AdvancedTechnical
5 min
Resilient Event-Driven System Design
Event-Driven ArchitectureScalabilityResilience
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Interview Question
What are the key design considerations for building resilient, event-driven systems at scale?
Key Points to Cover
- Use durable messaging (Kafka, SQS, Pulsar)
- Ensure idempotency of event consumers
- Handle retries and DLQs (dead-letter queues)
- Design schema evolution for events
- Implement monitoring of event flow and lag
Evaluation Rubric
Uses durable, reliable messaging30% weight
Handles idempotent consumers30% weight
Considers retries and DLQs20% weight
Implements observability for event pipelines20% weight
Hints
- 💡DLQ and retry backoff are critical here.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- ⚠️Assuming consumers will always process events successfully on the first attempt.
- ⚠️Lack of idempotency leading to duplicate data or corrupted state.
- ⚠️Infinite retry loops or fixed retry intervals that overwhelm systems.
- ⚠️Events being silently dropped upon failure instead of being retried or sent to a DLQ.
- ⚠️Overlooking the complexities of distributed transactions and eventual consistency, leading to data integrity issues.
Potential Follow-up Questions
- ❓How would you handle schema evolution?
- ❓How to test event ordering guarantees?
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