Scaling online coding assessment platforms is challenging because of the unpredictable and dynamic nature of the load. Thousands of candidates may log in simultaneously when an exam starts, causing sudden spikes that test the limits of traditional auto-scaling methods.
Our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team recently tackled this challenge head-on, working closely with the development team to build a custom scaling solution that not only ensured system reliability and performance but also introduced significant cost efficiencies.
While SRE is often discussed in terms of improving system reliability through well-defined SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs, our experience shows that the role of SRE extends far beyond those principles.
(more…)