A system design interview – key value store design questions and strategies
During a system design interview, an interviewer may ask you to design a key-value store. This request tests your understanding of the basic principles of distributed systems, your ability to think about scale, and your familiarity with trade-offs in consistency and availability.
When designing a key-value store, remember these key strategies:
- Clearly define the problem: Start by understanding the requirements and constraints of the problem. A key-value store could be asked for in many contexts – for a small application or a large-scale system – so clarify the necessary parameters first.
- Focus on scalability and performance: Discuss how you would ensure the key-value store can handle increasing amounts of data and requests. You might discuss sharding the data and using consistent hashing to distribute keys.
- Discuss replication and consistency: Address how you would handle...
