Example architecture interview
A common interview question is to ask interviewees to design a scalable piece of infrastructure on a whiteboard. This usually has an interviewer describing a business or piece of software, and then the interviewee needs to ask questions to clarify, and then draw out an architecture diagram.
To approach an interview like this, I suggest starting as general as you can and then refining on parts that the interviewer is curious about and wants more clarification on. Three very common questions are as follows:
- Design a distributed cron system
- Design a scalable URL shortener
- Design a large-scale CMS
For building distributed cron, I suggest you take a look at Chapter 24, Distributed Periodic Scheduling with Cron, of Google's SRE Book, where you can walk through one possible design in detail (https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/distributed-periodic-scheduling.html).
For building a CMS, Chapter 6, Capacity Planning, in this book has a few example designs you...
