Design a Distributed Message Queue

1. Problem Statement

2. Architecture Discussion Map

Use this as one discussion aid, not a single correct answer. Your design should follow from the requirements, scale, and trade-offs you establish.

graph LR
    A["Design a Distributed Message Queue"]
    A --> F1["Log-based storage vs Queue-based storage"]
    A --> F2["Partitioning and Sharding for scale"]
    A --> F3["Consumer Groups and Offset management"]
    A --> F4["Data durability and replication"]
    A --> F5["Delivery semantics At-least-once, Exactly-once"]

3. Key Focus Areas

• 1
  Log-based storage vs Queue-based storage
• 2
  Partitioning and Sharding for scale
• 3
  Consumer Groups and Offset management
• 4
  Data durability and replication
• 5
  Delivery semantics (At-least-once, Exactly-once)

4. What the Interviewer Looks For

The interviewer probes these areas, and the report grades the interview against them.

• Log storage model and capacity
• Partitioning, ordering, and hot topics
• Replication, durability, and leader failover
• Consumer groups, offsets, and delivery semantics
• Operations, multi-tenancy, and multi-region