Principal Distributed Systems Engineer

How do you decide between round-robin and least-connections load balancing for a given service?

I use round-robin when requests are roughly uniform in processing time, and least-connections when request duration varies significantly, since round-robin can overload a server handling several slow requests while it keeps receiving new ones at the same rate as faster servers.

What's your process for diagnosing intermittent network latency that only occurs under peak load?

I check for saturation on specific links or interfaces during the peak window using monitoring data, rather than testing during off-peak hours when the issue won't reproduce. I also look at whether the latency correlates with a specific service or is spread across the network, which points to either an application issue or a capacity issue.

How do you approach capacity planning for network infrastructure that needs to support future growth?

I project growth based on historical trend data combined with known upcoming initiatives, and I build in headroom above the projection since infrastructure upgrades often have long lead times. I avoid provisioning purely for current load, since that leaves no margin for unexpected spikes or faster-than-projected growth.

What steps do you take to ensure a load balancer configuration change doesn't cause an outage during deployment?

I test the configuration change in a staging environment that mirrors production traffic patterns first, and I roll out changes gradually, shifting a small percentage of traffic before a full cutover. I also keep the previous configuration ready to roll back to quickly if something unexpected happens.