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# System prepended metadata

title: Interview - Isaac Campbell (06/27/2022)

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# Interview - Isaac Campbell (06/27/2022)

### Notes
Firstly please start with asking some Linux, k8s questions (also some of aws/azure etc) to begin with and then move onto these targeted questions. 

- Ask questions around their stack ( aws/azure or openstack or do they use baremetal provider).
 - understand if he/she has exposure to gitops, automation, scripting ( these are core for SRE, as 50% of the time troubleshoot and 50% of the the automate sstuff so those outages doesnt happen again or team gets to know before an outage happen (monitoring))

- What are some Logging/ monitoring / tracing tool you have experience working with? 
   - Were you responsible for standing up the entire stack?
      - walk us thru your monitoring /logging stack.
      - if yes, what was your pain point in standing up the stack. If you were to redo it, what would you do differently and why?
      
   - if there is one thing that you must monitoring on the platform what would it be? ( say kubernetes)

- Have you worked in chaos testing /chaos engineering?
  - if yes, explain the tools used.

- what are SLOs, SLI's and Error budgets. 
- How would you utilize your Error budget?

- Which of these 3 pillers have you worked with logging, monitoring and tracing. which one of these do you think is more important? Do you feel you need exposure on any one of the pillars? 

- How do you implement changes to the environment.

- How do you keep up with latest tools in the industry? 

- How would you troubleshoot connectivity issue between differet services. 
   - example : I see timeout / 500 errors in promtail pods. ( promtail push logs to loki)
how would you go about troubleshooting and tools you would use, walk us thru ! what would you do aftermath.

- As an SRE what is important to you? ( in ragards to cluster / platform /cloud)
  - Answer should more along the line of stability of the platform, uptime, low latencies, zero to none desired downtime. 

- What alerting systesm do you have in place ( or do you have exposure to).
- what are some alerts that you would like to be pinged on slack/MM/email or pages.


- Can you get a clearance? Yes

- Where are you located? Iowa


### Feedback for Isaac's Interview
- Overall, seemed like a good candidate that had a lot AWS experience with Terraform and EKS
- In terms of k8s, had broad knowledge within EKS such as configuring controlplanes, agents, but not actually mananging the clusters
- Experience with DataDog as a monitoring stack to monitor k8s nodes and resources within AWS
- Familiar with creating and deploying helm charts for applications
- Utilized ArgoCD and Jenkins for pipelines
- Willingness to learn and help out the team
- Experience with writing sumo logic for APM that collects metrics on the cluster
- Used Terraform Enterprise for IaC/scripting

#### Cons
- Not as familiar with underlying OS infra layer
- Little to no exposure to OpenSource / CNCF project or tools with regards to monitoring and logging stack. 
- Has basic Linux knowledge.
- Only familiar with using EKS but not any other k8s distros. ( Which means lot abstraction and less exposure to layers below eks )