Distributed Computing Interview Questions
- 0of 0 votes
AnswersDesign distributed crawling system which would be feeded a source url.
- neer.1304 August 09, 2019 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon SDE-3 Distributed Computing - 1of 1 vote
AnswersGiven 'n' servers each having millions of sorted integers. Find distributed median of all the 'n' servers.
- neer.1304 August 09, 2019 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon SDE-3 Distributed Computing - 1of 1 vote
AnswersDesign real time tail log search
- neer.1304 July 09, 2019 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Rubrik MTS Distributed Computing - -1of 1 vote
AnswersIn a Kafka configuration, the same message is getting replayed to the consumer again n again.This is happening under heavy load otherwise it's fine.What can be possible causes?
- koustav.adorable August 30, 2017 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Spotify SDE-2 Distributed Computing - 2of 2 votes
AnswersPhone Interview, New Grad - Software Developer
Imagine you are given 10,000 files each containing 1 Million integers. I would you sum all of them and give the final result?
---> Interviewer wanted to test scalability, distributed concepts.
He has written the basic code and wanted to improve upon that.
Here's the basic code.public getSum(String[] file_names) { int sum = 0; for(String f: file_names) { sum = sum + sumOfFile(f); } return sum; }
Questions:
- confides123 March 25, 2017 in United States for Developer Tools
What's wrong with above code? Ans: Integer overflow
How would you implement sumOfFile?
What if 'sumOfFile' takes lot of time to finish computing?
How do you fasten the program?
Overall scalability etc| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Google Software Developer Distributed Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersWe tend to use computer to solve practical problems that actually earns or save dollars. Here is something that happens across the stock exchanges : people buy and sell stocks.
- NoOne October 15, 2016 in India
We generally use automated intelligent systems to buy and sell stocks. That part is too much mathematics, and beyond scope of this interview. There is another part. Suppose the system issues a buy order : buy 1000 Microsoft stock. Now, there are more than 1 ( in fact 10 ) active exchanges from where we can buy MSFT. There is a slight price delta, which keeps changing over time. There is another problem. In each stock exchange, prices are stacked, that is :
1. For first 100 stocks prices are 55$.
2. Next 200 stocks, prices are 55.2$.
... etc, and you got the idea. Even this stacks are changing over time.
Thus, here is the problem to solve. Design and implement a system such that one can buy n stocks with minimal price.
Also, in the same spirit, the same system should be able to sell n stocks with maximum payoff possible.
This is a non trivial problem, for Quant systems.
There are always k no of exchanges to hit.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Goldman Sachs Software Engineer / Developer Algorithm Cache Computer Architecture & Low Level Computer Science Distributed Computing Large Scale Computing Math & Computation Software Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersThe following is the design question I was asked.
- gopi.komanduri July 26, 2016 in India
Design a dash board.
Should be very realistic.
Should be scalabe .
Should have very less latency .
Can expect millions of updates per second.
Dash board should show :
for each day :
1. city name ,
2.total trips in that city for that day ,
3.total fare it could collect in that city on that day,
4. fare collected from old clients
5. fare collected from new clients (new client is the client who is having his first ride in Uber after registration)
Input : we get two strings s1 , s2.
the format of s1 : trip_id , client_id , city , datetime
the format of s2 : trip_id , fare.
Could you please suggest how to proceed for this kind of question?| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
StartUp Analyst Algorithm Business Question Cache Computer Architecture & Low Level Data Structures Distributed Computing Hash Table Ideas System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersThis was a design question, discuss data structures/ complexities, etc.
- AnonymousN January 05, 2016 in United States
There is a huge HashMap (Key-Value store). This is present in storage, dont worry about the Storage.
1. Build its index. Distributed system for indexing. Different cases: Key is a String/ Double/ complex structure, etc. How will you replicate this index structure - whole index is replicated/ parts of index are replicated.
2. How will you synchronize access (read/ write) if there are multiple replicas of the index partition. What if the actual Storage partition also has replicas.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon SDE-2 Distributed Computing - 3of 3 votes
AnswerDesign Uber or Lyft like architecture keeping scale, latency and availability in mind. The design can be at macro level first, that is, major components like persistent store (SQL/NoSQL/redundant), cache, communication/messaging. The design and if time permits, details will then be discussed/challenged.
- Blue Ocean November 29, 2015 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Principal Software Engineer Distributed Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersHow would you go about testing a distributed system such as Gmail, before releasing it to the public. How would you simulate realistic server load?
- Ray October 17, 2015 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Google Intern Distributed Computing - -1of 1 vote
AnswersRound 5
- sonesh July 12, 2015 in United States
Question 4 : Now lets say you have 1 PB(1000 TB) of numbers, what kind of system you would prefer, not that you can't store this data in one box. How will you sort these many numbers, what is the time complexity in seconds ?. does increasing core per machine help here ?| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Microsoft Software Engineer / Developer Algorithm Arrays Data Structures Distributed Computing Sorting - 0of 0 votes
AnswersIf given a binary file, with data like lat, long, weather, temp in key:value. It's a structured data how would u ingest it. what are the steps that are being taken before Hive process starts.
- Tom Walker June 07, 2015 in United States
- serde (serializartion deserialization). parque etc.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Developer Algorithm Data Mining Data Structures Database Distributed Computing Java SQL - 0of 0 votes
AnswerWhat do you mean by combiner?
- Tom Walker June 07, 2015 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Developer Data Mining Data Structures Database Distributed Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersWhat's Hbase, Pig, used for? Why do we need Hbase if we can use Hive to query Hadoop?
- Tom Walker June 07, 2015 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Microsoft Software Developer Data Mining Data Structures Database Distributed Computing Experience Java Knowledge Based Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersWhat are different phases of Map reduce operation - I think they were looking for split, combiners, partitioners, sorting phases of whole map reduce stage.
- Tom Walker June 07, 2015 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Microsoft Software Developer Data Mining Data Structures Database Distributed Computing Java Large Scale Computing SQL - 0of 0 votes
AnswersMy interview was for big data position for their Search team. They were looking for person with good Hadoop skill set :-
- Tom Walker June 07, 2015 in United States
1. Can you describe Hadoop Architecture? What are various components of it (Primary/Secondary namednodes, data node etc)? Explain working of each.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Microsoft Software Developer Data Mining Data Structures Database Distributed Computing Ideas Java - 0of 2 votes
AnswersI needed to develop next system:
- Stanand April 05, 2015 in United States
We have a lot of servers. Every server generate logs. Every log has two data types: first is numeric metrics. These numeric metrics are integer. Second is strings. We need to collect logs from all servers on other server (storage). Then we have to execute queries and get some data from storage. In our queries we have to use numeric metrics and strings as well. For numerics metrics we have to be able get aggregation data as well.
Develop Storage server, database. Describe how will you scale this system, what database will you use, how will you save data and how will you execute this queries.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Facebook Developer Program Engineer Distributed Computing - 2of 2 votes
AnswersPart 1: You are given a computer #1 with array Foo, a computer #2 with array Bar and a spare computer #3. You need to apply a function F to corresponding/matching elements of the two arrays. How would you do that?
- tested.candidate March 21, 2015 in UK
Part 2: Once you scale up, how would you balance the number of machines sorting with the machines applying the function?
Part 3: What if the master (which is distributing the work) dies and never recovers?| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Google Software Engineer Distributed Computing - 0of 2 votes
AnswersDesign a system like friend's functionality in facebook. should have all features of facebook's friends functionality. like for each person , he can have any number of friends , he will get suggestions for new firends , showing common friends if we visits any other profile . algo should be scalable , robust .
- gopi.komanduri August 02, 2014 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Computer Scientist Algorithm Android Application / UI Design Arrays Bit Manipulation C# C++ Cache Coding Computer Architecture & Low Level Data Mining Data Structures Database Distributed Computing Dynamic Programming Hash Table Java Large Scale Computing Linked Lists Math & Computation Object Oriented Design Problem Solving Sorting SQL Stacks System Design Trees and Graphs XML - 0of 0 votes
AnswersI have recently attended Amazon Interview and got rejected after design round, its happened three times with Amazon in 2 year, i always getting rejected because of design round. please help me to know how should i answer an design question. questions like 1) design elevator control system 2) design whisper-sync feature (used in Amazon instant video platform) they ask me to design End to end HLD LLD i did not get what exactly differ in both, i explain as a algorithm wise, but could not properly by HLD and LLD.
- ashishbansal1986 February 10, 2014 in India
i mean i searched alot, but could not found a way to answer such question.
Any help will be good for me.
Thanks,| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Senior Software Development Engineer Distributed Computing - 14of 16 votes
AnswersDesign an architecture for REST APIs where you have to upload big data like images/videos etc. Request should be async. Follow up: How will you tune the performance if you have millions of requests coming at same time? Clues: Queueing the request, Storing data in filesystems rather than traditional DB etc.
- techpanja October 02, 2013 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Senior Software Development Engineer Distributed Computing - 2of 2 votes
AnswersDesign an architecture for REST APIs where you have to upload big data like images/videos etc. Request should be async. Follow up: How will you tune the performance if you have millions of requests coming at same time? Clues: Queueing the request, Storing data in filesystems rather than traditional DB etc.
- techpanja October 02, 2013 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Ebay Software Engineer / Developer Distributed Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersDesign a distributed keystore with a single write end-point and multiple read end-points.
- RQYB September 28, 2013 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer Distributed Computing - 0of 6 votes
AnswersHow does a search engine perform exact phrase search? i.e. search for the term "the bees knees" exactly.
- sarasaurus August 24, 2013 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Google Software Engineer / Developer Distributed Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersHow does DropBox work ? Say if you have 25 Gb space granted to you by DropBox, does it mean that DropBox application when installed on Desktop will allocate 25 GB of your space ? Or does it keep only the recent used files on system and METADATA for all the files. Please suggest.
- Ranbir April 25, 2013 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Lab126 Software Engineer Intern Distributed Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersThere are different buildings in one environment, each with machines that can handle one request at a time. How would you design the request handling so that there is no single fail-point and is scalable.
- JSDUDE April 08, 2013 in United States
Hint: It is ok if a request is sent to a machine that is already servicing another request. We can handle requests that come back from a machine. But he didnot want a lock on a single file that contained the data of empty machines
Follow up question was, lets say BLDG-A has 250 free machines, BLDG-B has 500 free machines, BLDG-C has 100 free machines and BLDG-D has 0. How would you assign requests? What if you had 850 requests at the same time? Why would you assign what you did?| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer Distributed Computing - 1of 1 vote
AnswersDesign a site similar to tinyurl.com
- Steve September 12, 2012 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Facebook Software Engineer / Developer Distributed Computing - 1of 1 vote
AnswersCode a distributed hash table that will always live on 3 machines. Optimize for the case where the 3 machines are virtual on a single physical machine and when they are 3 physical machines.
- edoc0code August 08, 2012 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Shutterfly Software Engineer / Developer Distributed Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersExplain rack awareness in a data-center and an application where it is valuable and another where it should be avoided.
- edoc0code August 08, 2012 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Shutterfly Software Engineer / Developer Distributed Computing