How do I approach System Design interview questions?

System Design questions require understanding of core concepts and practice. PracHub provides solutions with explanations to help you master system design interviews.

What difficulty level is this interview question?

This is a medium difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Onsite rounds at Illumio.

What role is this question designed for?

This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at Illumio during technical interviews.

Design Multicloud Publishing and API Gateway

Quick Overview

This question evaluates understanding of distributed systems and cloud architecture, covering reliable database-to-multicloud event publishing (messaging, ordering, idempotence, retries, partitioning, recovery, and observability) and API gateway concerns (routing, authentication/authorization, rate limiting, validation, logging, and high availability). It is commonly asked to assess architectural thinking, trade-off analysis and failure-mode reasoning for systems that must scale and evolve, and it belongs to the System Design/distributed systems and cloud architecture domain while testing both practical application of architectural patterns and higher-level conceptual reasoning.

You will discuss two system design problems.

Problem 1: Design a Database-to-Multicloud Publishing System

Design a system that reads records or events from a database and publishes them reliably to services deployed across multiple cloud providers.

The system should support:

Fetching new or changed records from a database.
Publishing events to consumers in multiple cloud environments.
Kafka or a similar message broker as part of the architecture.
Partitioning strategy and ordering guarantees.
Idempotent publishing and duplicate handling.
Failure retry behavior.
Database consistency and recovery after crashes.
Operational observability.

Discuss trade-offs, failure modes, and how you would evolve the design as scale increases.

Problem 2: Design an API Gateway

Design an API Gateway for backend services.

The gateway should support:

Request routing to backend services.
Authentication and authorization.
Rate limiting.
Request validation and policy enforcement.
Observability, logging, and metrics.
High availability and horizontal scaling.

Discuss design trade-offs, data models, failure handling, and how the gateway should behave under high traffic.

Quick Overview

You will discuss two system design problems.

Problem 1: Design a Database-to-Multicloud Publishing System

Design a system that reads records or events from a database and publishes them reliably to services deployed across multiple cloud providers.

The system should support:

Fetching new or changed records from a database.
Publishing events to consumers in multiple cloud environments.
Kafka or a similar message broker as part of the architecture.
Partitioning strategy and ordering guarantees.
Idempotent publishing and duplicate handling.
Failure retry behavior.
Database consistency and recovery after crashes.
Operational observability.

Discuss trade-offs, failure modes, and how you would evolve the design as scale increases.

Problem 2: Design an API Gateway

Design an API Gateway for backend services.

The gateway should support:

Request routing to backend services.
Authentication and authorization.
Rate limiting.
Request validation and policy enforcement.
Observability, logging, and metrics.
High availability and horizontal scaling.

Discuss design trade-offs, data models, failure handling, and how the gateway should behave under high traffic.

Design Multicloud Publishing and API Gateway

Quick Overview

Problem 1: Design a Database-to-Multicloud Publishing System

Problem 2: Design an API Gateway

Solution

Submit Your Answer to Earn 20XP

Design Multicloud Publishing and API Gateway

Quick Overview

Problem 1: Design a Database-to-Multicloud Publishing System

Problem 2: Design an API Gateway

Solution

Submit Your Answer to Earn 20XP