Scalability and Future Extension Questions
Design systems that scale: handle 10 items, 1000 items, 10,000 items efficiently. Design for future feature additions without major refactoring. Use abstraction and interfaces to allow flexibility. Discuss how your solution would adapt if requirements changed. This shows you think beyond the immediate requirement.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the concepts of scalability and elasticity, and compare vertical vs horizontal scaling. For each approach describe typical triggers (for example: handling 10 → 1,000 → 10,000 items), operational costs, single-node limits, and scenarios where you would choose one approach over the other in a cloud-native service.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the role of an API Gateway in a microservices architecture. Describe how an API Gateway supports scalability, security, protocol translation, centralized routing, and future feature additions like per-client rate-limiting and request shaping.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
A microservice reports latency spikes when item list size grows from ~1k to ~10k, while database response time appears constant. Describe a systematic troubleshooting plan focusing on service-layer causes: what instrumentation to add, profiling techniques, code hotspots to check (serialization, loops), and quick mitigations you could apply in production.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design an extensible telemetry and tracing strategy for a microservices platform so teams can add new metrics and tags later without blowing up storage costs. Cover span/event schema design, adaptive sampling, tail-sampling, aggregation strategies, high-cardinality tag handling, and how to safely introduce new telemetry fields.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
List five concrete practices to design software so adding new features requires minimal refactor later (examples: vertical slicing, stable interfaces, domain boundaries, feature flags, plugin systems). For each practice give a brief concrete example in a web service context.
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