Hot partition mitigation
Design hot-partition mitigation for a DynamoDB-style key-value store where a few celebrity entities (a viral post, a flash-sale SKU) receive 100x the traffic of an average partition, causing throttling on those partition keys while the cluster is mostly idle. Writes are 30k/sec aggregate but spike to 50k/sec on a single key. How do you detect, spread, and absorb the hot key without over-provisioning everything?
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.
Clarify4:30 left
Estimate4:30 planned
Design13:30 planned
Deep dive10:30 planned
Failure7:00 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.