Fault-Tolerant Design Interview
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Interviewer [00:00:05]: Design a fault-tolerant payment processing system that can handle 10,000 transactions per second with 99.999% availability and zero data loss.
You [00:00:15]: I'd like to start by understanding the requirements better. What types of failures do we need to tolerate? What's the expected transaction volume and growth? What are the latency requirements? And are there any specific compliance or regulatory requirements?
Interviewer [00:00:28]: Good questions. We need to handle hardware failures, network partitions, and regional outages. The system should process 10,000 TPS now with expected 30% YoY growth. Transactions should complete in under 500ms. The system must be PCI-DSS compliant and support financial regulations requiring transaction durability and auditability.
AI Suggestion:
- Architecture Approach:
- Propose a multi-region active-active architecture
- Suggest layered resilience strategy (component, service, data, regional)
- Recommend event-driven architecture with idempotent processing
- Discuss chaos engineering approach for continuous resilience testing
- Transaction Processing:
- Suggest asynchronous processing with guaranteed delivery
- Recommend idempotency keys for safe retries
- Discuss distributed transaction patterns (Saga, TCC)
- Explain exactly-once delivery semantics implementation
- Data Resilience:
- Propose multi-region database with synchronous replication
- Discuss write-ahead logging and journal-based recovery
- Suggest event sourcing for transaction history
- Explain data consistency models and trade-offs
- Failure Detection & Recovery:
- Recommend distributed health checking with consensus
- Discuss automated failover mechanisms
- Suggest circuit breakers for dependency failures
- Explain graceful degradation strategies
- Scalability & Performance:
- Propose horizontal scaling with stateless services
- Discuss database sharding strategies
- Suggest caching layers with cache invalidation
- Explain load balancing with health-aware routing
- Monitoring & Operations:
- Recommend comprehensive observability (metrics, logs, traces)
- Discuss automated alerting with anomaly detection
- Suggest runbooks for common failure scenarios
- Explain disaster recovery testing approach
🔄 Resilience Pattern Design
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⚡ High-Availability Architectures
Receive instant recommendations on designing high-availability architectures, including active-active and active-passive configurations, load balancing strategies, and failover mechanisms.
🔄 Distributed Systems Resilience
Access real-time guidance on building resilient distributed systems, including consensus protocols, leader election, partition tolerance, and strategies for maintaining consistency during failures.
🔍 Failure Mode Analysis
Get instant suggestions for conducting failure mode analysis, including fault tree analysis, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), and approaches for identifying and mitigating critical failure points.
🔒 Data Resilience Strategies
Receive guidance on implementing data resilience, including replication strategies, backup and recovery approaches, and techniques for ensuring data durability and consistency during failures.
📈 Disaster Recovery Planning
Access expert advice on designing comprehensive disaster recovery plans, including RTO/RPO analysis, multi-region strategies, and approaches for testing and validating recovery procedures.
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