System Design Questions

Definition

High-level architectural interviews focusing on how to design massive, scalable, highly-available systems using containerization and orchestration.

Explain Like I'm New

Designing the architecture for Netflix or Uber. How do you route traffic across 10,000 containers?

Real World Example

Question: 'Design a highly available microservices architecture for an E-Commerce site. Explain how traffic routes from the user's browser, through the load balancer, to the appropriate Docker containers.'

Common Use Cases

•Principal Engineer roles
•Software Architecture

Interview Questions

basic

Why do massive architectures use 'Reverse Proxies' (like NGINX or Traefik) in front of their Docker containers?

intermediate

Explain the concept of 'State' in System Design and why databases are exponentially harder to containerize than web servers.

Flash Cards

Question

Why Reverse Proxy?

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Answer

To handle SSL/TLS termination, balance the traffic load across hundreds of identical containers, and route specific URL paths (like `/api`) to the correct backend service container.

Question

State and Databases?

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Answer

Web servers are 'Stateless'. If you kill a web server container and start a new one, the user doesn't notice. Databases are 'Stateful' (they hold permanent data). If a database container crashes, you must perfectly reconnect the new container to the exact persistent storage Volume on the disk without corrupting the data, which is highly complex in distributed clusters.