Scalability and Systems Resource Management Questions
Design and operational practices for managing compute and platform resources as systems scale. Covers autoscaling, resource pooling, orchestration, cost trade offs between always on versus on demand provisioning, and architectural choices that affect resource utilization and performance. Candidates should be prepared to discuss capacity planning for infrastructure, metrics and alerts for autoscaling, and cost versus performance decisions for high availability systems.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
A critical microservice is consuming excessive CPU and increasing your monthly cloud bill. Describe a step-by-step profiling and optimization plan you would execute as an SRE to reduce CPU usage and required instance count without sacrificing SLOs. Include tooling, metrics to collect, and risk controls.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Using basic queuing theory, describe how you would size a worker pool for a background job queue. Given average arrival rate λ = 200 jobs/sec and average service time μ^-1 = 10ms per worker, compute expected utilization and discuss how to set headroom to maintain a 99th percentile processing time objective.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a canary deployment process that tests both correctness and autoscaling stability for a new version of a service. Specify traffic percentages, duration, resource checks, and rollback criteria that include resource-related signals (CPU pressure, OOMs, latency spikes).
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Define resource pooling and explain two operational advantages and two potential risks of pooling compute resources across multiple teams in a shared Kubernetes cluster. Provide practical mitigations for each risk mentioned.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You are asked to design Terraform modules and a CI pipeline to provision autoscaling groups (or managed instance groups) across environments. Describe module interfaces, state management, promotion workflow, and how to test autoscaling behavior safely as part of the pipeline.
Unlock Full Question Bank
Get access to hundreds of Scalability and Systems Resource Management interview questions and detailed answers.
Sign in to ContinueJoin thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.