Design a Weighted Log Distributor
Company: Resolve.Ai
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Interview Round: Take-home Project
Design a high-throughput log distributor.
Agents running on application and infrastructure hosts send packets to the distributor. Each packet may contain multiple log messages. The distributor sits in front of multiple analyzer services. Each analyzer has a configured relative weight, such as `0.4`, `0.3`, `0.1`, and `0.2`; assume the weights sum to `1.0`.
The distributor must route incoming log packets to analyzers so that, over time, each analyzer processes a fraction of total log messages that is roughly proportional to its weight.
Discuss the architecture, routing algorithm, data structures, scaling strategy, and how you would handle packet sizes, analyzer failures, backpressure, and weight updates.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates distributed systems architecture, load-balancing and traffic-routing competencies, along with fault tolerance, backpressure handling, capacity planning, and operational scalability.