System design interview question
Design a Distributed Inventory Management and Fulfillment System for a Global E-Commerce Platform (Like Amazon's Warehouse Network at Scale)
Design a real-time inventory management system that handles stock visibility, reservation, and fulfillment orchestration across 500+ fulfillment centers globally, serving 200M active users. The system must support 50K inventory updates per second, sub-100ms stock availability queries, and guarantee no overselling across regions while handling eventual consistency between warehouse systems. Candidates should design the data model, consistency guarantees, reservation lifecycle management, and how to coordinate fulfillment across multiple regional warehouses with different operational SLAs.
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