YOUR BRIEF
What to work through
Work through a distributed message queue as a spoken system design interview. Start by clarifying the scope, sketch a working design and explain the trade-offs behind your choices.
- Producers send messages and consumers read them
- A message can be read once or many times
- Order is kept within a partition
- Messages are kept for two weeks, then truncated
- Delivery is configurable: at most once, at least once or exactly once
BEFORE YOU START
Constraints to discuss
- Two-week retention, durable on disk and copied across nodes
- High throughput or low latency, chosen per use case
- Scales with a sudden surge of messages
- At-least-once delivery at minimum
Need a starting point?
Watch for these common gaps as you prepare:
- Promising order across a whole topic
- Storing messages in a relational database
- Committing before processing and calling it at least once
- More consumers than partitions, expecting more throughput
- No answer for rebalancing
Why this question is in the collection
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