Cloud Engineer interview question · Most asked
What should you design for when using serverless functions?
Summary
Statelessness, idempotency (events can be delivered more than once), timeouts and payload limits, cold starts (small packages, initialisation outside the handler), concurrency limits and their effect on downstream systems such as databases, and observability with structured logs and tracing.
Longer Answer
Use queues to buffer and control concurrency, reserved concurrency for critical functions, and proxies (RDS Proxy) or HTTP-based data APIs for relational databases.
Key Points
- Stateless and idempotent.
- Limits and cold starts.
- Concurrency vs downstream capacity.
- Observability built in.
Explanation
What interviewers look for
Awareness of operational characteristics, not just 'no servers'.
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