platform-takehome-assessment

Take home assessment for Platform Engineer candidates.

What this document is for

You should have received a PDF document with a take home assignment. This README document is intended only to help you set up the environment and get started with this project.

Please reach out to your recruiter if you have any questions!

Introduction

This repository contains a toy application which implements a rudimentary user behavior tracking API. In the real world, we use third party tools like Segment, Amplitude, Mixpanel, etc. for this functionality. For this exercise, though, we imagine that we need to implement this ourselves.

Note that, for simplification of the exercise, we are not using a real database. The application simply prints an insert statement to the terminal.

This API is implemented as an AWS Serverless application using the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM). The underlying AWS products which implement the API (if we were to actually deploy it) are AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway.

System requirements

We have tested on Linux and Mac. If you use Windows, we advise to use a Linux VM to complete the exercise. If you're not sure how to do this, we suggest to start with VirtualBox.

Installation

First, install Docker, git, and curl (if you don't already have them installed). See Docker's installation docs, and use your OS package manager to install curl and git.

After you have Docker, git, and curl installed, install AWS SAM CLI tool.

Linux

Download the AWS SAM CLI zip file. From the location where this file is (probably ~/Downloads), then you can run:

unzip aws-sam-cli-linux-x86_64.zip -d sam-installation
sudo ./sam-installation/install

Mac

You will need to install homebrew if you don't already have it. Follow the homebrew installation instructions.

Then you can run:

brew tap aws/tap
brew install aws-sam-cli

Check that SAM CLI is working

sam --version

If you see SAM CLI, version 1.22.0 (or similar), it works! 🎉

If you have some issues, check the AWS SAM documentation, or reach out to your recruiter if you're really stuck.

Build, run, test the API

Warning: you need to re-build the application each time you make changes. AWS SAM unfortunately does not currently support hot reloading.

Clone this repo, and navigate to the tracking-service subdirectory. You will run all the following commands from that location.

To build:

sam build --use-container

To run the API locally:

sam local start-api

To test the API:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -XPOST --data '{"event": "click", "location": "something", "user": "sylvia", "otherParam": "otherVal"}' http://127.0.0.1:3000/track

You should see an SQL statement printed in blue to the terminal where the API is running.

Important files in this repo

• app.py - the application code
• event.json - a sample event that the lambda function receives
• template.yaml - the SAM configuration file

We expect you'll make changes primarily in tracking-service/tracking_service/app.py.

Note about tests

We like tests! They are really important and we write lots of them! However, in order to keep the problem simple, we've excluded them here. If you feel that adding tests will help you work through the problem, go for it. However, we don't expect it, and won't give extra points for answers that include tests. 🙂