Design globally consistent metadata service
Overview
This question evaluates expertise in distributed systems and system design, focusing on linearizable consistency, multi-region replication and partitioning, low-latency reads, failure handling, degradation strategies, and operational rollback for a global-scale metadata service, and is categorized under System Design.
Amazon
Jan 6, 2026, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
1
0
Loading...
System Design Prompt
Design a global-scale metadata service used by many internal products.
Goals / Requirements
- Writes must be strictly consistent (treat as linearizable writes; no conflicting updates).
- Reads must be low latency for clients across multiple regions.
- Global deployment (multi-region). Assume high QPS and large metadata cardinality.
What to cover
-
Data model and API surface (e.g.,
Get/Put/List/Watch, versioning). - Replication and consistency approach; explicitly justify why not eventual consistency .
- How you handle network partitions and region-level outages .
- Degradation strategy under failures (what continues to work, what becomes read-only, etc.).
- A rollback / recovery approach for bad writes (operator error, buggy deployment).
Constraints (you may assume)
- Metadata items are typically small (KBs), but the keyspace is large.
- Clients are latency-sensitive on reads; writes are less frequent but correctness-critical.
- You may partition by tenant and/or key.