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Large Scale System Architecture and Evolution Questions

Design and evolution of architectures to support massive user bases large data volumes and very high request rates. Topics include global distribution strategies such as geographic partitioning and multi region replication; high throughput low latency design choices including careful partitioning efficient data pipelines and edge caching; storage and data lifecycle strategies for petabyte scale including tiered storage and efficient compaction; federation and aggregation patterns for global services; migration strategies for rewarding systems and rolling upgrades; and operational concerns for large fleets including monitoring alerting incident response and cost management. Interviewers assess the candidate on ability to reason about long term maintainability operational scaling and trade offs required to run systems at extreme scale.

MediumTechnical
30 practiced
You're tasked with migrating traffic from a monolithic gateway to a new microservices architecture without downtime. Outline a migration strategy (e.g., strangler fig), traffic migration patterns (reverse-proxy routing, traffic shadowing), data migration approaches, testing strategy, and rollback plans to maintain SLOs during migration.
MediumSystem Design
30 practiced
Design an API gateway for global services that enforces authentication, per-customer rate limits, observability (metrics/traces), and supports canarying new gateway rules/config. Describe components, scaling considerations, caching, and how to avoid the gateway becoming a single point of failure.
MediumSystem Design
46 practiced
Design a multi-layer caching strategy for a social feed service: edge CDN, regional cache, and origin. Describe cache key design for personalization, cache invalidation, cache warming, stale-while-revalidate patterns, and metrics you would track to evaluate effectiveness.
MediumTechnical
26 practiced
Write a Python script that consumes a CSV of minute-level tuples `(timestamp, requests, errors)` and computes: 1) rolling availability SLI over a 28-day window; 2) current error-budget burn rate; 3) forecasted time until SLO breach if current burn rate continues. Explain your windowing assumptions and how you handle sparse or missing data.
HardSystem Design
32 practiced
Design a tiered storage lifecycle for logs and traces at petabyte scale balancing retention, query latency, and cost. Specify hot/warm/cold tiers, compaction and rollup strategies, index placement, archive policies, and how to handle compliance/legal holds and ad-hoc forensic queries.

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