Service Integration and Interoperability Questions

Focuses on how services and components work together within cloud and distributed systems, and on patterns and trade offs for integrating systems. Candidates should explain common integration patterns across compute, storage, databases, networking, and monitoring, describe when to use managed platform services versus custom implementations, and demonstrate application programming interface first thinking including interface design, versioning, and contract management. Discussion should cover interoperability challenges such as data formats, authentication and authorization, latency and throughput considerations, fault isolation, orchestration, and observability. Candidates should also be able to reason about security and operational concerns when integrating services, testing integration points, and strategies for graceful degradation and compatibility across service boundaries.