# SpotQA SRE/DevOps Challenge ## Introduction Welcome to the challenge for joining SpotQA's product team. By submitting a solution to the challenge you will be evaluated for a position as a SRE/DevOps engineer at SpotQA. The challenge is split into two parts: - The first is about your knowledge of cloud computing providers and architectures; - and the second is a short practical task related to containers. ## Answering guideline For each challenge, please add your answer/solution(s) to this repository. Please use this repository as you see fit; if you wish to commit other notes as you work feel free to do so. If you're unable to answer a question, please note what you considered in place of an answer. There is no right answer for either of the exercises, so your answers will be judged on the strength of the knowledge and skills you present. We expect that the exercises shouldn't take more than a few hours, so do not feel obligated to invest a lot of time into the challenge. ## Part 1 In this part of the challenge, we will describe our software architecture below. Please look at the software we use and make a recommendation for the components that you would select to deploy it on a cloud provider of your choosing (e.g., AWS, GCP). Note - we don't need any detailed config files etc., just a break-down of the different components you would select and what they are for. After describing your architecture, please discuss it in terms of the questions below: * How would you scale the architecture? * What challenges do you foresee with scaling different components, and how would you approach resolving them at infrastructure level? * What could fail in the architecture and what effect might that have? * How would you continuously (and safely) deploy the components? * How would you monitor your architecture? * How would you structure a fault-tolerance model for the architecture? * How could we test the architecture's failure tolerance? ### The software The software is built from several services. Some services communicate with each other, and some depend on an SQL database. The components are as follows: * **Frontend** is a single-page application that includes an API client that issues requests to the **Webserver** from the user's browser. * **Webserver** provides a web API that **Frontend** uses. It needs an SQL database and sends job requests to the **Controller**. * **Controller** manages jobs that are currently running, and starts jobs when it receives a request from a **Webserver** and sends tasks to be done by **Workers**. Controllers use the database to save state. * **Scheduler** receives tasks from **Controller** and sends them to a **Dispatcher**. * **Dispatcher** provides an endpoint that one or more **Worker** connects to to receive Tasks. **Dispatchers** send task results back to **Controllers** * **Workers** connect to a **Dispatcher** and process tasks sent to them. > Note: this architecture has been simplified specifically for the purpose of this challenge, and is not an exact representation of our internal architecture. ## Part 2 In the directory named `Part2` there is a small Dockerfile and a statically linked binary. Please build the container, and answer the following questions: * What does the container do? * What does the service do? * Is there anything else you can find about the container/service? * How would you improve performance of the service? * Can you give an example of how to improve performance using containers (just using docker compose)? ## Submission and next steps ... Once you have completed the challenge (as outlined in the section "Answering guideline"), please notify us of your completion via email and one of the product team's engineers will clone the repository and evaluates the submitted solution. Following this, we may schedule a call during which we can go through your solution(s), and to expand further on them.
