Predictable traffic spike causes 503s
A ticketing service has a known traffic pattern: every weekday at exactly 12:00 a popular daily on-sale opens and traffic spikes 5x within 60 seconds. Every day at 12:00 you get a 3-4 minute window of elevated p99 and some 503s, then it settles. Dashboards show CPU saturating right at 12:00, the HPA scaling up but new pods only becoming ready ~2-3 minutes later (image pull + app warmup), and the load balancer 503ing while pods are unready. No bug, no bad deploy — it's the same every day. Triage and propose durable mitigations.
What a strong answer looks like
Stop the bleeding first (mitigate), then form hypotheses from real signals. Separate root cause from symptom, communicate status as you go, and close with what prevents a repeat.
0:00 of about 30 min
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.