System Design and Operations Deep-Dive
Context: You are interviewing for a Software Engineer role with a focus on system design and engineering. Provide concise, design-oriented answers with justifications and operational guardrails.
1) Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and CI/CD for Bare Metal and Kubernetes
Describe a reference design to provision and update bare-metal servers and Kubernetes clusters via CI/CD. Address:
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Secrets management (bootstrapping, in-cluster, and at-rest)
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Idempotency and safe rollouts
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Drift detection and policy enforcement
2) Kubernetes Control Plane and Workload Management
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Explain Kubernetes’ reconciliation loop and how controllers converge desired vs. observed state.
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Outline strategies for workload management:
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Scheduling primitives (affinity/anti-affinity, taints/tolerations, topology spread)
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Resource requests/limits and LimitRanges
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ResourceQuotas and fair-share
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Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) and Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA)
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Cluster Autoscaler (CA)
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Multi-tenancy models and recommended guardrails
3) Edge Firmware/Fleet Management
Design and operate a solution for edge devices that supports:
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Secure OTA updates (signing, A/B, deltas)
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Staged rollouts and canarying
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Automatic rollback and break-glass procedures
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Device identity, health telemetry, and fleet observability
4) IP Routing and Troubleshooting
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Explain routing tables and longest-prefix match. Contrast static vs. dynamic routing.
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Troubleshoot blackholes and asymmetric routing; list diagnostic steps and mitigations.
5) Homelab
Share a practical homelab setup that demonstrates your skills across automation, Kubernetes, networking, observability, and security. Explain what it proves about your capabilities.