Strongly consistent metadata control plane
Design the metadata/control plane for a distributed object store that must hold the authoritative mapping of buckets→shards→storage nodes (a few hundred GB of metadata, ~50k writes/sec of placement changes, millions of reads/sec). The mapping must be strongly consistent — two clients must never disagree on which node owns a shard — and must survive losing a minority of control-plane nodes with no data loss. How do you build it and how do you scale the read path without weakening consistency?
What a strong answer looks like
Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts (data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes) and name the trade-offs you are making.
Clarify5:30 left
Estimate5:30 planned
Design16:30 planned
Deep dive13:30 planned
Failure9:00 planned
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.