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mediumCloud Engineer interview question

You are on call and p99 latency for a cloud API jumps from 200 ms to 3 seconds. Walk through how you investigate and handle it.

What the interviewer wants to hear

  • Acknowledge, assess user impact and communicate status
  • Check recent changes such as deploys, config or infrastructure
  • Narrow down with metrics and traces: which endpoint, AZ, or dependency
  • Look at saturation: CPU, memory, connections, throttling, queue depth
  • Mitigate first with rollback, scaling or failover, then find the root cause
  • Blameless postmortem with follow-up actions

Model answer

I acknowledge the page, check how many users are affected, and open an incident channel so others know I am on it. The first question is what changed: a deploy, a config flag, a scaling event, or a provider issue on the status page. Then I narrow the scope using dashboards and traces: is it all endpoints or one, all AZs or one, and which dependency is slow, such as the database, a cache or an external API. I look at saturation signals like CPU, memory, connection pools, database load, throttling errors and queue depth. My priority is to mitigate before fully understanding, so if a deploy lines up with the spike I roll it back, or I scale out or fail over if capacity is the issue. Once stable, I find the root cause and run a blameless postmortem with concrete follow-up actions.

Can you answer it under time pressure?

Take a timed medium round and get scored on every answer.

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