Confirm the scope of the degradation and whether failing over is genuinely faster than waiting, because failover is not free and partial outages sometimes recover sooner. Get an explicit decision from an owner, then follow the runbook: promote the replica accepting the known data loss, shift traffic at the DNS or routing layer, verify with real requests, and communicate. Plan failback deliberately later, once the primary is stable.
Why interviewers ask this
This tests decision making rather than mechanics. The interviewer wants to hear that failover is a judgment call with a cost, that someone must own the decision, and that you know the data loss implication of promoting an asynchronous replica. They also listen for failback, which teams routinely forget, and for the possibility that the provider control plane you need is itself degraded.
How to structure your answer
- Assess scope and decide whether failover beats waiting.
- Name the decision owner and the data loss you are accepting.
- Execute the runbook steps in order, verifying as you go.
- Communicate, then plan failback as its own controlled event.
Example answer
The first thing is that failing over is a decision, not a reflex. I want to know the scope, whether it is one service or the whole region, and what the provider is saying, because if the estimate is fifteen minutes then a failover that takes thirty and loses data is the worse option. So I get that assessment to the incident commander or the business owner and they make the call explicitly, because nobody should be accepting data loss unilaterally at three in the morning. Once the call is made, I follow the runbook rather than improvising. Promote the replica in the secondary region, knowing we are accepting whatever replication lag existed at the moment of failure, and I write that number down for the reconciliation afterwards. Shift traffic at the routing layer, and here I check that health checks and record lifetimes are short enough to move quickly, because a long cached record makes this take far longer than expected. Then verify with real requests rather than a dashboard. And failback is its own planned change during business hours, never a rushed second failover.
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See how it worksFollow-up questions to expect
- How do you reconcile writes that were lost in the failover?
- What if the routing control plane is also affected by the outage?
- How do you decide when it is safe to fail back?
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