core practice · system design prompt
Design exercise: Event Streaming & Kafka
Partitioned logs, producers, consumer groups, offsets, ordering, delivery semantics, backpressure, and stream processing. Implement designOutline() returning non-empty values for: partitioning, deliverySemantics, consumerRecovery. Each value must name a concrete mechanism or decision.
The mechanism
Kafka turns an append-only log into a coordination boundary. Ordering is per partition, progress is an offset, and consumers own replay and idempotency.
Expected evidence
A design outline with partitioning, deliverySemantics, consumerRecovery 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.