System Design · Question Set

Messaging & Event-Driven Architecture – System Design interview questions

Messaging & Event-Driven Architecture interview questions for placements and exams.

Subject: System DesignDifficulty: Mixed14 questions in this set

Set overview

Questions

Included in this set

Subject

System Design

Explore more sets

Difficulty

Mixed

Level of this set

System Design – Messaging & Event-Driven Architecture questions (14)

Go through each question and its explanation. Use this set as a focused practice pack for System Design.

Back to System Design subject page

1. Which statement best distinguishes a message queue from a log/stream platform?

Difficulty: EasyType: MCQTopic: Messaging

Queues are good for task distribution: a message is consumed once by any consumer in the group. Streams (like Kafka) persist an append-only log; many consumer groups can read the same data independently. Pick queues for fan-out of work, and streams for analytics, multiple downstreams, or replay.

Example code

Queue: workers pull → ack
Stream: topic partitions → consumer groups with offsets

2. Differentiate event-driven architecture (EDA) from event sourcing. When would you choose each?

Continue your preparation

For complete preparation, combine this set with full subject-wise practice for System Design. You can also explore other subjects and sets from the links below.

Quick navigation:System Design subject page•All subjects

Master Interviews
Anywhere, Anytime

Messaging & Event-Driven Architecture – System Design interview questions

Set overview

System Design – Messaging & Event-Driven Architecture questions (14)

1. Which statement best distinguishes a message queue from a log/stream platform?

2. Differentiate event-driven architecture (EDA) from event sourcing. When would you choose each?

Continue your preparation

3. You must notify search, analytics, and email when an order is placed. Describe two fan-out strategies and trade-offs.

4. Which delivery guarantee is most commonly achievable in distributed messaging at scale?

5. How is event ordering typically maintained in a partitioned stream?

6. Which technique best handles a slow consumer so it does not overwhelm the system?

7. For transient failures, which retry policy is recommended?

8. What is the purpose of a Dead-Letter Queue (DLQ)?

9. Why use the Transactional Outbox pattern?

10. Which is a safe practice for event schema evolution?

11. Which combination most reliably approximates 'exactly-once processing' end-to-end?

12. Outline how you would build an idempotent consumer for payment events.

13. What observability signals do you instrument on a messaging pipeline to detect incidents early?

14. Large payloads (5–20 MB) are causing broker pressure. How would you redesign message flow?

More sets in System Design

Explore related subjects

Master Interviews Anywhere, Anytime

Messaging & Event-Driven Architecture – System Design interview questions

Set overview

1. Which statement best distinguishes a message queue from a log/stream platform?

2. Differentiate event-driven architecture (EDA) from event sourcing. When would you choose each?

Continue your preparation

3. You must notify search, analytics, and email when an order is placed. Describe two fan-out strategies and trade-offs.

4. Which delivery guarantee is most commonly achievable in distributed messaging at scale?

5. How is event ordering typically maintained in a partitioned stream?

6. Which technique best handles a slow consumer so it does not overwhelm the system?

7. For transient failures, which retry policy is recommended?

8. What is the purpose of a Dead-Letter Queue (DLQ)?

9. Why use the Transactional Outbox pattern?

10. Which is a safe practice for event schema evolution?

11. Which combination most reliably approximates 'exactly-once processing' end-to-end?

12. Outline how you would build an idempotent consumer for payment events.

13. What observability signals do you instrument on a messaging pipeline to detect incidents early?

14. Large payloads (5–20 MB) are causing broker pressure. How would you redesign message flow?

More sets in System Design

Explore related subjects

Master Interviews
Anywhere, Anytime