System Architecture and Scalability Questions

Covers distributed systems fundamentals and high level architecture decision making. Candidates should explain trade offs between consistency and availability, horizontal versus vertical scaling, load balancing strategies, caching patterns, database and storage choices, partitioning and replication approaches, latency versus throughput trade offs, fault tolerance and recovery strategies, and cost and maintainability considerations. Interviewers look for structured reasoning about architecture choices and when to apply particular patterns given specific non functional and business requirements.