Cloud Platforms and Infrastructure Questions

Comprehensive understanding of cloud computing platforms and core infrastructure concepts. Candidates should know service models including Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service, and be familiar with major providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Core technical knowledge includes compute models, storage systems, networking fundamentals such as domain name system and load balancing, virtual private networks and network segmentation, virtualization, containerization for example Docker, orchestration with Kubernetes, serverless architectures, and microservices. Candidates should be able to evaluate trade offs between managed services and self managed solutions with respect to cost, reliability, operational burden, scalability, performance, security, and vendor lock in, and reason about when to choose platform managed services versus building custom infrastructure. The topic also covers system design considerations for high availability and fault tolerance, capacity planning and autoscaling, monitoring and observability, deployment strategies, and operational practices such as infrastructure as code and continuous integration and continuous delivery. This knowledge is critical for backend engineers, site reliability engineers, and DevOps roles and is increasingly relevant across many engineering positions.