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
Describe how to implement a CI/CD pipeline that supports automated canary releases with health checks and automated rollback. Include tooling options (e.g., Argo Rollouts, Spinnaker, Flagger), the health metrics to evaluate, automated rollback triggers, and how to test rollback safety before production rollouts.
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.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Write a Python function decide_scale(samples: List[int]) -> str that inspects a list of CPU percentage samples (one per minute). Return 'scale_up' if the last 3 consecutive samples are >75, return 'scale_down' if the last 5 consecutive samples are <30, otherwise return 'no_change'. Provide example inputs and outputs, and ensure O(n) time. Example: samples = [60, 78, 80, 82] -> 'scale_up'.
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.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Design a CDN caching strategy for a news website with both long-lived static articles and rapidly updating live blogs. Specify TTL policies, Cache-Control headers, Stale-while-revalidate or ESI options, and invalidation strategies that balance freshness and CDN cost. Also explain how you'd implement cache purges for breaking news.
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