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Design a Cloud-Hosted Distributed Cache Tier is a medium cloud architecture interview question covering cloud architecture, managed services, caching, cap theorem, distributed systems — the kind asked at FAANG (Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and AI-first companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia.
A database serving a two-terabyte dataset can no longer keep up with read traffic. Design a distributed in-memory cache tier in front of it, running on a cloud provider. Make an explicit consistency choice and justify it. Cover how clients find data, what happens when a node or the whole tier is lost, and how the tier is resized without an outage.
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