Scaling Systems and Platforms Through Growth Questions

Describe experiences scaling systems, platforms, or services through significant growth phases. Examples: scaling from 1 million to 100 million users, migrating from monolith to microservices as organization grew, or building infrastructure to support 10x team growth. For each example: What was working before that stopped working at scale? What bottlenecks did you encounter? How did you identify and address them? What architectural changes were necessary? How did you sequence the work to minimize disruption? What did you learn? Discuss both technical and organizational scaling—they're intertwined.

EasyTechnical

83 practiced

Define SLI, SLO, and SLA and explain how a Solutions Architect uses these when planning to scale an API platform. Provide two example SLOs suitable for an API expected to support a sustained 50,000 requests per second with 99.95% availability.

HardTechnical

68 practiced

As a Solutions Architect, propose a governance model, metrics, and incentives to systematically reduce high-impact technical debt while preserving feature velocity during a period of rapid growth. Explain how you'd identify debt that most affects scaling, how to allocate time, and how to measure progress.

MediumTechnical

72 practiced

You are migrating a synchronous monolith where a key transaction flows synchronously through multiple modules and shows high end-to-end latency spikes. Describe a refactor approach to reduce latency, considering async processing, event-driven decoupling, compensating actions, and request fibers such as idempotency and retries.

HardSystem Design

72 practiced

Design a migration plan to replace a stateful session store used by millions with a stateless token-based approach (JWT or similar) while preserving existing sessions and minimizing user disruption. Explain token issuance, session invalidation, transitional strategies, and how you'd roll back if needed.

EasyTechnical

89 practiced

When evaluating managed third-party services (e.g., message queue, CDN, auth service) as part of a scaling plan, what decision criteria and trade-offs should a Solutions Architect document? Include considerations about SLAs, limits, multi-region support, portability, cost, and operational overhead.

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