The Busy Machine Fallacy: Why Your CPU Alerts Are Lying to You

access_time 2025-09-19T04:56:33.664Z face Benito J D
The Busy Machine Fallacy: Why Your CPU Alerts Are Lying to You Junior/Mid Engineer Asked at: Amazon, Meta, Google, Startups Q: Write a Python script to check CPU usage, and if it’s above 80%, print an alert. Why this matters: This question is a smoke test for your operational maturity. It's not abou...

Beyond the Acronyms: How SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs Create Engineering Freedom

access_time 2025-09-19T03:31:08.722Z face Benito J D
Beyond the Acronyms: How SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs Create Engineering Freedom Mid/Senior Engineer Asked at: Google, FAANG, Cloud-Native Startups Q: Explain the difference between SLA, SLO, and SLI. How would you use them to design an alerting strategy that isn't noisy, incorporating the concept of an err...

From Chaos to Control: A Framework for Debugging Cascading Failures

access_time 2025-09-19T03:28:03.194Z face Benito J D
From Chaos to Control: A Framework for Debugging Cascading Failures Senior/Staff Engineer Asked at: FAANG, Stripe, Cloudflare, Datadog Q: Walk me through how you’d debug a production incident where you see a high CPU spike on your service, the primary database disk is rapidly filling up, database qu...

Debugging the Domino Effect: From CPU Spike to API Timeout

access_time 2025-09-19T03:18:02.372Z face Benito J D
Debugging the Domino Effect: From CPU Spike to API Timeout Senior/Staff Engineer Asked at: Netflix, Uber, Stripe, AWS Q: Walk me through how you’d debug a cascading failure: you get an alert for a high CPU spike on a service. As you investigate, you see disk usage climbing, database latency increasi...

Will AI Replace SREs? The Question Itself Is Obsolete

access_time 2025-09-18T18:46:01.325Z face Benito J D
Will AI Replace SREs? The Question Itself Is Obsolete Principal Engineer Asked at: Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI Q: How do you see the role of a Site Reliability Engineer evolving in the age of AI? Will AI automate the job away? Why this matters: This isn't a question about the future; it's a questio...