Cloud Engineer interview question · Most asked
How do you make a workload resilient to an availability zone failure?
Summary
Deploy every component in the request path across zones (including NAT gateways, caches, brokers), pre-provision enough capacity in the remaining zones to absorb the loss without launching anything (static stability), use managed multi-AZ services, keep traffic zone-aware, and practise zonal shifts and failure game days.
Longer Answer
Hidden singletons (one NAT gateway, one Redis instance, a cron server) are the usual weak point.
Key Points
- Multi-AZ for every component.
- Static stability: pre-provisioned capacity.
- Managed HA services.
- Practise zone failures.
Deep dive: Cloud Engineering in Production: The Zone Outage We Didn't Survive
Explanation
What interviewers look for
Static stability and hidden dependencies.
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