2.9.3: Hands On Lab Exercise

Instructions:

1. System Decomposition (20 min): Break CloudCart into at least 5 distributed components (e.g., product catalog, inventory, user accounts, order processing, payment). For each component, specify whether it requires strong consistency or can tolerate eventual consistency, and justify your choice.
2. CAP Analysis (20 min): For each component identified above, classify it as CP or AP during a network partition. Create a table showing: Component | CAP Priority | Justification | Acceptable Trade-off.
3. Fault Tolerance Design (20 min): Design a replication strategy for the two most critical components. Specify:
   • Number of replicas and their geographic distribution
   • Replication model (synchronous vs. asynchronous)
   • Failover procedure when the primary node fails
4. Scalability Plan (15 min): Describe how you would scale the product catalog service to handle a 10x traffic increase during Black Friday. Include specific strategies (sharding, caching, read replicas, load balancing).
5. Failure Scenario Analysis (15 min): Describe what happens to CloudCart if the US-East data center goes offline. Walk through the impact on each component and the recovery process.

Deliverables:

• System architecture diagram (can be hand-drawn or digital)
• CAP analysis table
• Replication strategy document
• Written failure scenario analysis (1–2 pages)