Compare core system design tradeoffs with scenarios

Q: Compare core system design tradeoffs with scenarios

This is a System Design interview question from BitGo for Software Engineer roles. View the full question and solution on PracHub.

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Question

System Design Tradeoffs for a Web-Scale Service

Context

You are designing a web-scale, user-facing transactional service. Compare key architectural choices across the following dimensions, and ground your answers with quantitative targets (e.g., 20k QPS, P99 200 ms, 99.99% availability):

Service decomposition: monolith vs microservices
Primary data store: relational vs document vs wide-column
Inter-service communication: synchronous RPC vs event-driven messaging
API protocol: REST vs gRPC
Caching strategies: write-through, write-back, write-around
Consistency models: strong vs eventual
Data partitioning: range, hash, consistent hashing
Load balancing: round-robin, least-connections, consistent hashing

Task

For each dimension:

Provide a concrete scenario and quantitative targets (throughput, latency SLOs, availability, retention, etc.).
Justify a choice, and discuss implications for:
- Latency
- Availability and durability
- Cost and scalability
- Operability (developer productivity, observability, change management)
- Failure modes and mitigations

Where helpful, include small calculations (capacity, shard counts, cache hit/miss effects) and brief formulas. Keep each comparison grounded in realistic, web-scale use cases.

Compare core system design tradeoffs with scenarios

System Design Tradeoffs for a Web-Scale Service

Context

Task

Solution

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