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Movable Ink SRE Take-Home Assignment

Overview

This take-home assignment is designed to evaluate your Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and software development skills. You will be working with a bare-bones service that interacts with Movable Ink's GeoIP API to retrieve geographical information for IP addresses.

Assignment Details

Time Limit

  • You have 5 days to complete this assignment from the time you receive it.

Getting Started

  1. Choose one of the following template repositories in your preferred language:

  2. You will receive from Movable Ink:

    • A production API token for the Movable Ink GeoIP API
    • The production URL for the Movable Ink GeoIP API
    • A test_ips.txt file containing 1000 IP addresses for testing

Initial Setup

  1. Clone your chosen template repository
  2. Follow the repository's README for build and installation instructions
  3. Set up the required environment variables: 
    export API_URL="<provided-movableink-geoip-url>"
export API_TOKEN="<provided-api-token>"
  4. Copy the provided test_ips.txt file to your project directory
  5. Build and start the service
  6. Run the included test script: 
    ./test-ips.sh

Assignment Goals

Primary Objective

Your main goal is to improve the service's reliability to achieve a 100% success rate (HTTP 200 status codes) when running the test-ips.sh test script against the Movable Ink GeoIP API.

Current State

  • The initial template service will show a mix of successful (200) and failed (500) responses
  • This represents a baseline implementation without any reliability engineering

Required Improvements

Using SRE and Software Engineering principles, modify the template service to maximize request success rates. Consider implementing:

  1. Reliable HTTP Request Patterns

    • Retry logic

  2. Observability

    • Metrics in Prometheus exposition format
    • Structured logging output

  3. Health Checks

    • Service health endpoints
    • Dependency health monitoring
    • Readiness/liveness checks

Evaluation Criteria

Your submission will be evaluated on:

  1. Reliability Improvements

    • Success rate improvement from baseline
    • Robustness of error handling
    • Quality of reliability patterns implemented

  2. Code Quality

    • Clean, well-organized code
    • Proper error handling
    • Good documentation

  3. Observability

    • Quality of metrics implementation
    • Usefulness of logging
    • Effectiveness of health checks

Submission Requirements

  1. Zip your completed project directory

  2. Include a detailed README or documentation that explains:

    • Your reliability improvements
    • The reasoning behind your choices
    • How to run and test your improved service
    • Any additional features or improvements you've added
    • Known limitations or areas for future improvement

  3. Submit your zip file to Movable Ink within the 5 day time limit

Tips for Success

  • Focus on reliability first - aim for that 100% success rate
  • Use industry-standard patterns and libraries
  • Document your thought process and decisions
  • Consider edge cases and failure modes
  • Test thoroughly before submission
  • Keep your code clean and maintainable

Questions?

If you have any questions about the assignment requirements or encounter technical issues, please reach out to your Movable Ink contact.