Choose Your Level
Pick the difficulty that matches where you are. You can come back and try a harder level later.
Architect a Simple URL Shortener
Design a system that converts long URLs into short, shareable links.
Architect a Scalable Chat Application
Design a real-time messaging system using WebSockets and Pub/Sub.
Architect a Global E-commerce Platform
Design a high-availability microservices architecture for Black Friday traffic.
System Architecture & Microservices Design
System architecture defines how software components scale, communicate, and handle failure. Principal engineers evaluate candidates on Monolith vs Microservices tradeoffs, event-driven architecture, API gateways, database-per-service patterns, and circuit breakers.
1. High-Level System Architecture Specification
System blueprint detailing component boundaries, API gateways, asynchronous event buses, and data stores.
2. Resilient Microservices API Gateway Config
API Gateway routing configuration enforcing rate-limiting, authentication delegation, and health checks.
3. Scalability & Resilience Tradeoff Document
Technical paper analyzing CAP theorem trade-offs, circuit breaker fallback rules, and event consistency.
Frequently Asked Questions (System Architecture Design)
When should a team choose a Monolith over Microservices?
Start with a Monolith for early products to move fast without network latency, distributed tracing, and complex DevOps overhead. Consider Microservices when independent scaling or team domain autonomy requires it.
What is the Circuit Breaker pattern?
Circuit breakers monitor remote service calls and trip automatically when failures exceed thresholds, failing fast and returning fallback responses to prevent cascading system crashes.
What is the CAP Theorem?
CAP states that a distributed data store can simultaneously provide at most two out of three guarantees: Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance.
Explore Software Development Career Paths
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