**Section 1 — The Context (The 'Why')**
Reliable and correct data is the hardest guarantee in distributed systems: silent corruption, duplicate records from retries, and schema drift can invalidate entire analytics foundations. A naive approach—trusting sources, writing without validation, or lacking lineage—means downstream consumers make decisions on garbage. At Netflix scale, a single bad record multiplied across millions of recommendations creates revenue and trust damage....
The complete answer continues with detailed implementation patterns, architectural trade-offs, and production-grade considerations. It covers performance optimization strategies, common pitfalls to avoid, and real-world examples from companies like Netflix. The answer also includes follow-up discussion points that interviewers commonly explore.
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