Topic 16.3
Advanced Design Questions (36–50)
In one line
Fifteen design questions that expect a full reasoning chain: distributed and global rate limiters, schedulers, locking, Redlock, fencing, invalidation, stampede prevention, multi-region, Cluster design, high availability, 100M sessions, leaderboards, feeds and distributed WebSockets.
Think of it like this
An architect's review board. You're not asked "what's a beam"; you're asked "will this building stand in an earthquake, and how do you know?" Advanced answers are judged on trade-offs and failure handling.
Key ideas
- 01
Answer shape: clarify requirements and numbers → pick primitives → make it atomic → scale it (keys, shards, hot spots) → break it (Redis down, failover, partition) → observe it → state trade-offs.
- 02
Each model answer below is a summary; the linked topics hold the full designs.
Explain it without notes
36. Design a distributed rate limiter.
37. Design a global (multi-region) rate limiter.
38. Design a Redis-backed job scheduler.
39. Design distributed locking.
40. Explain Redlock.
41. Explain fencing tokens.
42. Design cache invalidation.
43. Design cache stampede prevention.
44. Design multi-region Redis.
45. Design a Redis Cluster deployment.
46. Design highly available Redis.
47. Design a 100M-session store.
48. Design a real-time leaderboard.
49. Design a social media feed.
50. Design distributed WebSocket infrastructure.
Practice
Take question 36 and present it for 15 minutes to a friend or recording, following the answer shape.
Done when you can
I can deliver all 15 designs with requirements, primitives, atomicity, failure, scale and trade-offs.