Cloud & Infrastructure Topics
Cloud platform services, infrastructure architecture, Infrastructure as Code, environment provisioning, and infrastructure operations. Covers cloud service selection, infrastructure provisioning patterns, container orchestration (Kubernetes), multi-cloud and hybrid architectures, infrastructure cost optimization, and cloud platform operations. For CI/CD pipeline and deployment automation, see DevOps & Release Engineering. For cloud security implementation, see Security Engineering & Operations. For data infrastructure design, see Data Engineering & Analytics Infrastructure.
Game Server Architecture and Deployment
Architecture and deployment patterns for online game backends including dedicated servers, authoritative server models, hosted service architectures and serverless components; regional and multiregion deployment strategies to minimize player latency; session and connection management, state synchronization, tick rate and authoritative state design; load balancing, sharding and matchmaking strategies; scaling techniques including autoscaling, predictive scaling and warm pools; graceful shutdown, handoff and reconnection handling to preserve player experience; networking considerations such as UDP versus TCP, NAT traversal and rate limiting; deployment, CI CD and observability practices for game services, and trade offs between latency, consistency, cost and operational complexity.
Load Balancing and Horizontal Scaling
Covers principles and mechanisms for distributing traffic and scaling services horizontally. Includes load balancing algorithms such as round robin, least connections, and consistent hashing; health checks, connection draining, and sticky sessions; and session management strategies for stateless and stateful services. Explains when to scale horizontally versus vertically, capacity planning, and trade offs of each approach. Also includes infrastructure level autoscaling concepts such as auto scaling groups, launch templates, target tracking and step scaling policies, and how load balancers and autoscaling interact to absorb traffic spikes. Reviews different load balancer types and selection criteria, integration with service discovery, and operational concerns for maintaining availability and performance at scale.
Network Performance and Latency Optimization
Network level performance considerations including bandwidth, latency, jitter, packet loss, quality of service, congestion management, and capacity planning. Techniques covered include request batching, compression, connection pooling, content delivery networks, edge caching, and transport level tuning. Candidates should also discuss measurement and monitoring of network metrics, trade offs for global user bases, and strategies to optimize tail latency for latency sensitive services.