Infrastructure Fundamentals Questions

Foundational infrastructure and system components that underpin modern application architectures. Topics include relational and non relational database trade offs, application programming interfaces such as representational state transfer and remote procedure call frameworks, caching layers including Redis and Memcached, load balancers and their layer four and layer seven behaviors, message queues and asynchronous processing patterns, and containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. Candidates should understand each component's purpose, how components interact in an end to end data flow, common failure modes and mitigation strategies, and operational concerns including deployment and rollback strategies, health checks, monitoring, logging, metrics and alerting. Important technical trade offs to reason about include latency and throughput implications, scalability patterns, consistency and durability properties, delivery semantics and idempotency, backpressure and retry strategies, dead letter queues, caching patterns and invalidation, and capacity planning and cost considerations. Interview questions typically probe component selection for given requirements, design choices to improve reliability and maintainability, and how these components fit together in real architectures.