System design interview question
Design a Distributed Cache Layer for an E-commerce Product Catalog
You're building a caching layer for an e-commerce platform's product catalog service. The platform serves 1 million active users across 3 geographic regions (US, EU, APAC), with approximately 500K product SKUs. Peak traffic reaches 50K reads/second and 500 writes/second (inventory updates, price changes). Products have varying access patternspopular items are read 100x more frequently than niche products. The cache must handle cache misses gracefully, maintain consistency with the source database within 5 seconds, and survive single-node failures without data loss. Design a distributed cache system that minimizes latency for read-heavy operations while ensuring data freshness and availability across regions.
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