternatives, clarify constraints such as scale cost and team capability, and articulate trade offs like consistency versus availability, latency versus throughput, simplicity versus extensibility, monolith versus microservices, synchronous versus asynchronous patterns, database selection, caching strategies, and operational complexity. This topic covers methods for quantifying or qualitatively evaluating impacts, prototyping and measuring performance, planning incremental migrations, documenting decisions, and proposing mitigation and monitoring plans to manage risk and maintainability.

EasyTechnical

32 practiced

Compare synchronous and asynchronous communication patterns between services. For a payment-processing workflow that requires both quick acknowledgement and eventual reconciliation, propose which parts should be synchronous and which asynchronous — justify with trade-offs.

HardTechnical

30 practiced

Plan a zero-downtime migration from a single-region primary database to a multi-region active-passive setup for a customer-facing service. Describe the migration steps, verification checks, fallback plan, data replication approach, and potential pitfalls like split-brain or replication lag.

MediumSystem Design

29 practiced

Sketch an incremental migration plan to extract a payments capability from a legacy monolith into a separate service. Include steps for data ownership, API contracts, authentication, testing, migration safety, rollback plans, and how you would validate correctness during the transition.

HardSystem Design

33 practiced

You need to design a global read-heavy service with strict low-latency requirements for users in Asia, Europe, and North America. Evaluate and compare multi-region read replicas, edge caching (CDN), and geo-proximity routing. For each option, discuss consistency, freshness, cost, and operational complexity trade-offs.

HardTechnical

28 practiced

Propose a plan to validate and measure the impact of architecture changes on consistency and availability using fault injection. Describe what faults you'd inject (network partitions, delayed packets, node crashes), what hypotheses you would test, what automated checks you'd run, and how to interpret results.

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