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Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) - Interview Questions
How do you approach capacity planning?
Capacity planning involves determining the resources required to meet current and future demand for your system. It helps ensure that your infrastructure can handle the anticipated workload without performance degradation or service disruptions. Here's an approach to capacity planning:

1. Understand the System : Gain a thorough understanding of your system's architecture, components, and dependencies. Identify the critical resources that impact performance, such as CPU, memory, storage, network bandwidth, and database connections.

2. Define Performance Goals : Establish clear performance goals and metrics for your system, such as response time, throughput, and concurrency. Determine the acceptable performance thresholds and service level objectives (SLOs) for your system.

3. Collect and Analyze Historical Data : Gather historical data on resource utilization, performance metrics, and workload patterns. Analyze this data to identify usage patterns, peak loads, and growth trends. Use this information to identify seasonal variations, recurring patterns, and areas of resource contention.

4. Forecast Future Workload : Use the historical data and knowledge of upcoming changes (e.g., new features, marketing campaigns, expected user growth) to forecast future workload. Consider factors such as user traffic, transaction volumes, data growth, and system usage patterns. Account for expected changes in usage patterns, potential spikes, and growth over the planning horizon.
5. Estimate Resource Requirements : Based on the workload forecast, estimate the resources needed to handle the anticipated demand. Consider both vertical scaling (increasing the capacity of existing resources) and horizontal scaling (adding more resources or nodes).

6. Perform Capacity Testing : Conduct capacity testing to validate your resource estimates and assess system performance under realistic conditions. Simulate the anticipated workload to measure the system's response and identify any performance bottlenecks or limitations. Use the results to refine your capacity planning estimates and identify potential areas for optimization.

7. Monitor and Analyze in Production : Continuously monitor your system in production to gather real-time data on resource utilization, performance metrics, and user behavior. Leverage monitoring tools and techniques to identify any deviations from expected patterns, resource constraints, or performance issues. Analyze this data to detect trends, adjust capacity planning estimates, and optimize resource allocation.

8. Plan for Scalability and Redundancy : Consider scalability and redundancy in your capacity planning. Account for future growth by designing your system to scale horizontally or vertically. Implement load balancing, caching, distributed architectures, and other techniques to handle increased demand and ensure high availability.

9. Review and Iterate : Regularly review and iterate on your capacity planning approach. Evaluate the accuracy of your forecasts and resource estimates. Learn from past experiences and make adjustments to your planning methodology based on observed performance, changes in workload patterns, or evolving business requirements.
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