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Core Infrastructure & Storage

Design the foundational building blocks that every distributed system depends on

Consistency models (CAP) Partitioning strategies Replication protocols Fault tolerance patterns

Key-Value Store

Hard

Design a distributed KV store like DynamoDB with consistent hashing, tunable consistency, LSM-tree storage, and multi-region replication.

⏱ ~3.5h
Amazon Google Meta

Web Cache

Easy

Design a distributed cache with LRU/LFU eviction, cache stampede prevention, write-through/write-back policies, and multi-tier architecture.

⏱ ~2.5h
Google Cloudflare

Distributed File System

Hard

Design GFS/HDFS with block-based storage, NameNode architecture, rack-aware replication, and automatic failure recovery.

⏱ ~3.5h
Google Amazon Microsoft

CDN Network

Hard

Design a global CDN with 200+ PoPs, origin shielding, cache invalidation, DDoS protection, and edge compute capabilities.

⏱ ~3.5h
Cloudflare Akamai Amazon

Load Balancer

Medium

Design L4/L7 load balancing with health checks, connection draining, multiple algorithms (round-robin, least-connections, consistent hashing).

⏱ ~3h
Amazon Google Cloudflare