Compare RDBMS vs NoSQL and containers
Company: Paradromics
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Answer the following engineering fundamentals questions:
1) Compare RDBMS and NoSQL databases: key trade-offs (schema, transactions/ACID, consistency, scaling, query flexibility), and when you would choose each.
2) Explain virtualization vs containerization: how VMs differ from containers, and what problems Docker solves.
3) What is Kubernetes used for if you already have Docker? Explain what Kubernetes adds (scheduling, service discovery, autoscaling, rollout/rollback, self-healing).
4) Why is Python often slower than C++ for CPU-bound work? List practical ways to speed up Python code and when each approach is appropriate.
Quick Answer: Evaluates mastery of data storage and scaling trade-offs (RDBMS vs NoSQL), virtualization and containerization concepts (VMs, Docker), orchestration features (Kubernetes), and language-level performance optimization (Python vs C++).