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.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Define graceful degradation and contrast it with hard failure. Provide two concrete architectural patterns a web application can use to degrade gracefully when a downstream dependency is slow or unavailable, and briefly note pros and cons for each pattern.

EasyTechnical

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Describe what an error budget is and how product and engineering teams should use it to make trade-offs. Provide a short example policy stating concrete actions when the error budget burn reaches 50% in a 7-day window and when it is exhausted (100%) during that timeframe.

MediumTechnical

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Design an on-call runbook that triages and mitigates widespread 503 responses originating from an upstream microservice in your platform. The runbook should include detection rules, immediate mitigation steps, how to assess blast radius and affected services, rollback decision criteria, and stakeholder communication templates.

HardSystem Design

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Architect a multi-region disaster recovery (DR) strategy for a stateful service with RPO = 1 hour and RTO = 15 minutes. Discuss replication topology (sync vs async), warm vs cold standby, failover automation, DNS/traffic cutover mechanisms, consistency and data integrity checks, and cost trade-offs.

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).

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