Q1
Walk me through how you would design a monitoring and alerting strategy for a microservices architecture running on Kubernetes. What metrics would you prioritize, and what tools would you use?
Why they ask this:* SREs must understand observability at scale. This reveals knowledge of Kubernetes, metrics selection, and practical tool experience (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.).
Q2
Describe your experience with Infrastructure as Code. How have you used tools like Terraform or CloudFormation to manage cloud resources, and how do you handle state management and drift detection?
Why they ask this:* IaC is fundamental to modern SRE work. This tests understanding of reproducibility, version control, and preventing configuration drift in production environments.
Q3
Explain how you would troubleshoot high latency in a distributed system. Walk me through your debugging methodology and what observability data you'd examine first.
Why they ask this:* SREs must diagnose production issues systematically. This assesses root cause analysis skills, understanding of distributed tracing, and knowledge of common latency culprits.
Q4
How do you approach capacity planning and scaling decisions for cloud infrastructure? What metrics and forecasting methods would you use?