System Reliability and Availability Questions

Assess the candidate's approach to designing and operating highly reliable business critical systems. Topics include defining service level agreements and service level objectives, capacity planning, fault tolerance and redundancy strategies, high availability architecture patterns, load balancing and traffic management, monitoring and observability design, alerting and on call practices, incident detection and response, structured root cause analysis and post incident action tracking, reliability testing and chaos experiments, and continuous improvement processes to reduce downtime and improve recoverability. Interviewers may probe trade offs between cost and redundancy, how reliability targets are set with stakeholders, and examples of measurable improvements.