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.
HardTechnical
88 practiced
Design an error classification and mapping strategy whereby internal service errors are translated into appropriate HTTP status codes and standardized machine-readable error codes for clients, while ensuring sensitive internal details are not leaked. Provide examples and explain how SREs should instrument these translations for analytics and alerting.
MediumTechnical
74 practiced
Compare offset-based pagination and cursor-based pagination for a high-traffic REST API used for listing items. Discuss performance, correctness when data is changing during pagination, cacheability, and operational considerations from an SRE viewpoint.
HardTechnical
64 practiced
Design an SRE-focused test suite to validate that REST APIs emit correct telemetry: structured logs (schema), traces (span names/ids), and metrics (labels/units), and that they return appropriate HTTP status codes. Include mock dependencies, failure injection (chaos), and how CI/CD should enforce telemetry schema compliance and fail builds for critical telemetry regressions.
HardTechnical
85 practiced
A sudden spike of abusive requests from many IPs is saturating your REST API. Propose a multi-layer mitigation strategy combining CDN rules, gateway rate-limits, API-key throttling, challenge pages, and dynamic blacklisting. Evaluate trade-offs between false positives and minimizing impact to legitimate users, and describe how you'd roll back or relax mitigations safely.
EasyTechnical
112 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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