The Scenario
A global fashion retailer is preparing for Black Friday. Last year, their monolithic application crashed under the load. They have asked you to redesign the system using microservices to ensure the site stays up, even if the payment provider is temporarily slow.
The Brief
Design a resilient microservices architecture. Focus on decoupling the Order Service from the Inventory Service and Payment Service. Explain how you will handle high-traffic spikes, eventual consistency, and graceful degradation.
Deliverables
- A comprehensive system diagram showing the API Gateway, microservices, databases, and message queues
- An explanation of how an order is processed asynchronously (e.g., using the Saga pattern or an event bus)
- A strategy for gracefully degrading the UI (e.g., disabling the recommendation engine) if under extreme load
Submission Guidance
Focus on fault tolerance. What happens if the Inventory service goes down right as a user clicks "Buy"? Your architecture must not drop the order.
Submit Your Work
Your submission is graded against the rubric on the right. If you pass, you get a public Badge URL you can share on LinkedIn. There is no draft save, so work offline first and paste your finished response here.