Multi Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Architecture Questions

Designing systems that span multiple cloud providers or combine cloud with on premise infrastructure, including when and why to choose multi cloud or hybrid deployments and the trade offs involved. Candidates should be able to justify multi cloud and hybrid approaches with respect to vendor independence, resilience, regulatory and data residency requirements, and cost versus the increased operational and engineering complexity. Core technical concerns include workload portability strategies such as containerization and Kubernetes, platform abstraction layers and trade offs between managed vendor services and portable open source components. Data management topics include replication topologies, consistency models, disaster recovery, backup strategies, data gravity and egress cost implications. Networking and connectivity considerations cover secure cross provider links, virtual private networks, direct connections and transit architectures, service mesh and the latency and throughput implications for stateful and latency sensitive services. Identity and access management and policy consistency across providers involves identity federation, single sign on, centralized policy enforcement, and secrets and key management. Observability and operations include centralized logging, metrics and tracing, alerting, deployment and release strategies across heterogeneous environments, automation and infrastructure as code, cost governance and tagging, security boundary definition, compliance, runbooks and incident response. Interviewers commonly assess the candidate's ability to articulate concrete trade offs, propose migration and portability approaches, and recommend tooling and governance patterns to operate multi provider systems reliably.