How Much Data May We Lose?
What are RPO and RTO, and how would you establish them for a payments system?
Practical scenario
A payments platform advertises "highly available, fully replicated" in its status page copy. It has never run a restore drill, and last quarter a schema migration corrupted three hours of the ledger across every replica simultaneously.
What it tests
Answer it out loud first. The guide below stays closed until you ask for it, on purpose.
- Whether the terms are connected to concrete recovery requirements rather than recited
- Whether the candidate derives targets from business consequence and then costs the architecture
- Whether they know which mechanisms buy which numbers
Reading a strong answer is not the same as producing one. Commit to what you would say, then compare.