motivation

The answer that fails is a compliment to the company. The answer that lands is a thesis about where the constraint sits, tied to something you have actually done, and it works whether you are coming from distributed systems, kernels, hardware or SRE.

The interviewer is checking whether you know what you are trading, because both directions are reasonable and both have a version that ends badly. What each environment actually gives you, and the answer that works when the real reason is compensation.