Cloud Architecture Interview Questions
10 questions
Cloud architecture interview questions on designing resilient, cost-aware systems — the higher-level design judgment that sits above any single service or provider.
When does autoscaling actually save money compared to a well-chosen fixed capacity, and when can it end up costing more?
IntermediateAWSKubernetes6 min
Your architecture serves a large volume of data out to end users and other services, and data transfer/egress costs have become one of your largest line items. What architectural decisions actually reduce this?
AdvancedAWS8 min
Leadership wants to adopt a multi-cloud strategy specifically to reduce vendor lock-in and negotiate better pricing. What are the real cost trade-offs they might not be accounting for?
AdvancedAWSAzureGCP7 min
How would you decide what mix of Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, and On-Demand capacity to use across a workload with both steady baseline traffic and unpredictable spikes?
IntermediateAWS7 min
An audit finds most of your EC2 instances are running at under 15% average CPU utilization. How would you approach rightsizing them without risking a performance incident?
IntermediateAWS6 min
This month's cloud bill came in 3x higher than usual, with no corresponding increase in traffic or deliberate infrastructure change. How do you actually track down the cause?
IntermediateAWS8 min
How would you design the data layer differently for an active-active multi-region architecture versus an active-passive (failover) one?
ExpertAWS10 min
What's the actual difference between RPO and RTO, and how does each change depending on whether you're designing for multi-AZ or multi-region failover?
IntermediateAWS6 min
In a real system with dozens of services, how would you decide which specific ones actually need multi-region treatment versus which can safely stay single-region?
AdvancedAWS8 min
What's the actual difference between designing for high availability across Availability Zones versus across Regions, and when do you actually need multi-region instead of just multi-AZ?
AdvancedAWS8 min