Scalable Architecture Interview
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Interviewer [00:00:05]: Design a scalable architecture for an e-commerce platform that can handle Black Friday-level traffic spikes.
You [00:00:15]: I'd like to start by understanding the requirements better. What are the key functionalities we need to support? And what are the expected traffic patterns and scale?
Interviewer [00:00:28]: Good questions. The platform needs to support product browsing, user accounts, shopping carts, checkout, and order management. During normal operations, we expect about 10,000 concurrent users, but during Black Friday, this could spike to 500,000 concurrent users with 10,000 orders per minute.
AI Suggestion:
- Architecture Approach: Propose a microservices architecture with domain-driven design
- Key Services: Outline product catalog, user service, cart service, checkout service, order service, inventory service, and payment service
- Scalability Patterns:
- Horizontal scaling with stateless services
- Database sharding by user ID or product category
- Caching strategy with Redis for product catalog and user sessions
- Asynchronous processing with message queues for order fulfillment
- Traffic Management: Discuss rate limiting, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation
- Infrastructure: Mention Kubernetes for orchestration, auto-scaling groups, and multi-region deployment
- Data Consistency: Explain CQRS pattern and eventual consistency for order processing
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🔒 Resilience & Fault Tolerance
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