Design a cloud database write path and recovery

Company: Amazon

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: hard

Interview Round: Technical Screen

Quick Answer: This question evaluates expertise in designing transactional write paths and crash recovery for cloud-native relational databases that separate compute from durable distributed storage, focusing on durability guarantees, commit protocols, replication and quorum rules, crash recovery mechanisms, write amplification, scalability, and observability.