Thanks for posting this, it was an interesting read. I recently went through a few loops where I've seen an increased appearance of such questions in interviews. To me, these are better than whiteboard coding, and in my opinion, companies should put more focus on these questions especially for senior candidates.
Biggest take from my experiences on how to answer such questions is to first figure out a running system before thinking about scaling it. I would start with building a service say Youtube on a single server, listing down how my service handles major workflows like uploading a video, encoding it, generating thumbnails, adding it to the search index, etc. Defining system interfaces (APIs) helps a lot during this phase. Later, focus on scale-out and handling system bottlenecks.
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Thanks for posting this, it was an interesting read. I recently went through a few loops where I've seen an increased appearance of such questions in interviews. To me, these are better than whiteboard coding, and in my opinion, companies should put more focus on these questions especially for senior candidates.
Biggest take from my experiences on how to answer such questions is to first figure out a running system before thinking about scaling it. I would start with building a service say Youtube on a single server, listing down how my service handles major workflows like uploading a video, encoding it, generating thumbnails, adding it to the search index, etc. Defining system interfaces (APIs) helps a lot during this phase. Later, focus on scale-out and handling system bottlenecks.