Summary
I experienced an interview with Illumio that featured a deep dive into Kafka concepts and a coding segment involving a Key-Value Store implementation.
Full Experience
My interview at Illumio was structured into two main parts. The first segment involved a comprehensive discussion about Kafka, exploring its core use cases, the mechanics of producers and consumers, and strategies for achieving high throughput and low latency. The second segment focused on a coding challenge where I was asked to implement a specific function for a Key-Value Store, alongside addressing concurrency issues like the ConcurrentModificationException and the advantages of using iterators.
Interview Questions (2)
I was asked to explain why Kafka is preferred over REST APIs, describe the internal workings of Kafka producers and consumers, and elaborate on techniques to achieve high throughput in producers. Additionally, I needed to explain how to ensure consumers can keep pace with producers and what measures to take for low latency on the consumer side.
I was tasked with writing a deleteByValue function for a Key-Value Store. The discussion also involved understanding how to navigate the ConcurrentModificationException and explaining why using an iterator is more beneficial than a traditional for loop in certain concurrent scenarios.