Very few people have real distributed systems experience. Maybe 1% of people who pass system design interviews have ever actually implemented or even worked on such a system.
The nitty gritty of implementing a distributed system is orders of magnitude harder than the high level view of a sys design interview.
What it means is you can just prep for system design like algo. The expectations are not that high. Learn the patterns and common technologies and how they are applied. It almost always comes down to databases and message queues, and the different versions of those. DDIA is the reference book for these interviews.
The nitty gritty of implementing a distributed system is orders of magnitude harder than the high level view of a sys design interview.
What it means is you can just prep for system design like algo. The expectations are not that high. Learn the patterns and common technologies and how they are applied. It almost always comes down to databases and message queues, and the different versions of those. DDIA is the reference book for these interviews.