You have 90 seconds to verbally explain how you would design a leader election system for a distributed service.
Your system should: - Elect exactly one leader among N nodes - All nodes agree on who the leader is - Automatically re-elect if leader fails - Tolerate network partitions - Prevent split-brain scenarios
Explain your consensus algorithm, failure detection, and state management.
How to approach it
- Hint 1
Use Raft or Paxos consensus algorithm to ensure agreement across nodes
- Hint 2
Implement heartbeat mechanism for failure detection with quorum-based decisions
- Hint 3
Consider term/epoch numbers to detect stale leaders after partition heals
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