RESTful API Design and HTTP Fundamentals Questions
Understanding REST architectural principles including resource-based URLs, proper HTTP methods (GET for safe retrieval, POST for creation, PUT for updates, DELETE for deletion), appropriate status codes (200 OK, 201 Created, 400 Bad Request, 404 Not Found, 500 Internal Server Error), and stateless communication patterns. Ability to design simple API endpoints following REST conventions.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
List HTTP security patterns appropriate for REST APIs (e.g., Authorization: Bearer tokens, mutual TLS, HMAC signatures), and explain where to enforce them (gateway vs service). As an SRE, describe how you would roll credentials or certificates with zero downtime and monitor for suspicious authentication failures.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
You have an SLO that 99.9% of requests to a REST API must return 2xx or 3xx codes in a rolling 30-day window. Explain how you'd calculate error budget consumption using request metrics, discuss which 4xx and 5xx categories should be included or excluded, and describe how to treat planned maintenance or known client misbehavior.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You start seeing intermittent 502 Bad Gateway errors at the gateway for a production REST API that previously worked. As the on-call SRE, outline your incident response plan: triage steps, quick mitigations to restore traffic, how to determine whether to roll back recent changes, short-term workarounds, root-cause analysis approach, and how you would communicate progress to stakeholders.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe how HTTP caching works and explain the difference between Cache-Control directives (public, private, max-age) and validators like ETag / If-None-Match. As an SRE, how would caching behavior influence the metrics you monitor and how you detect stale-content incidents?
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Given a service managing blog posts and comments, propose RESTful, resource-based URL patterns for CRUD operations on posts and nested comments, including how to fetch all comments for a post and how to address operations on comments directly. Explain design choices that make these URLs RESTful and intuitive for clients.
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