core practice · system design prompt
Design exercise: Cloud Infrastructure
Regions, zones, networks, compute, managed storage, identity, load balancing, and control planes. Implement designOutline() returning non-empty values for: failureDomains, statePlacement, recoveryPlan. Each value must name a concrete mechanism or decision.
The mechanism
Cloud systems are distributed resource managers with failure domains. Architecture should make placement, identity, state ownership, and regional recovery explicit.
Expected evidence
A design outline with failureDomains, statePlacement, recoveryPlan plus an explicit failure mode or trade-off.
Try this drill in the practice workspace →
Hints when you need them
- Name the failure mode before selecting the mechanism.
Check the sources
- Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing (UCB/EECS-2009-28)
- Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing
- USENIX SREcon24 Americas — Gray Failure: The Achilles' Heel of Cloud-Scale Systems
- Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg (EuroSys 2015)
- Kubernetes — Cluster Architecture
- AWS Builders Library