Approach - rFronteddu/general_wiki GitHub Wiki

Typically, system requirements, constraints and bottlenecks should be well understood to shape the direction of both the interviewer and interviewee.

Requirements Clarifications - Clarify Ambiguities

• Design questions are often open-ended and they don't have ONE correct answer.

System Interface Definition

• Establish a contract for the system and gain visibility in how to satisfy the requirements.

Back-of-the-envelope estimation

• Estimate the scale of the system to guide decisions on scaling, partitioning, load-balancing and caching.
  • Expected Scale of the system?
  • Storage?
  • Bandwidth?

Defining Data Model

• Clarify how data will flow among different components of the system and guide partitioning and management (storage, transportation, encryption, etc.) and which database to use.

High-level Design

• Draw a block diagram with 5-6 boxes representing the core components of our system that solve the problem end-to-end.

Detailed Design

• Dig deeper into two or three components, present different approaches, their pros and cons, and explain why we will prefer one approach on the other.

Identify and resolve bottlenecks

• Discuss bottlenecks and possible mitigation approaches:
  • Is there any single point of failure?
  • Do we have enough replicas of the data?
  • Do we have enough copies of services running?
  • How are we monitoring performance and system liveness?*