System design interview question
"Design a distributed file system — something like HDFS or GFS. It stores very large files across a cluster of commodity machines, supports sequential reads at high throughput, and tolerates machines failing constantly. Petabytes of data, thousands of nodes."
classic distributed-systems fundamentals — a single metadata authority versus distributed metadata, block placement, replication and recovery, and the workload assumptions that justify the design. It is deliberately a systems question rather than a product question, and it rewards candidates who know why GFS-style systems made the choices they did.
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