System design interview question
"Design a distributed cache — something like Memcached or Redis used as a caching tier. Hundreds of nodes, terabytes of memory, serving millions of reads per second in front of a database. Tell me how a client finds the right node and what happens when nodes come and go."
consistent hashing, eviction, and cache-coherence failure modes. The three signature issues are: how keys map to nodes without a mass reshuffle when the topology changes, what happens when a hot key overwhelms one node, and the stampede/avalanche behaviours that make caches fail catastrophically rather than gracefully.
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