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Interview Question
Explain the trade-offs of building applications on a serverless architecture. When is it a good fit, and when is it not?
Key Points to Cover
- Pros: auto-scaling, reduced ops burden, cost efficiency for bursty workloads
- Cons: cold starts, limited execution time, vendor lock-in
- Good fit: event-driven workloads, APIs, lightweight pipelines
- Not fit: long-running compute, heavy networking, low-latency workloads
Evaluation Rubric
Explains advantages clearly30% weight
Explains limitations clearly30% weight
Provides context for good/bad fits20% weight
Balances trade-offs effectively20% weight
Hints
- 💡AWS Lambda, GCP Cloud Functions, Azure Functions.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- ⚠️Underestimating cold start latency for user-facing applications.
- ⚠️Exceeding execution time limits for compute-intensive tasks.
- ⚠️Ignoring the complexities of distributed tracing and debugging.
- ⚠️Overlooking vendor lock-in implications during the initial design phase.
- ⚠️Failing to implement proper security measures for event sources and function permissions.
Potential Follow-up Questions
- ❓How do you mitigate cold starts?
- ❓How do you test serverless locally?
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