Reliability engineering + Estimation and capacity planning
Comes up in: Backend design, Debugging
This concept is being written. It gets the full five steps — explanation, predict, interview angle, practice with tests, and review cards. Here is exactly what it will cover, so you can study it elsewhere in the meantime.
What it covers
- SLIs, SLOs, error budgets (Google SRE book)
- timeouts, retries with backoff, idempotency, circuit breakers, bulkheads
- graceful degradation
- incident response and postmortems
- latency numbers every engineer should know (dated source)
- QPS, storage and bandwidth estimates
- peak vs average
Words you will know
What you will practise
- write an SLO for a checkout API
- estimate storage for a chat app
Interview questions this answers
- What are SLIs, SLOs and error budgets?
- How do retries cause outages, and how do you prevent that?
- Estimate the storage needed for 10 million daily messages.