🧭 Scenario · Make the call
The product catalog drowning in reads
The situation
An online store keeps its product catalog in one database. Shoppers browse constantly — millions of reads an hour to view products — but the catalog itself changes rarely (a few price or stock updates a day). That one database is buckling, and when you check, almost all of its work is answering READ requests. The data comfortably fits on one machine; it's the flood of readers that's the trouble.
You haven't read about this exact system. That's the point — walk the three questions a designer asks: what's really wrong, what fixes it, and what does the fix cost?
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Diagnose
Read past the story. What's the REAL problem — not what the feature does, but what's actually going wrong?
Look past the story. What's the REAL problem here?