Cloud Platform Experience Questions

Personal account of hands on experience using public cloud providers and the concrete results delivered. Candidates should describe specific services and patterns they used for compute, storage, networking, managed databases, serverless and eventing, and explain their role in architecture decisions, deployments, automation and infrastructure as code practices, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, container orchestration, scaling and performance tuning, monitoring and incident response, and cost management. Interviewees should quantify outcomes when possible with metrics such as latency reduction, cost savings, availability improvements or deployment frequency and note any formal training or certifications. This topic evaluates depth of practical experience, ownership, and the ability to operate and improve cloud systems in production.

HardTechnical

32 practiced

Write a GitHub Actions workflow YAML that builds a Docker image, runs unit tests, pushes the image to a container registry with semantic tagging, deploys an ephemeral test environment in Kubernetes for integration tests, and then updates cluster manifests using kustomize. Include secure handling of credentials (GitHub OIDC or secrets) and an approval step before production deployment.

MediumTechnical

42 practiced

Explain database scaling strategies for managed databases: vertical scaling, read replicas, caching (Redis/ElastiCache/Cloud Memorystore), partitioning and sharding. For each approach describe implementation examples on AWS/Azure/GCP, the operational complexity, and trade-offs when planning for schema changes and resharding.

HardTechnical

39 practiced

Describe strategies to achieve zero-downtime deployments and schema changes for a globally replicated, stateful database architecture. Include approaches for online schema migrations, backward-compatible changes, feature flags, dual-write avoidance, conflict resolution, and how to coordinate application and DB deploys across regions.

MediumTechnical

31 practiced

Write Kubernetes YAML manifests to deploy an application named 'api' including: a Deployment with 3 replicas, resource requests and limits, liveness and readiness probes; a ClusterIP Service to expose it internally; and a HorizontalPodAutoscaler that scales between 3 and 20 replicas based on 75% CPU utilization. Provide any ConfigMap needed for configuration.

MediumSystem Design

43 practiced

Design a scalable, highly available web application architecture on AWS for 1 million monthly active users with a peak concurrency of approximately 5,000 and an availability target of 99.95%. Specify choices for compute (EC2/ECS/EKS/Lambda), autoscaling patterns, load balancing, caching, managed database, CDN, session management, storage, and deployment strategy. Explain trade-offs and major cost drivers.

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