Systems Design Trivia Questions
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Designing large-scale software systems. Play Systems Design trivia solo to sharpen your knowledge, or challenge a friend head-to-head in Trivia Tango — every question comes with an explanation so you learn as you play. Questions span every level, from easy warm-ups to expert-level stumpers, so there's a real challenge here however much you already know.
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Sample Systems Design Quiz Questions
A mix of easy, medium and hard — questions run from warm-up to expert, so there's a real challenge at every level. Think you know the answers? Play to find out.
Before a browser can load a page, it asks this hierarchical directory to turn a typed name like example.com into a numeric machine address.
Difficulty: Easy- DNS
- DHCP
- CDN
- NAT
A foundational result in distributed systems proves that when nodes cannot all reach each other, a store must choose between always answering and always answering correctly.
Difficulty: Medium- PACELC theorem
- CALM theorem
- CAP theorem
- FLP theorem
These special data types let many copies be edited independently and merged automatically to a single guaranteed outcome, because their operations commute and always converge.
Difficulty: Hard- CRDT
- Operational transformation
- Last-write-wins
- Vector clock
To avoid recomputing or refetching identical results, systems keep recently used data in this fast, temporary storage layer close to the application.
Difficulty: Easy- Buffer
- Cache
- Log
- Ledger
This compact probabilistic structure can tell you an element is definitely not in a set or probably is, and it never reports a false negative.
Difficulty: Medium- Bloom filter
- Skip list
- Trie
- Count-min sketch
In eventually consistent stores, when a lookup finds replicas returning different values, the coordinator pushes the freshest value back to the stale ones during that very request.
Difficulty: Hard- Read repair
- Hinted handoff
- Anti-entropy
- Write-back
Positioned in front of a pool of servers, this component spreads incoming traffic so that no single machine becomes overwhelmed.
Difficulty: Easy- Reverse proxy
- API gateway
- Load balancer
- Firewall
When servers join or leave a cluster, this technique reshuffles only a small fraction of keys instead of nearly all of them, by arranging nodes on a ring.
Difficulty: Medium- Round robin
- Rendezvous hashing
- Modulo hashing
- Consistent hashing
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