This question evaluates system design skills including relational data modeling, hierarchical category representation, product variant and attribute modeling, API design, caching, and search/index consistency trade-offs for an e-commerce product catalog.
You are designing a product catalog service for an e‑commerce site. Assume a read‑heavy workload, a relational primary store, and JSON over HTTP APIs.
Requirements:
Assumptions (you may refine): JSON APIs, REST style; prices/inventory may be separate services; 10M products, typical product has a few variants; peak read 1k QPS, writes much lower.
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