Google Interview Question | System Design: Flash Sale (5+ Approaches)

Isn't clock drift an outdated concern. A good datanceter would use PTP instead of NTP. PTP provides a microsecond precision. Even my old laptop from 2019 had a PTP clock within a wifi module. Quick googling shows something like only 5 microsecond per hour drift.

Would be interesting to see an Amazon case closer to a real life when a shopping cart is used. If a customer puts an item in their shopping cart, it's reserved. There might be no orders but also no discounted items available anymore because all discounted items are in shopping carts.

And what about materialized conflicts and generated discount coupon codes specifically for a sale and then internally assigning discount codes to an order that has the item.

How is concurrent updates to the inventory handled if there's concurrent requests coming via another ordering service? Are database isolations involved here?

so spanner solution isnt what the interviewer will be expecting for this prompt, correct? is it because spanner is GCP's own tech and other cloud providers dont have it?

Beautiful content!!