Design distributed log storage service
Company: Google
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Technical Screen
How would you design storage for distributed data logs supporting append-only writes, retention policies, partitioning, replication, and high-throughput sequential reads? Detail segment management, compaction, indexing, leader and follower roles, and recovery.
Overview: This question evaluates a candidate's expertise in designing distributed storage systems, covering partitioned append-only logs, high-throughput writes and reads, replication, retention, indexing, compaction, leader/follower roles, and recovery mechanisms.