An ingestion pipeline hit a 10x flash-sale spike
A medium Pipeline Design mock interview question on DataDriven. Practice with AI-powered feedback, real code execution, and a hire/no-hire decision.
- Domain
- Pipeline Design
- Difficulty
- medium
Interview Prompt
An ingestion pipeline hit a 10x flash-sale spike. The producer writes 50k events/sec; the consumer drains at 5k; there is no durable queue between them. Memory grows on the consumer host until it crashes; the producer keeps writing into a closed socket; events are silently lost. The section names three backpressure strategies: buffer the spike (Kafka, Kinesis, SQS, Pub/Sub), slow the producer (rate-limit at source), or drop selectively (sample or age out). The pick depends on whether data is per-event optional or must not be lost. Place the buffer by adding a durable queue between producer and consumer whose name states the depth and the strategy for events past that depth.
How This Interview Works
- Read the vague prompt (just like a real interview)
- Ask clarifying questions to the AI interviewer
- Write your pipeline design solution with real code execution
- Get instant feedback and a hire/no-hire decision