SRE Thailand Bootcamp

Week 19: System Design for SRE

Theme: Master system design interviews for SRE/platform engineering roles.

Learning Objectives

1. Design large-scale distributed systems (with focus on reliability)
2. Apply SRE principles in system design discussions (SLOs, redundancy, graceful degradation)
3. Practice whiteboarding system designs in 45-minute sessions
4. Prepare for "design an observability platform" and "design a CI/CD pipeline" questions

Reading Materials

• System Design Interview (Alex Xu)
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Martin Kleppmann) — Chapters 1, 6, 8, 9
• System Design Primer (GitHub)
• SRE Interview Questions (GitHub)
• Google SRE Book (re-read relevant chapters)
• ByteByteGo System Design Videos

Finger Exercises (choose 3)

1. Design a monitoring and alerting system for 10,000 microservices. Include data ingestion, storage, query, alert routing.
2. Design a CI/CD pipeline for a monorepo with 50 microservices. Include build optimization, dependency caching, deployment ordering.
3. Design a highly available Kafka platform for real-time event processing. Include partitioning strategy, consumer group design, disaster recovery.
4. Design a multi-region PostgreSQL deployment with < 1 second RPO. Include synchronous replication, failover, read replicas.
5. Design an incident management platform: alert aggregation, on-call scheduling, escalation, postmortem automation.

Mock Interview Sessions (simulate with a friend or record yourself)

• Session 1: "Design a real-time dashboard system for 100K QPS metrics" (45 min)
• Session 2: "Design a GitOps deployment system for 200 microservices across 5 environments" (45 min)
• Session 3: "Design a secrets management platform for 1000 applications" (45 min)

Time Budget