Easy everything in DevOps & Cloud, page 2
Load vs stress vs soak testing
Load tests expected traffic, stress pushes past limits to find the breaking point, soak runs sustained load for hours to expose leaks.
Golden signals for capacity planning
Monitor the four golden signals, latency, traffic, errors, and saturation, from day one, watching percentiles and saturation to forecast scaling.
Automate temporary elevated database access securely
Self-service request with approval, short-lived auto-expiring grants scoped to least privilege, and full audit logging.
Distinguishing toil from necessary ops work
Toil is manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, and scales with growth; engineering and judgment-heavy work is not toil.
Automating a recurring manual cache clear
Recognize the repetitive manual task, document the runbook, then automate it into the deploy pipeline as a post-deploy hook with monitoring.
Why blameless culture matters for reviews
Blame causes people to hide facts, so reviews miss systemic causes; blamelessness surfaces honest detail.
The 5 Whys root cause technique
Repeatedly ask why to move from symptom to systemic cause, stop at an actionable systemic fix.
Essential sections of a post-mortem
Summary, impact, timeline, root cause, lessons, and owned action items, each with a clear purpose.
Primary goal and sections of a post-mortem
Goal is organizational learning and prevention, not blame; include summary, timeline, impact, root cause, action items.
Triaging a 5xx error spike
Confirm impact and scope, declare and assign roles, check recent changes, stop the bleeding before root cause.
First steps on a p99 latency page
Confirm scope and blast radius, check recent changes and deploys, then look at dependencies and resource saturation.
Symptom-based versus cause-based alerting
Symptom alerts fire on user impact like high error rate or latency; cause alerts fire on internal conditions like high CPU. Page on symptoms, treat causes as diagnostic.
Core components of Prometheus
Server scrapes targets found via service discovery, stores samples in a local time-series database, with Alertmanager and exporters as helpers.
Essential tags for a request latency metric
Add method, route template, status code, and maybe service or region; they enable slicing while staying low-cardinality.
Structured vs unstructured logging
Unstructured logs are free-text lines; structured logs are machine-readable key-value or JSON, enabling reliable parsing, filtering, and aggregation.
The three pillars of observability
Metrics show what and when via cheap aggregates, logs give detailed per-event context, traces show where across services.
Proposing availability and latency SLIs for an auth API
Availability as the ratio of successful valid requests; latency as the fraction served under a threshold; measure at the edge from the user's view.
What is an error budget?
Error budget is one minus the SLO, the allowed unreliability; it gates feature velocity versus reliability work.
Relationship between SLI, SLO, and SLA
SLI is the measured metric, SLO is the internal target for that metric, SLA is the external contract with consequences.
What are the Four Golden Signals?
Name latency, traffic, errors, and saturation; explain each briefly; describe measuring latency as a distribution separating success from failure.
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