Automation and Scripting Questions

Covers practical and architectural skills for writing production safe automation and operational scripts as well as building reusable automation systems. Topics include designing idempotent automation, safe retries, robust error handling, structured logging and observability, argument parsing and command line interface design, configuration management, and secure credential handling. Emphasis on testing and validation of scripts and automation code, packaging, documentation, deployment, and maintainability so automation can be operated by other team members. Includes integration with schedulers such as cron and systemd timers, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, orchestration and configuration management systems, and common operational patterns such as log processing, backups, polling, multi step orchestration, provisioning, configuration changes, and routine maintenance. Also assesses language selection and trade offs among Python, Go, Bash and other tooling, concurrency and performance considerations, and at senior levels the design and architecture of reusable automation frameworks and strategies for scaling automation to reduce toil.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Describe the principle of least privilege as applied to automation agents and scripts. Provide at least two concrete tactics (e.g., scoped service accounts with minimal roles, short-lived credentials via OIDC or vault-issued tokens) and explain how to validate and audit that privileges are minimized.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

As an SRE lead, prepare a checklist to ensure automation code is maintainable and operable by other engineers. Include coding standards, documentation requirements, runbooks, owner labels, test coverage requirements, CI gating, metrics to emit, and on-call handoff instructions.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a GitOps-based release flow for multiple interdependent services: propose repository layouts (mono-repo vs multi-repo), describe how artifacts are promoted between environments, how to model cross-repo dependencies and atomic promotions, automated gating and owner approvals, and emergency hotfix paths. Include reconciliation and conflict handling.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain idempotency in the context of operational automation and SRE scripts. Provide concrete examples of idempotent and non-idempotent operations, explain why idempotency matters for retries, scheduled jobs, and incident recovery, and list practical techniques (checks, CAS, temporary files, atomic renames) you'd use to make an automation idempotent.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Design an idempotent automation that consumes JSON log files from S3, aggregates hourly error counts per service, writes those metrics to a TSDB, and records a checkpoint so files are not double-processed. Explain how you'd achieve idempotency, checkpointing, and trade-offs between exactly-once and at-least-once processing.

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