In the event of a network partition (P), a distributed system can guarantee either Consistency (C) or Availability (A), but not both.
System design interviews do not have a single correct answer.The interviewer evaluates your ability to handle vagueness and defend your engineering choices.Liu outlines a four-step framework to keep your thoughts organized under pressure. 1. Requirements Clarification System Design Interview Fundamentals Rylan Liu Pdf
For tasks that do not need to happen in real-time (e.g., video processing, sending email alerts), decouple your services using message queues like Kafka or RabbitMQ. This ensures your user-facing APIs remain fast and resilient to traffic spikes. 4. Key Architectural Concepts to Master In the event of a network partition (P),