Scale-in terminates active requests
After the morning peak passes, your autoscaler scales the fleet in from 50 to 20 instances to save cost. Right at each scale-in step you get a brief burst of 502s and a spike in failed requests, then it's clean again — the bursts line up exactly with terminations in the scaling event log. Long-running requests (some take 20–30s) on terminating instances are getting cut off mid-flight. The instances are stateless. Recent context: a platform upgrade last week shortened the default termination grace period. How do you triage and fix?
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 25 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.