DevOps Take Home Assignment

Below is a take-home assignment before the interview for the position.

Situation

Money Bank Inc. recently discovered that Cryptocurrency is a thing and wants to take advantage of Cloud-native practices to build a system for collecting Bitcoins. As the DevOps Engineer on the project, your task is to deploy and improve the prototype.

Testers have noticed the following issues:

• The application takes a very long time to start even though the developer team says that it starts almost instantly.
• If the application restarts, we lose all our Bitcoins.
• Firefox and Chrome both show a warning saying that the site is insecure.

Your objectives are:

• Resolve the slow startup issue.
• Store the bitcoins counter in any database (e.g. PostgreSQL, Redis) and increase the number of backend replicas above 1.
• Make the application accessible using TLS (you can self-sign a certificate).

Tips

• We are looking for the most Cloud-native design within reason. If the best solution takes too much time, take note of what you would have done and go with a simpler solution that works.
• If you can't complete the tasks, think about how you would. Allowing the interviewer to understand your thought process is more important than completing the assignment.

Prerequisites

• Docker
• Minikube
• Kubectl
• Skaffold

Starting Minikube

minikube start --driver=docker
minikube addons enable ingress
kubectl create namespace devops-2025

minikube ip # usually outputs 192.168.49.2

If minikube ip outputs a different result, make sure to edit backend/k8s/ingress.yaml and frontend/k8s/ingress.yaml to contain the actual IP.

Starting the backend

Since a bulk of the work will take place here, the backend is written in multiple languages. Choose the one you are most comfortable with.

Go

cd backend/
skaffold run

Python

cd backend/
skaffold run -p python

Java

cd backend/
skaffold run -p java

Starting the frontend

cd frontend/
skaffold run

After a minute or two, the application should be accessible via your web browser at http://bitcoin.127.0.0.1.nip.io.