YOUR BRIEF
What to work through
Work through a cloud IDE as a spoken system design interview. Start by clarifying the scope, sketch a working design and explain the trade-offs behind your choices.
- Create a workspace and open it in the browser
- Edit the project’s files
- Use a terminal, and build and run code inside the workspace
- Stop a workspace and resume it later with its files intact
BEFORE YOU START
Constraints to discuss
- Each tenant’s code is isolated from every other tenant and from the platform
- Workspace files survive a restart or the loss of a host
- Idle workspaces give their compute back
- Starting or resuming a workspace is quick
Need a starting point?
Watch for these common gaps as you prepare:
- Plain containers on a shared kernel with no word on the risk
- Workspace files only on the host’s local disk
- No fencing, so one workspace can run on two hosts
- Designing the editor screen instead of the platform behind it
- No idle shutdown, so compute grows with every workspace ever opened
Why this question is in the collection
These sources connect the problem to company interview reports or preparation guides. They do not guarantee what a company will ask you.