Distributed Systems Fundamentals Questions

Core principles and theory that underlie distributed computing systems. Includes understanding trade offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance, common consistency models such as eventual and strong consistency, replication and sharding strategies, load balancing and data partitioning, consensus algorithms and their guarantees, scalability and fault tolerance patterns, and how these concepts apply to infrastructure components such as databases, caches, service meshes, and load balancers. Candidates are expected to explain design choices, common failure modes, and how fundamental concepts influence architecture decisions for resilient and scalable systems.