Reliability and Operational Excellence Questions

Covers design and operational practices for building and running reliable software systems and for achieving operational maturity. Topics include defining, measuring, and using Service Level Objectives, Service Level Indicators, and Service Level Agreements; establishing error budget policies and reliability governance; measuring incident impact and using error budgets to prioritize work. Also includes architectural and operational techniques such as redundancy, failover, graceful degradation, disaster recovery, capacity planning, resilience patterns, and technical debt management to improve availability at scale. Operational practices covered include observability, monitoring, alerting, runbooks, incident response and post incident analysis, release gating, and reliability driven prioritization. Proactive resilience practices such as fault injection and chaos engineering, as well as trade offs between reliability, cost, and development velocity and scaling reliability practices across teams and organizations, are included to capture both hands on and senior level discussions.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You're responsible for a user-facing REST API with highly bursty traffic. Propose a set of SLIs you would collect (e.g., request_success_rate, p95 and p99 latency, queueing time), explain the aggregation windows and quantiles you would use for SLO evaluation, and describe how you'd tag metrics to support per-region/per-customer SLOs and post-incident analysis. Justify choices for bursty traffic patterns.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a rollout gating and rollback blueprint that supports complex DB migrations, feature flags, and coordinated cross-service releases. Explain sequencing (migrate schemas vs push code vs enable flags), backward/forward-compatible migration patterns, automated checks (data integrity, smoke tests), canary strategies, and communication/coordination steps across teams.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Define redundancy, replication, and failover. For each term provide a concise example (e.g., load-balanced web servers for redundancy, master-replica DB replication, automated failover orchestration) and explain how each affects availability, consistency, and system complexity.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

List the key factors you should consider when choosing SLO targets for latency and availability for a user-facing service. Provide a concise checklist that includes customer impact, business criticality, historical telemetry, error budget considerations, and cost/operational constraints. Give one short rule-of-thumb example for a latency SLO (e.g., choosing p95 target relative to current percentiles).

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You are rolling out an error budget policy across multiple product teams. Describe the policy elements (SLO ownership, measurement windows, burn thresholds, gating actions), the enforcement model (automated gates vs manual review), and how you would mediate disputes when a team contests their SLI or SLO definition.

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