Design a device configuration system
Company: Palo
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: easy
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a system for about 1,000 admin users to manage configurations for about 1,000 devices. Admins need to update device configuration every day. Explain the main APIs, storage model, rollout workflow, and operational behavior. As follow-up discussion, describe how you would scale the system and how you would preserve strong consistency for configuration updates.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design and distributed systems competency, including API design, storage modeling, rollout workflows, operational behavior, and consistency trade-offs for device configuration management.