Airlift Technologies

DevOps & Cloud - Case Study

General Instructions on the Recruitment Process:

Airlift’s culture is built around a few core values that
define the behaviors and attitudes that we seek in
teammates:

● Hyper bias to action -- we seek to partner with true

doers
● Be an obsessive learner -- we love
candidates who are eager to learn and grow ●
Move at lightning speed -- we view velocity as
our greatest advantage

As you go through the recruitment process, our suggestion

is to incorporate the above value system into your
approach. Airlift leans on and reads heavily into the
case study -- we view the effort and thoughtfulness of
the response as a proxy for what we can expect from
the candidate on the team.
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Specific Problems for the Case Study:

1. A company has several S3 buckets in their AWS
account. On creating a new bucket, the DevOps
team member with full admin. access is still shown
an error about the buckets’ limit reached. Why is
this error occurring and how can this be resolved?

2. A DevOps intern sets up a Free-Tier AWS

account. He buys a domain from GoDaddy and
imports it into Route53. He only uses t2.micro for a
few hours, an application load balancer, RDS
database and S3 bucket all which come under Free-
Tier. Even his data storage and transfer limit is under
Free-Tier limits. Despite this, he received a $0.50 bill
at the end of the month. Please explain why he was
charged and for what service?

3. A company needs to shift their MongoDB server

hosted on MLab to AWS. The company's Software
Architect asks you to suggest how to use
MongoDB on AWS. You recommend him
DynamoDB but on reading the documentation,
Software Architect suggests DynamoDB would
require several lines of code changes because the
querying syntax is completely different from
MongoDB and that there is no time for these
changes so he needs a solution that requires bare-
minimum code changes. Please suggest two other
options of how you could host MongoDB on AWS.
Pls suggest any managed solutions available for it
on AWS.

4. While browsing a freelance website you see a paid

task where the client mentioned that his website
used 6GB ram out of 8GB ram on his EC2
instance. He is using 4 core CPU
and the CPU usage graphs shared by him shows
that CPU in the past 1 month has never crossed
3% usage. He is looking for a cheaper alternative
on AWS. What would you assume his current
instance type is? Which instance would you
suggest to him? How much cost savings would
he approximately have? Pls explain your logic
and calculations.

5. You just joined a new company and the finance team

cannot understand why they are getting an AWS
bill every month when all the 10 servers in their
AWS account are in a stopped state. They do not
have any other AWS Sub Accounts or Services
running. Their account only had 10 EC2 servers
and you confirmed on the EC2 console that all of
them are stopped. Being an awesome DevOps
support engineer, how would you immediately
identify the cause of this bill without looking at the
billing console?

6. You are working on making a presentable

CloudWatch Dashboard over the weekend and
 show your boss about how all metrics are visible on
the CloudWatch Dashboard. Your boss is
impressed. He gets your team a new PS4 with a 55
inch TCL TV. Since you do not intend to play PS4
all day, you consider using the chrome browser in
the TCL TV to open CloudWatch Dashboard on the
big screen. However, you do not want to sign-in to
the AWS account on your TV because it is not safe.
You also do not want to make a user with
CloudWatch permissions because you would need
to login using that User-ID as well. You need to find
a way to display the CloudWatch dashboard on the
Chrome browser without signing in. How do you
display the dashboard you made on CloudWatch on
the TV?

7. Your university teacher is interested in giving an

assignment to his students around "serverless"
technologies on AWS as he has read several posts
about this on LinkedIn. He assigns you an
assignment by giving you a CSV file with 10,000
records of a database and tells you to use a
server-less AWS service to query the database.
You read about lambda and ask your professor if
lambda would be the right choice, however, he
declines because he wants to type SQL statements
on the screen and query S3 data without designing
any application or software. Unlike every other
student, rather than searching on Google, you look
for AWS Console to see if you find a relevant
service. What would your answer be? Which
service would help you do the task you are
assigned?

8. Your developers are using an EC2 instance and to

make the application architecture decoupled, they
have also started using AWS Simple Queue
Service - FIFO queues for this purpose. The AWS
NodeJS tutorial that they referred to requires an
AWS Access KeyId and Secret Access Key.
Naturally with you being the AWS Administrator,
they turn to you for keys. What do you do
according to AWS recommended best practises?

9. Your company sells stock photos for which a cost

effective yet speedy method is required to
 generate thumbnails for all the high resolution
images stored in the S3 bucket. You suggested
resizing images in the HTML and CSS code to
thumbnails, but the FrontEnd Programmer
suggests that this would lower the website
speed score on
GTmetrix. Moreover the images are at least 10MB in size
so for a page that has 100 images, the customers would
be downloading 1GB of images just for thumbnails! He
asks you for a simple, yet cost effective-solution on the
cloud. What solution would you suggest? Which S3
storage type would you use for the generated thumbnails
and why?
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In answering the above, you can make assumptions and

base your working and hypotheses on these. Please state
any assumptions that you may be making.

We recommend that candidates conduct some research

before authoring their solutions. Neither in this case study
nor on the job would we expect you to be alone in tackling
problems. We are not necessarily looking for know-it-alls;
instead, we are looking for learn-it-alls, or candidates who
are exceptionally talented in figuring things out. We are
seeking responses that show effort and thoughtfulness.

If you have any questions, please reach out to our Cloud

Architect at [email protected].