Friday, March 22, 2024

System Architecture Design Interview Questions

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Concepts You Should Know

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Heres a list of concepts/considerations/tools that you should have in your tool belt when approaching system architecture questions. In no particular order, and without being exhaustive:

  • Does everything need to be in RAM?
  • RAID configurations
  • Consensus and membership protocols
  • Possible to work harder on writes in order to make reads easier
  • Operations should almost never be more than n*log, preferably n
  • See the System Architecture page of my interview prep notes for more examples, explanations, and links for further reading.

    Questions About Experience And Background

    As a building architect, youll need to demonstrate that you are experienced in the field, relay the reason you pursued a career in architecture and explain how you would perform under certain circumstances. These questions will provide interviewers with a better look at your qualifications and determine whether or not they align with the position and company. Youll likely be asked:

  • What do you like most about architecture?

  • What is your least favorite thing about architecture?

  • What qualities make you a great architect?

  • Describe your design style as an architect.

  • What skill has served you best as an architect?

  • Describe a time a problem arose and how you dealt with it.

  • Describe your worst day as an architect and what you learned from it.

  • What factors led to your biggest success as an architect?

  • What is your least favorite project in your

  • organize, plan and prioritize your work as an architect?

  • In your opinion, what is the key to ensuring a building is compliant with all laws and regulations applicable?

  • Why should we choose you for this position?

  • Related: 12 Tough Interview Questions and Answers

    Additional System Design Interview Prep

    Here at Exponent, we’ve connected tens of thousands of job seekers in countless tech roles with expert courses and resources to best prepare them for their upcoming interviews.

    If you’re interested in more system design-related resources, be sure to check out:

    Study up on example system interview questions

    Read Also: How To Prepare For Your First Job Interview

    What Is The Most Innovative Solution You’ve Proposed Working As A Solutions Architect

    When an interviewer asks you about innovative solutions you’ve proposed, they may want to know what experience you have with new technology and how you can apply it to help their business. The most appropriate answer discusses a non-obvious solution and how it impacted business operations.

    Example:”When I worked at Copy Company, I was presented with a problem having to do with a client that was a creditor. The company’s website was designed to encourage users to create an account and find the perfect credit card for their lifestyle.

    They wanted to include a way that customers could return to a credit card they had previously viewed. I decided that the best solution would be to create a user interface that allows guests to favorite credit cards. This allowed consumers to mark cards they wanted to return to. As a result, the creditor increased their customer base.”

    Related: The Ultimate Guide to Innovation Strategies

    Are System Design Interviews Difficult

    Sakthivel Periyasamy

    System design interview questions are notoriously difficult to prepare for. Unlike algorithmic questions, they don’t reduce down to a handful of prescribed patterns. Instead, they require years of technical knowledge and experience to answer well.

    For junior engineers, this can be tricky. Even senior developers sometimes find themselves scratching their head trying to understand a system.

    The key to doing well in these types of interviews is to use your entire knowledge-base to think about scalability and reliability in your answer.

    Recommended Reading: How Does A Job Interview Go

    Section 1: Messaging & Pub

    When you design and build large-scale and distributed systems, for that system to work cohesively and smoothly, it is important to exchange information between the components and services that make up the system. But as we have seen before, systems that rely on networks suffer from the same weakness as networks – they are fragile. Networks fail and its not an infrequent occurrence. When networks fail, components in the system are not able to communicate and may degrade the system or cause the system to fail altogether . So distributed systems need robust mechanisms to ensure that the communication continues or recovers where it left off, even if there is an “arbitrary partition” between components in the system.

    Publisher / Subscriber Messaging

    This is a very popular paradigm for messaging. The key concept is that publishers ‘publish’ a message and a subscriber subscribes to messages. To give greater granularity, messages can belong to a certain “topic” which is like a category. These topics are like dedicated “channels” or pipes, where each pipe exclusives handles messages belonging to a specific topic. Subscribers choose which topic they want to subscribe to and get notified of messages in that topic. The advantage of this system is that the publisher and the subscriber can be completely de-coupled – i.e. they don’t need to know about each other. The publisher announces, and the subscriber listens for announcements for topics that it is on the lookout for.

    Interview Questions For System Designers

    The Indeed Editorial Team comprises a diverse and talented team of writers, researchers and subject matter experts equipped with Indeed’s data and insights to deliver useful tips to help guide your career journey.

    An interview for a system designer position is an opportunity to discuss your experience and abilities and to showcase your skills at creating complex systems. You can prepare for your job interview by studying basic design principles and preparing answers to possible questions about them. In this article, we review common questions and answers for a system design interview to help you prepare.

    Related: Top 6 Common Interview Questions and Answers

    Jenn, an Indeed Career Coach, breaks down the intentions behind employer’s questions and shares strategies for crafting strong responses.

    Read Also: What Is The Star Method When Interviewing

    What Is A Cdn

    A geographically dispersed group of servers known as a content delivery network collaborates to deliver Internet material quickly. A CDN enables the rapid transfer of resources such as HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, pictures, and videos that are required for Internet content to load. Today, the bulk of web traffic, including traffic from well-known websites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon, is served through CDNs thanks to the services’ rising popularity.

    Bonus Questions For Experienced Engineers

    System Design Interview: Architecture of Amazon, Flipkart like e-commerce system with @Gaurav Sen

    There are plenty of resources available for low-level system design questions and object-oriented design interview questions. The following, however, are examples of the types of questions posed to candidates seeking an upper-level position:

  • Can you name some metrics for measuring system performance?
  • What is load balancing, and why is it important to system design?
  • How would you design a tinyURL system?
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    Define A Proxy Server And Mention Its Benefits

    A proxy server acts as an intermediary between the internet and a user. It separates a user from the site they are accessing. The traffic goes via a proxy server whenever a user submits a request from the end server. The same proxy server again handles the results of the requests by returning them to the user. Proxy servers offer several advantages, including enhancing security, improving privacy, providing access to blocked resources, controlling how employees and kids use the internet, and helping to speed up requests through caching.

    Types Of System Design Interview Questions

    There are various types of system designs such as architectural design, physical design, logical design, etc. Various categories of system design interview questions are also based on these system designs.

    The categories of system design interview questions are as follows:

    • Low-Level Design System design interview questions
    • High-Level Design System design interview questions
    • Object-Oriented System design interview questions

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    Why Is There A Design Process In System Development

    When you share the design process with your client, you can work together to set realistic deliverables and timeframes. The client gets to know precisely what to anticipate from the developer and when to expect it, reducing the possibility of future misunderstanding. By making a client understand the system design process, the client knows exactly where their money is going. A good system design process helps to understand all aspects of the proposed system.

    What Types Of Questions Are Asked In System Design Interview

    Oracle Interview Question: Oracle Architecture

    In a system design interview, the candidates are asked many questions from the part of a system such as modules, architecture, components, interfaces, communication, data storage, chat services, etc., as well as the real-life problems that a company might be facing. After that, the candidates are categorized according to their field of expertization, such as programmers, designers, developers, and software engineers.

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    Best Resources To Prepare System Design Interviews

    If you need some more resources like online courses and guides and a few more questions to practice then you can check out these online courses and book to further sharpen your knowledge and crack any System design interviews.

    Other Java Design Patterns tutorials you may like

    • My favorite courses to learn Software Architecture
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    • Top 5 Courses to learn Microservices in Java with Spring
    • How to create thread-safe Singleton in Java?
    • How to implement the Strategy Design Pattern in Java?
    • Difference between Factory and AbstractFactory Pattern?
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    Thanks for reading this article so far. If you like these Software design and System Design interview questions then please share them with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or feedback then please drop a note.

    P.S.- If you are looking for some free courses to learn Design Pattern and Software Architecture, I also suggest you check out the Java Design Patterns and Architecture course by John Purcell on Udemy. Its completely free, all you need to do is create an Udemy account to access this course.

    Questions About Background And Experience

    As you discuss your skills and unique traits that qualify you for the job, you can also expect to answer questions about your education, credentials, work experience and past job performance. The following examples can help you get a better idea of what the interviewer may ask regarding your experience and background:

    • How long have you been working as a software architect?

    • What certifications do you possess?

    • Where did you receive your education and training?

    • What frameworks do you favor to work within and why?

    • How do you apply architectural principles to software and framework design?

    • What approaches have you taken in the past when onboarding new projects?

    • How would past employers describe you?

    • What is one challenge you faced when implementing software specifications? How did you solve it?

    • What is the largest software development team you have managed?

    • How do you communicate with clients to gather essential components and specifications for projects?

    • Have you ever given presentations to executives or key shareholders about the projects you completed?

    Related:Technical Interview Questions and Example Answers

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    Solution Architect Interview Questions

    The Indeed Editorial Team comprises a diverse and talented team of writers, researchers and subject matter experts equipped with Indeed’s data and insights to deliver useful tips to help guide your career journey.

    Solutions architects are technology professionals responsible for solving certain business problems and completing projects. Businesses today rely on the expertise of solution architects to recommend and manage hardware and software systems that are central to a businesss operations. For this reason, people with technical acumen and development skills might look into becoming a solution architect.

    In this article, we take a look at 35 common solution architect interview questions you can expect during a job interview, plus we provide example answers to five.

    What Is The Write

    Twitter system design | twitter Software architecture | twitter interview questions

    Example:Write-through is the preferred method of data storage in many applications, especially in banking and medical device control, as its good at preventing data loss. In less critical applications, and especially when the volume of data is large, an alternative method known as write-back speeds up system performance because updates are typically written exclusively to the cache and are saved in the main memory only under certain conditions or at specified intervals.

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    Section : Leader Election

    Let’s move back to servers again for a slightly more advanced topic. We already understand the principle of Availability, and how redundancy is one way to increase availability. We have also walked through some practical considerations when handling the routing of requests to clusters of redundant servers.

    But sometimes, with this kind of setup where multiple servers are doing much the same thing, there can arise situations where you need only one server to take the lead.

    For example, you want to ensure that only one server is given the responsibility for updating some third party API because multiple updates from different servers could cause issues or run up costs on the third-party’s side.

    In this case you need to choose that primary server to delegate this update responsibility to. That process is called leader election.

    When multiple servers are in a cluster to provide redundancy, they could, amongst themselves, be configured to have one and only one leader. They would also detect when that leader server has failed, and appoint another one to take its place.

    The principle is very simple, but the devil is in the details. The really tricky part is ensuring that the servers are “in sync” in terms of their data, state and operations.

    In other words, a consensus algorithm is used to give all the servers an “agreed on” value that they can all rely on in their logic when identifying which server is the leader.

    Ask Questions And Establish Scope

    The biggest mistake you can make during a system design interview is to jump right into the design without first asking questions. Because system design interview questions are intentionally vague, youll want to collaborate with your interviewer to establish design scope and validate any assumptions you may have.

    Youll likely want to ask some or all of the following questions:

    • Which features are most important?
    • How many daily active users are there?
    • Can I leverage existing cloud providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure? , auto-scaling groups, document storage , message queues , cache , or CDN .
    • What types of data are we dealing with?
    • Do we need to consider ?
    • Can I assume that ?

    Once you feel that you have a decent understanding of the problem, you can move on to the high-level design.

    Recommended Reading: Is Grokking The System Design Interview Worth It

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    What Are The Different Hazards

    Example:”Hazards have three classes. These include the structural hazards, which occur from resource conflicts when the hardware can’t support all possible combinations of instructions in synchronized overlapped execution data hazards, which occur when instructions that manifest data dependence change data in different stages of a pipeline and control hazards, which occur from the pipelining of branches and other instructions that modify the PC.”

    How Do You Design An Elevator Or A Lift System

    30+ .NET Interview Questions (2021)

    The basic functionality of an elevator or lift is to reach the following levels quickly. It mostly comes in pairs like the upstairs/downstairs elevator and two lifts aligned in one row. We can design the best elevator or lift system by creating a program code that can fulfil these functionalities.

    Check this video link to know in detail.

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    Design A Parking Lot System

    • What are some of the Required Features?
    • The parking lot can have multiple levels where each level has multiple rows for parking spots.
    • The parking lot can support parking for cars, buses, motorcycles hence spots can be of multiple sizes.
    • Consider the parking lot capacity at the time of designing the system.
    • Design appropriate pricing for each parking spot.
  • What are some of the Common Problems encountered?
  • What should happen to the parking lot system if every spot is occupied?
  • Assigning parking lot spots of smaller size to vehicles of a bigger size.
  • Possible tips for consideration:
  • Think of an algorithm for assigning an appropriate parking spot to a vehicle.
  • Think of different entities required for designing the system.
  • Explain Url Shortening Service Describe How You Can Shorten Any Url

    URL shortening service shortens the long URL link up to one-third of the original URL size. This service is helpful in link optimisation, measuring marketing ads performance, and audience analysis. You need all functional, non-functional, and extended requirements to execute this service. Do estimation of memory, bandwidth, storage, and traffic. You need to explain the database scheme, system APIs, and other design constraints to shorten any URL using this service.

    Check this detailed solution link.

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    What Consistency Design Patterns Are There For Different Systems

    Every read request should receive the most recent data written, according to consistency from the CAP theorem. When there are several versions of the same data, it becomes difficult to synchronise them so that the clients always receive up-to-date information. The available consistency patterns are as follows:

    Weak Consistency: The read request may or may not be successful in obtaining the new data after a write operation. Real-time use cases like VoIP, video chat, and online gaming all benefit from this kind of stability. For instance, if we experience a brief network outage while on a phone call, we will lose all information that was said during that time.

    Eventual Consistency: Following a data write, reads will finally receive the most recent data in a matter of milliseconds. Here, asynchronous replication of the data is used. DNS and email systems both use them. In highly accessible systems, this works well.

    Strong Consistency: Subsequent reads will always access the most recent data after a write. Here, synchronous replication of the data is used. This is seen in RDBMS and file systems, which are appropriate for systems needing data transfers.

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