Cloud Data Architecture and Tradeoffs Questions

Designing data architectures specifically for cloud environments and evaluating platform trade offs. Topics include when to use managed relational services, managed nonrelational services, cloud data warehouses, cloud object storage, lifecycle policies, cross region replication, data residency and compliance considerations, cost versus performance trade offs, managed service operational constraints, and strategies for high availability and disaster recovery in the cloud. Candidates should be able to compare cloud service options and justify choices based on reliability, cost, and compliance.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a cost-aware tiering and retention policy that meets these constraints: 3-year legal retention with occasional audit restores, frequent access to most recent 90 days, cold retention must be low cost, and ability to place legal holds on individual datasets. Include restore procedures, access controls, and impact on query performance.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

You must consolidate multiple vendor-specific data marts into a single governed lakehouse without interrupting reporting. Provide a migration plan that includes discovery, canonical modeling, data reconciliation, parallel runs, and cutover while ensuring existing dashboards remain functional.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Large-scale time-series workloads are experiencing partition hotspotting and skew. Propose sharding, bucketing, compaction, and ingestion patterns to address hotspotting, and discuss the operational overhead and query performance implications for each approach.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

A client has hundreds of data assets and asks why a metadata catalog is important. Describe the benefits for data discovery, governance, lineage, and self-service analytics, and list three practical steps to onboard teams to a new data catalog.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Design an auditable logging and access trail for data access and transformation pipelines that supports legal discovery and privacy reviews. Specify what to log, retention, indexing for search, access controls, and how to ensure logs themselves meet retention and privacy requirements.

Unlock Full Question Bank

Get access to hundreds of Cloud Data Architecture and Tradeoffs interview questions and detailed answers.

Join thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.