Cloud Fundamentals Interview Questions
10 questions
Cross-provider cloud computing concepts — the shared vocabulary and trade-offs that apply before you've committed to any single vendor.
A junior engineer asks why deploying across multiple Availability Zones in the same region isn't enough for 'true' disaster recovery. How would you explain the actual distinction between AZs and regions?
BeginnerAWS6 min
Finance is asking why the same infrastructure spend that used to be a predictable annual budget line is now a variable monthly cloud bill that's harder to forecast. How would you explain this shift?
BeginnerCloud Fundamentals5 min
A system that can scale from 10 to 1,000 servers is described as both 'scalable' and 'elastic' — are these actually the same property, and does the distinction matter practically?
BeginnerCloud Fundamentals5 min
What's the actual difference between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and how would you decide which one is the right fit for a given workload?
BeginnerCloud6 min
How would you evaluate whether to move an existing IaaS-hosted application to a PaaS, given the migration cost involved?
IntermediateCloud7 min
A customer asks how their data stays isolated from other customers on the same physical cloud infrastructure. What's actually happening under the hood to make multi-tenancy safe?
IntermediateCloud Fundamentals6 min
What operational risks does heavy reliance on SaaS introduce that IaaS or PaaS generally don't — vendor lock-in and data portability included?
IntermediateCloud6 min
Where does serverless (e.g. AWS Lambda) actually fit on the IaaS/PaaS/SaaS spectrum — does it fit cleanly into any of those three categories at all?
IntermediateAWS6 min
A company got breached because an S3 bucket was publicly accessible, and leadership initially blamed AWS. Why is that framing wrong, and how does the shared responsibility model actually draw the line?
BeginnerAWS6 min
Leadership is nervous about 'vendor lock-in' and wants every architectural decision evaluated for portability across cloud providers. Is this concern well-founded, or often overstated?
IntermediateCloud Fundamentals6 min