Real World Scenario Based Decision Making Questions
Applying infrastructure knowledge to realistic business scenarios: handling traffic spikes, migrations from on-premises to cloud, optimizing costs during resource constraints, responding to security incidents, and managing infrastructure during rapid growth. Making trade-off decisions when constraints conflict.
MediumSystem Design
43 practiced
Design a VPC and network segmentation for a payments platform that must meet PCI-DSS compliance. Include subnet structure, public/private subnets, bastion host patterns, NAT gateways, security groups vs NACLs, logging/flow record requirements, and how to minimize blast radius while enabling necessary integrations.
MediumSystem Design
64 practiced
Design an autoscaling strategy for a Kubernetes-hosted microservices application with baseline 2k RPS and spikes to 20k RPS. Requirements: minimize cost, keep p95 latency under 300ms, support both CPU-bound and IO-bound services, and tolerate node startup times up to 2 minutes. Describe components (HPA/VPA, Cluster Autoscaler, node pools), metrics, and safeguards to prevent oscillation and cascading failures.
MediumTechnical
40 practiced
Design a low-downtime migration for an on-prem PostgreSQL database (10TB, 5k writes/s peak) to a managed cloud DB (RDS/Aurora) while meeting a 0.5% downtime SLA during a migration window. Discuss logical replication, change-data-capture (CDC), dual-write approaches, data validation, index/building strategies, and the final cutover steps.
MediumTechnical
38 practiced
As a team, you must adopt modular Terraform code supporting dev/stage/prod. Sketch a repo layout, remote state backend strategy (locking), workspace vs per-environment state, and best practices for testing modules and handling secrets. Include how you would perform safe upgrades of a shared module.
HardSystem Design
64 practiced
Design an edge-based traffic shaping and quota enforcement system for a public API with tiered customers and global traffic. Requirements: enforce monthly per-tenant quotas, per-minute rate limits, and fairness across regions; support offline quota reconciliation and avoid quota evasion. Describe where counters live, how to guarantee eventual consistency, and how to handle offline enforcement failure.
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