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Design a Real-Time Retail Inventory Platform is a hard cloud architecture interview question covering cloud data platform, stream processing, cloud architecture, real-time, databases — the kind asked at FAANG (Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and AI-first companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia.
A retailer with about 1,200 stores plus an online channel wants one view of what stock exists and where. Stock changes from point-of-sale terminals, warehouse receiving and picking, online orders, returns and periodic manual counts. Store connectivity is unreliable, so terminals sometimes send hours of events at once. On the busiest sale day, volume is roughly twenty times normal and concentrates on a few promoted items. Design it, and say what happens when the same last unit is sold twice.
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