Real Time and Geo Distributed Systems Questions

Covers design and operation of systems with strict real time requirements and that are distributed across geographic regions. Candidates should discuss low latency architecture patterns, event driven and streaming processing, socket based or push based communication, message ordering and delivery guarantees, replication and leader election strategies, and consistency models including strong, causal and eventual consistency. Topics also include geographic data partitioning and sharding, routing and read write strategies for regional stores, use of content delivery networks and edge compute to reduce latency, cross region failover and graceful degradation, handling network partitions and clock skew, and monitoring and distributed tracing for debugging. Interviewers will focus on trade offs between consistency availability and latency and on measurable latency budgets and user experience metrics.