AdvancedScenario
15 min
Cloud Provider Outage
CloudReliabilityIncident Response
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Interview Question
Your cloud provider reports an ongoing outage in one region, affecting your services. How do you respond?
Key Points to Cover
- Verify scope of outage with provider status/metrics
- Failover to healthy regions if multi-region setup exists
- Communicate with stakeholders and update status page
- Reduce blast radius by disabling impacted features
- Perform postmortem and resilience improvements
Evaluation Rubric
Confirms outage impact clearly30% weight
Executes failover or feature disablement30% weight
Communicates status effectively20% weight
Plans for long-term resilience20% weight
Hints
- 💡Always prepare for regional outages.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- ⚠️Relying solely on the cloud provider's status page without independent verification of service impact.
- ⚠️Delaying or failing to initiate failover procedures in a multi-region setup.
- ⚠️Under-communicating or providing infrequent, vague updates to stakeholders.
- ⚠️Not actively engaging with the cloud provider's support for detailed information or escalation.
- ⚠️Skipping or conducting a superficial post-incident review, missing opportunities for improvement.
Potential Follow-up Questions
- ❓How do you design for cross-region failover?
- ❓What about DNS-based routing?
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