Software Systems Design Trivia Questions

Sample Software Systems Design Questions

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1. 1.Netflix famously uses this strategy to store copies of popular shows at ISPs and network edges, reducing latency and bandwidth costs dramatically.

   • Content Delivery Network (CDN)
   • Load Balancer
   • Database Replica
   • Message Queue

2. 2.Instagram stores user photos in Amazon S3 and profile data in PostgreSQL, exemplifying how different data types benefit from specialized storage—a pattern called this.

   • Database Sharding
   • Data Replication
   • Polyglot Persistence
   • Eventual Consistency

3. 3.GitHub adds more servers to handle increased traffic rather than upgrading existing hardware—the fundamental difference between horizontal and this alternative approach.

   • Diagonal Scaling
   • Elastic Scaling
   • Vertical Scaling
   • Auto Scaling

4. 4.Facebook Messenger stores billions of messages but queries them by conversation ID, distributing data across servers using this database scaling technique.

   • Replication
   • Indexing
   • Caching
   • Sharding

5. 5.CockroachDB uses hybrid logical clocks that combine physical timestamps with logical counters, solving the clock synchronization problem that NTP alone cannot guarantee to within this precision level.

   • Nanoseconds
   • Microseconds
   • Milliseconds
   • Hundreds of Milliseconds

6. 6.Cockroach Labs found that splitting ranges at 512MB optimizes the balance between metadata overhead and this operational concern that affects cluster rebalancing.

   • Range Movement Time
   • Query Latency
   • Memory Usage
   • CPU Utilization

7. 7.Jepsen testing revealed that MongoDB's causal consistency implementation could violate guarantees when network partitions resolved, a violation of this session guarantee property.

   • Read Your Writes
   • Monotonic Reads
   • Monotonic Writes
   • Writes Follow Reads

8. 8.PlanetScale implements this schema change approach where both old and new schemas coexist temporarily, with writes going to both during migration.

   • Immediate Schema Change
   • Locking Migration
   • Blue-Green Schema
   • Expand-Contract Migration

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