The 100,000 Free Trials That Vanished Overnight
The 100,000 Free Trials That Vanished Overnight
Your cloud AI sandbox platform offers 0.85 each, pointing the DNS MX records to disposable email hosting backends (like Mailgun or custom catch-all Postfix servers). Because the domains are brand new, they do not appear on any public blocklist. The database fills with 120,000 fake accounts, cloud compute bills surge by $180,000, and outbound verification emails sent to dead catch-all inboxes cause AWS SES to throttle your email sending quota. You are asked to design a real-time email verification and disposable domain intelligence architecture that identifies ephemeral throwaway domains dynamically.
The 100,000 Free Trials That Vanished Overnight
Your cloud AI sandbox platform offers 0.85 each, pointing the DNS MX records to disposable email hosting backends (like Mailgun or custom catch-all Postfix servers). Because the domains are brand new, they do not appear on any public blocklist. The database fills with 120,000 fake accounts, cloud compute bills surge by $180,000, and outbound verification emails sent to dead catch-all inboxes cause AWS SES to throttle your email sending quota. You are asked to design a real-time email verification and disposable domain intelligence architecture that identifies ephemeral throwaway domains dynamically.
Provide 1–2 precise sentences for each architectural dimension. Each box guides you on what staff-level interviewers evaluate.
Define SLA targets, hard consistency constraints, and conditions the system must never violate.
Quantify throughput (QPS/RPS), read:write ratios, and peak burst multipliers.
Step-by-step path: client ingress → API gateway → queues → background workers → persistence.
Database engine, table schema, partition keys (PK/SK), and durability strategy.
What resource hits saturation first under 10x traffic? (CPU, disk IOPS, connection pools, network).
Worker crashes, network partitions, split-brain, poison pill DLQ, retries, and idempotency.
What did you sacrifice in exchange and why? (e.g. eventual consistency vs latency, cost vs redundancy).