Design a Distributed Key-Value Store

Company: Microsoft

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

Quick Answer: This system design question evaluates the ability to architect a horizontally scalable distributed key-value store, covering data partitioning, replication, and failure handling. It tests conceptual understanding of consistent hashing, quorum-based consistency, and rebalancing, skills commonly probed in system design interviews to assess architectural reasoning about scalability and fault tolerance.