Questions
3 of 6
1How would you design a high-availability, horizontally scalable Go backend service?
2How do you build a basic HTTP server using only the standard library?
3How would you implement graceful shutdown for an HTTP server handling long-lived connections?
4How do you implement rate limiting in a Go API — per user, per IP, and globally?
5How would you implement middleware in Go using the standard library pattern vs a framework?
6What are the trade-offs between REST and gRPC for internal Go microservices?
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Standard Library
03 / 06

How would you implement graceful shutdown for an HTTP server handling long-lived connections?

Listen for SIGTERM/SIGINT, call server.Shutdown() with a deadline context, drain in-flight requests, and signal health checks as unhealthy before stopping to let the load balancer route away.

Graceful shutdown implementation
Shutdown checklist
  1. 1

    server.Shutdown() stops accepting new connections and waits for active requests to complete

  2. 2

    Set a shutdown deadline (30s) to force-close stuck connections after the timeout

  3. 3

    Mark health endpoint unhealthy before shutdown — gives load balancer time to drain

  4. 4

    Drain message queue consumers before exit to avoid duplicate processing on restart

  5. 5

    Use preStop hook in Kubernetes to add the delay before SIGTERM is sent