This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of public cloud architecture, including compute models (virtual machines, containers, serverless), storage and networking building blocks, testing and deployment strategies, and trade-offs around portability and vendor lock-in within the System Design domain.
Assume you are designing a new stateless HTTP microservice that exposes REST or gRPC endpoints. It will have spiky traffic (for example, a 10x burst during peak hours), aims for 99.9 percent availability, p95 latency under 150 ms, and should be easy to operate by a small team. If your answer depends on different constraints, state how the choice would change.
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