The building blocks of system design interviews and real distributed systems: scaling, load balancing, caching, data partitioning, consistency models and event-driven architecture. Every concept is presented as a trade-off, because that is how it is actually assessed.
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Balancing algorithms, layer 4 versus layer 7, and how health checking keeps a pool honest — including how a careless health check can take down an entire fleet.
38 total questions
Card #1
Round robin
Card #2
Least connections
Card #3
Weighted round robin
1. Compared with round robin, 'least connections' helps most when:
2. Which capability requires a layer 7 load balancer rather than layer 4?
3. The advantage of consistent hashing over hash(key) % N is that:
1. Handing requests to backends in strict rotation is the ___ robin algorithm.
Hint: Two words, first one missing
2. Routing a request based on its HTTP path or headers requires a layer ___ load balancer.
Hint: The application layer
3. ___ hashing keeps most keys mapped to the same backend when one backend is added or removed.
Hint: Think of a hash ring
