44One anycast prefix announced from six sites. What does that buy you, and what breaks at 3am?▼mediumCloudflareAmazon & AWSGoogle◆ premiumAnycast turns BGP convergence into your failover mechanism. Sessions stick to the site they landed on, monitoring must go per-site, and a route you cannot withdraw cleanly is worse than DNS.Open full answer →
15The database failed over to its Multi-AZ standby and the application fell over anyway. What did Multi-AZ promise, what does it not?▼mediumAmazon & AWSRazorpayJPMorgan ChaseunlockedDatabase redundancy still needs reconnecting clients. Distinguish the deployment type, then measure how promotion and DNS changes affect application requests.Open full answer →
18DNS failover with health checks is configured between two regions, yet users saw minutes of downtime. Why is it slower than it looks?▼mediumAmazon & AWSCloudflareSalesforceunlockedDNS failover is a blunt instrument with three delays stacked on top of each other: detection, propagation and client caching. Knowing their sizes tells you when DNS is the right layer at all.Open full answer →
47Last night's failover left both database nodes accepting writes for four minutes. Finance wants to know which orders are real.▼hard★ EssentialJPMorgan ChasePhonePeOracle◆ premiumSplit-brain writes are a fencing failure first and a data problem second. Freeze writes, read the divergence boundary from replication positions, and let the payment ledger arbitrate reality.Open full answer →
04Design multi-region active-active for a tier-1 API. What breaks, and what does it cost?▼hard★ EssentialNetflixStripeUber2 notes & commentsunlockedThe design round where the honest answer is mostly about data. Stateless traffic across regions is straightforward; the database is where active-active is either solved or pretended.Open full answer →
07Make a Postgres database highly available. What are you actually promising, and what breaks?▼hard★ EssentialAmazonRazorpaySnowflake2 notes & commentsunlockedEvery candidate says replication and failover. The scoring answer names the replication mode, states the resulting data loss window, and explains how the cluster avoids two primaries.Open full answer →
08Design an authentication service for 100,000 QPS across three regions: 2KB payloads, 10ms processing, 16-core VMs. Do the math out loud.▼expert★ EssentialGoogleMetaAmazon & AWSunlockedThe Google-style NALSD round in miniature. The boxes are easy; what is being scored is whether the numbers fall out of Little's law before you draw them.Open full answer →
51Design how traffic reaches three regions and how it leaves one that is failing. Last time the failover took nineteen minutes.▼hardCloudflareNetflixAmazon & AWS◆ premiumDNS time-to-live is a suggestion and nineteen minutes is what believing it costs. The mechanism you choose decides your failover time, and the health check you choose decides whether it fires at all.Open full answer →
27Your product depends on a model API and the provider has a regional outage. What did you build beforehand?▼hardStripeCloudflareUber2 notes & comments○ sign inA model provider is a single dependency with a shared failure domain across every customer they have. Treating it like a database you cannot fail over from is how a product goes down for four hours.Open full answer →