Diagnose overloaded Kubernetes cluster
Company: Perplexity
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Technical Screen
A Kubernetes-based microservices system is experiencing overload (e.g., high tail latency, request timeouts, and autoscaling thrash). How would you debug and mitigate it end-to-end? Specify the metrics, logs, and traces you would examine; the tools and commands you would use; the hypotheses you would test; and your immediate mitigations versus longer-term fixes.
Overview: This question evaluates competency in diagnosing and mitigating production overloads in Kubernetes-based microservice architectures, emphasizing observability, autoscaling behavior, resource constraints, and incident-response reasoning.