How do you assess database system stability?
Company: Bytedance
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
You are responsible for a production database (or database platform) used by multiple services.
How would you determine whether the database system is "stable"?
Include:
- What reliability/performance indicators you would track (SLIs/SLOs)
- Monitoring/alerting and incident response
- Capacity planning and scaling signals
- Data safety (backups, replication, recovery)
- How you would validate stability over time (testing, game days, postmortems)
Quick Answer: This question evaluates competency in operational database stability, including monitoring and SLIs/SLOs, alerting and incident response, capacity planning and scaling signals, and data safety measures such as backups, replication, and recovery.