Code RoomCross-shard transactional atomicity
HardPrep Room Coding #3429

Cross-shard transactional atomicity

System designDatabases & SQLDistributed systemsSenior–Staff~50 min

A sharded transactional store (sharded by user_id) needs to support transactions that span two shards: a money transfer where the sender and receiver hash to different shards and the debit + credit must be atomic (both or neither), at 20k transfers/sec. Single-shard transactions are cheap and common; cross-shard ones are the minority but must be correct. Design how cross-shard atomicity is achieved, how you minimize how often you pay that cost, and the failure mode of the chosen protocol plus how you bound it.

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
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Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.