Distributed booking saga
Design a saga-based booking system that reserves a flight, a hotel, and a car as a single logical trip across three vendor services with separate databases, at 2k trips/sec. Each vendor call can succeed, fail, or time out ambiguously, and vendors may be slow for seconds. Compare orchestration vs choreography, and explain how you guarantee the trip is fully booked or fully cancelled even when a compensation itself fails.
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.
Clarify5:00 left
Estimate5:00 planned
Design15:00 planned
Deep dive12:00 planned
Failure8:00 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.