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.

MediumTechnical

27 practiced

Discuss the trade-offs between synchronous (sync) replication and asynchronous (async) replication for cross-region database replication. Consider RPO/RTO, consistency, client-perceived latency, and operational complexity in your answer.

HardSystem Design

30 practiced

Design a system that reliably ingests telemetry from IoT devices with intermittent connectivity (devices may be offline for hours). Discuss store-and-forward approaches, ordering guarantees, data retention trade-offs, bandwidth constraints, and how to achieve eventual consistency without overwhelming the backend when devices reconnect.

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.

MediumTechnical

31 practiced

Compare relational (SQL) and document/key-value (NoSQL) databases for two use cases: (a) user authentication/session storage, and (b) analytics of user behavior. For each use case recommend one database type and explain the trade-offs in terms of consistency, queryability, operational complexity, and cost.

MediumSystem Design

55 practiced

Outline a strategy to perform backward-compatible schema migrations across services during a service split. Include techniques like expand-contract changes, dual reads/writes, and how to manage ownership and rollbacks during the migration.

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