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hardDevOps Engineer interview question

Your company wants to run a critical service active-active in two cloud regions. What are the main DevOps challenges and how would you handle them?

What the interviewer wants to hear

  • Data replication and consistency is the hardest part
  • Global traffic routing and failover with health checks
  • Deploy region by region, never both at once
  • Identical infrastructure through IaC; avoid drift
  • Test failover regularly; capacity for one region to take all load

Model answer

The hardest part is data. I would work with developers to decide which data needs strong consistency and which can be eventually consistent, and pick a database that supports multi-region writes or route writes for each record to a home region to avoid conflicts. For traffic, a global load balancer or latency-based DNS with health checks sends users to the nearest healthy region. Both regions are built from the same IaC modules so they stay identical. Releases go region by region, with a bake time and automatic rollback, so one bad change cannot take down both. Each region must have enough capacity, or fast autoscaling, to take all traffic if the other fails. Most importantly, we practise failover with regular game days, because untested failover usually fails when you need it. Cost and cross-region data transfer also need tracking.

Can you answer it under time pressure?

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

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