Learn how to design robust systems that can handle high traffic volumes, balance loads effectively, and maintain reliability even during failures.
When discussing traffic management and reliability in your interview, be sure to address these key points:
Explain how your traffic management approach supports both vertical and horizontal scaling. Discuss how load balancers, API gateways, and service discovery enable seamless scaling without client awareness or downtime.
Clearly articulate your system's failure modes and how they're addressed. Explain circuit breakers, retries, and fallbacks in the context of your specific design, showing how partial failures don't cascade to total system outage.
Demonstrate awareness of protecting finite resources using rate limiting, bulkheads, and throttling. Explain how your design prevents resource exhaustion during traffic spikes or partial outages.
Discuss how your system detects failures through health checks and monitoring, and the automated recovery mechanisms that restore service. Explain how observability is built into the design to quickly identify and address issues.