Questions and coding challenges

In this section, we cover 13 questions and coding challenges that represent must-knows in junior/middle-level scalability interviews. Let's begin!

Coding challenge 1 – Scaling types

Problem: What do scaling up and scaling out mean?

Solution: Scaling up (or vertical scaling) is achieved by adding more resources to an existing system to achieve better performance and successfully face a greater workload. By resources, we can understand more storage, more memory, more network, more threads, more connections, more powerful hosts, more caching, and so on. Once the new resources are added, the application should be capable of respecting the SLAs. Today, scaling up in the cloud is very efficient and fast. Clouds such as AWS, Azure, Oracle, Heroku, Google Cloud, and so on can automatically allocate more resources based on the threshold plan in just a couple of minutes. When the traffic decreases, AWS can disable these extra resources. This...