Distributed Systems

🟠 P1 — how distributed systems reason about “what happened before what”

🟠 P1 — isolating failures so one component’s problems don’t sink the ship

🔴 P0 — the default error recovery mechanism; Stripe definitely asks about this

🟠 P1 — solves the dual-write problem; critical for exactly-once in event-driven systems

🔴 P0 — prevents cascading failures by stopping calls to a failing service

🔴 P0 — staff-level framing question: how do multi-service workflows coordinate?

🟠 P1 — two paradigms for processing large volumes of data

🔴 P0 — the most fundamental reliability mechanism; every network call needs one

🔴 P0 — queues are the backbone of async architectures

🔴 P0 — the most fundamental inter-service communication decision