AdvancedScenario
15 min
Network Partition in Distributed System
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Interview Question
Half your nodes cannot communicate with the other half due to a suspected network partition. How do you investigate and respond?
Key Points to Cover
- Check cluster health and quorum status
- Validate network routes, firewalls, and DNS
- Inspect control plane connectivity
- Apply safe failover or reroute traffic
- Perform root cause analysis and long-term fix
Evaluation Rubric
Analyzes cluster quorum health30% weight
Investigates networking/firewalls30% weight
Provides safe mitigation/failover20% weight
Proposes long-term network fixes20% weight
Hints
- 💡Think CAP theorem trade-offs.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- ⚠️Focusing solely on infrastructure without considering application-level errors.
- ⚠️Failing to check quorum status early, leading to incorrect assumptions about data availability.
- ⚠️Not systematically validating all network layers (routing, firewall, DNS).
- ⚠️Overlooking control plane communication as a distinct and critical path.
- ⚠️Not having a plan for staged isolation and testing when initial diagnostics are ambiguous.
Potential Follow-up Questions
- ❓How do you design for partition tolerance?
- ❓What tools detect network splits?
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