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.
MediumTechnical
30 practiced
Describe how you would implement a GitOps-based CI/CD pipeline for both infrastructure and applications using tools like Flux or ArgoCD. Explain repository layout (single repo vs mono-repo vs app-per-repo), pull request workflows, automated safety checks, secrets handling, drift detection, and rollback strategies. Also explain how GitOps integrates with a traditional CI system that builds artifacts.
EasyBehavioral
32 practiced
Describe a concrete example where you identified and implemented cloud cost savings. Explain the discovery process (tools or queries used), the specific actions taken (rightsizing, reserved instances/commitments, automation to shut down idle resources, storage tier changes), and quantify the before/after impact (percent reduction or dollar amount over a time period).
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.
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
39 practiced
Compare serverless event-driven architectures (functions + event buses/queues) to container-based microservices on Kubernetes. Discuss operational overhead, cost behavior at different load patterns, cold-starts and latency variability, observability and debugging challenges, vendor lock-in, and typical use cases where one clearly outperforms the other.
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