Compare cloud compute; design Kubernetes security and CI/CD
Company: Salesforce
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Compare compute models in public clouds (VMs, containers, serverless) and explain when you would choose each on GCP versus AWS. Describe strategies for testing cloud services (unit, integration, load, chaos) in these environments. Deep-dive into Kubernetes: explain the control plane versus worker nodes, list core components on each, and walk through kubectl commands to deploy, scale, roll back, and debug a service. Discuss data security for a multi-tenant cluster (RBAC, network policies, secrets management, encryption in transit/at rest). Finally, design a CI/CD pipeline that builds, tests, scans, and deploys containerized services to GKE with rollbacks and canary releases.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's competency in cloud compute model selection, testing strategies, Kubernetes architecture and operational commands, multi-tenant data security, and CI/CD pipeline design including rollbacks and canary releases.