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.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
During rapid user growth, you observe cache stampedes where many clients miss cache and thrash the database for the same hot keys. Describe mitigation strategies (mutex/locking, probabilistic early refresh, background refresh, request coalescing, and heat-based pre-warming), and discuss trade-offs and implementation complexity for each.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You're leading a migration required to comply with GDPR and PCI. Produce a high-level compliance plan that covers data residency and sovereignty, encryption at rest and in transit, audit logging and retention, access controls and least privilege, vendor assessments, and how to gather evidence for auditors. Also explain how you'd work with legal and product teams to schedule compliance milestones.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Your company must cut cloud spend by 40% in 90 days without removing core product functionality. Present a prioritized 90-day plan with measurable actions: quick wins, medium-term architectural changes, potential provider negotiations, and organizational processes. For each action, estimate savings, effort, and risks.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
You must migrate an enterprise application from on-prem to a multi-cloud setup (AWS + GCP) minimizing vendor lock-in, supporting cross-region failover, and centralizing deployment pipelines. System constraints: 10TB of persistent storage and 1k global writes/sec. Propose networking, data replication, CI/CD, IaC and service patterns, and discuss trade-offs in operational complexity, latency, and cost.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Describe a safe, zero-downtime procedure to add a NOT NULL column and populate it for a high-traffic relational database. Include steps for schema changes, backfill strategy, application compatibility (dual-read/write vs feature flags), validation, and rollback plan. Explain how you ensure consistency during the migration.
Unlock Full Question Bank
Get access to hundreds of Real World Scenario Based Decision Making interview questions and detailed answers.
Sign in to ContinueJoin thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.