1. What is system design?

System design is the process of defining the architecture, components, and interactions of a software system
to meet specific requirements and objectives.
2. Explain the key principles of system design.
The key principles of system design include scalability, reliability, availability, performance, maintainability,
and security.
3. What are the components of a typical system design?
A typical system design consists of various components such as the user interface, application logic, data
storage, external services, and communication protocols.
4. Describe the client-server architecture and its advantages.
Client-server architecture is a computing model where clients request resources or services from servers. Its
advantages include centralized management, scalability, and separation of concerns.
5. What is the difference between horizontal and vertical scaling?
Horizontal scaling involves adding more machines to distribute the load, while vertical scaling involves
adding more resources (CPU, memory) to a single machine.
6. How do you design a fault-tolerant system?
Designing a fault-tolerant system involves redundancy, replication, error handling, and failure detection
mechanisms to ensure uninterrupted operation even in the presence of failures.
7. What is database sharding, and when is it necessary?
Database sharding is a technique of horizontally partitioning data across multiple servers. It is necessary
when the data size grows beyond the capacity of a single server or when high availability and scalability are
required.
8. Explain the concept of caching and its importance in system design.
Caching involves storing frequently accessed data in a fast-access memory, reducing the need to fetch data
from slower sources. It improves system performance by reducing latency and load on backend resources.
9. Describe the CAP theorem and its implications in distributed systems.
The CAP theorem states that in a distributed system, it is impossible to guarantee consistency, availability,
and partition tolerance simultaneously. System designers need to make trade-offs based on the desired
system characteristics.
10. How would you design a distributed messaging system?
A distributed messaging system can be designed using components such as message queues, brokers, and
publish-subscribe patterns to enable asynchronous communication and decoupling of components.
11. What is load balancing, and how would you implement it in a system?
Load balancing is the process of distributing workload across multiple computing resources to optimize
performance and avoid resource overloading. It can be implemented using techniques like round-robin,
weighted distribution, or dynamic load balancing algorithms.
12. Explain the different types of consistency models in distributed systems.
The different consistency models include strong consistency, eventual consistency, and causal consistency.
Each model defines how updates are propagated and observed by different nodes in a distributed system.
13. How would you design a scalable web crawler?
A scalable web crawler can be designed using a distributed architecture with multiple crawler nodes, efficient
URL frontier management, and parallel processing to crawl and process web pages in a scalable manner.
14. What are the considerations for designing a scalable real-time analytics system?
Design considerations for a scalable real-time analytics system include data ingestion, stream processing,
storage, query optimization, and scalability of the analytics pipeline.
15. Describe the steps involved in designing an API.
Steps involved in designing an API include defining the use cases, identifying the resources and endpoints,
designing the request and response payloads, determining authentication and authorization mechanisms,
and documenting the API.
16. How would you design a recommendation system like Netflix's?
Designing a recommendation system like Netflix's involves user profiling, content analysis, collaborative
filtering, and machine learning algorithms to provide personalized recommendations based on
17. What is eventual consistency and when is it suitable?
Eventual consistency is a consistency model where updates to a system propagate asynchronously and may
 take some time to reach all replicas. It is suitable in distributed systems where immediate consistency is not
critical and eventual convergence is acceptable.
18. How would you design a distributed file system?
Designing a distributed file system involves dividing files into chunks, replicating and distributing these
chunks across multiple servers, maintaining metadata, implementing data consistency, and providing fault
tolerance and high availability.
19. What is the role of a load balancer in a system design?
A load balancer distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure optimal resource
utilization, improve system performance, and provide fault tolerance by avoiding overloaded servers.
20. How would you design a distributed cache system?
To design a distributed cache system, you can use techniques like consistent hashing to distribute the cache
across multiple cache nodes, implement cache eviction policies, handle cache misses, and handle cache
synchronization and consistency.
21. Describe the architectural components of a microservices-based system.
A microservices-based system consists of loosely coupled services that communicate through APIs. The
architectural components include service discovery, load balancing, API gateways, event-driven
communication, distributed data management, and independent service deployment.
22. How would you design a scalable chat application like WhatsApp?
To design a scalable chat application like WhatsApp, you can use techniques like message queuing, load
balancing, data partitioning, real-time communication protocols (e.g., WebSockets), and efficient storage and
retrieval of chat messages.
23. What are the challenges of designing a distributed database system?
Challenges in designing a distributed database system include data partitioning and distribution, consistency
and synchronization across replicas, fault tolerance, data replication, and handling distributed transactions.
24. Explain the concept of data replication and its importance in system design.
Data replication involves creating multiple copies of data across different servers. It is important in system
design to provide fault tolerance, improve data availability and access latency, and increase system scalability
and read performance.
25. How would you design a social media platform like Facebook?
Designing a social media platform like Facebook involves creating user profiles, managing relationships,
implementing news feeds, handling user-generated content, ensuring privacy and security, and supporting
high scalability and real-time interactions.
26. What is the role of a message queue in system design?
A message queue acts as an intermediary between components in a distributed system, enabling
asynchronous communication and decoupling of sender and receiver. It provides reliability, scalability, and
fault tolerance by buffering messages and supporting different messaging patterns.
27. How would you design a scalable e-commerce system like Amazon?
To design a scalable e-commerce system like Amazon, you would consider components like product catalog
management, user management, order processing, inventory management, recommendation systems,
search functionality, secure payment processing, and scalable infrastructure.
28. Explain the concept of eventual consistency and its trade-offs.
Eventual consistency guarantees that, given a sufficiently long period of time with no updates, all replicas will
eventually converge to the same state. The trade-off is that there may be temporary inconsistencies or
conflicts during concurrent updates.
29. How would you design a scalable video streaming platform like YouTube?
Designing a scalable video streaming platform like YouTube involves distributed video storage, efficient
video transcoding and encoding, content delivery networks (CDNs), adaptive bitrate streaming, and video
metadata management.
30. What are the considerations for designing a scalable search engine?
Considerations for designing a scalable search engine include data indexing, distributed search and retrieval,
query processing and relevance