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Cloud Identity and Access Management Questions

Comprehensive coverage of identity and access management in cloud environments. Candidates should understand identity models and authentication and authorization patterns, design and implement role based access control and attribute based access control, author and scope policies, apply permission boundaries and the principle of least privilege, and manage service identities and workload identities for virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions. Topics include federated identity and single sign on, multi factor authentication, service accounts and cross account trust, ephemeral credentials and credential rotation, secrets and key management using vaults and hardware security modules, encryption key lifecycle, avoidance of hard coded credentials, policy as code and automation with infrastructure as code, auditing and access logging for detection and compliance, and integration with enterprise identity providers. Interview scenarios assess policy design, least privilege exercises, troubleshooting misconfigured permissions, and trade offs between cloud native managed services and custom solutions.

MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Write an AWS IAM policy JSON for a role that allows s3:GetObject on 'arn:aws:s3:::acme-data/*' only when the request originates from the corporate IP range 203.0.113.0/24 and is performed by a session authenticated with MFA. Include Condition blocks for both source IP and MFA.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Design an automated onboarding and offboarding workflow that integrates HR system events with SCIM provisioning to cloud accounts, ensuring timely role assignments and entitlement revocation. Include reconciliation jobs, retry and failure handling, audit trails for compliance, and how to handle contractors and temporary roles.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a secure ephemeral credential issuance service for CI/CD pipelines that issues scoped, short-lived credentials for deployment jobs. Include pipeline authentication, approval gates (e.g., commit signatures or PR approvals), token scopes and TTLs, auditing, rate-limiting, revocation, and mitigations for compromised runners or leaked credentials.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a prevention and detection pipeline to avoid hard-coded credentials in source code repositories. Include pre-commit hooks, static analysis rules, CI secret scanning, automated creation and rotation of secrets when leaks are detected, and developer education. Mention specific tools and how you'd integrate the pipeline with GitHub/GitLab.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the difference between authentication and authorization in cloud environments. Compare common authentication protocols (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML) and authorization patterns (role-based RBAC, attribute-based ABAC, capability-based). For a web API that must allow third-party clients and user logins, which authentication and authorization stack would you choose and why?

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