Explain reliability and runtime fundamentals

You might get a handful of brief technical-fundamentals questions, for example:

• For a Kafka-based batch consumer, how would you stop a batch from being handled more than once?
• Walk through what occurs end-to-end when someone opens a browser, enters a query into Google, and hits Search.
• When a large web service's API gateway goes down, what is the right way for the system to degrade gracefully or recover?
• Which database or storage engine would you pick for search results or searchable documents, and what is your reasoning?
• How does a compiler differ from an interpreter?

Overview: This question tests your grasp of reliability and runtime fundamentals in backend engineering, including fault tolerance, end-to-end request lifecycles, API gateway degradation, storage engine selection for search, and the difference between compilers and interpreters.