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Design a Distributed Message Queue

System Design

Problem

Design a Distributed Message Queue.

Self-assessment rubric

0/15

Scope & Requirements

Clarified delivery semantics (at-least-once vs exactly-once) and ordering guarantees (per-partition vs global) before designing
Established pub/sub-with-replay vs delete-on-ack model and scale targets (throughput, retention, msg size)

Core Architecture

Designed topics split into partitions as the unit of parallelism and ordering
Included a broker cluster with leader/follower replication per partition
Included a metadata/coordination layer (Raft/ZK-like) for leader election and cluster state
Modeled consumer groups with independent, per-group offset tracking enabling replay/fanout

APIs & Data Model

Defined publish, consume/fetch, and offset-commit APIs with sensible request/response shapes
Designed the partition log schema (append-only, offset-indexed) separately from the metadata store and offset store, matching access patterns

Deep Dives

Explained partitioning strategy (hash-by-key) and its ordering implications
Explained replication/durability via ISR and ack levels (0/1/all) with the associated trade-offs
Addressed consumer offset management, rebalancing, and failure/leader-election handling
Discussed at-least-once vs exactly-once semantics and how idempotency/dedup is achieved

Trade-offs & Communication

Articulated explicit trade-offs (e.g., ordering scope, ack latency vs durability, partition count vs overhead)
Structured the interview well: spent proportionate time on requirements, high-level design, and deep dives within ~45 minutes
Delivered a clear, concise opening/closing summary of the design

Solution

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