Migrating a stateful monolith to the cloud
WHAT IT TESTS: pragmatic migration planning. OUTLINE: assess and inventory, pick a migration pattern like rehost or replatform, handle data migration and cutover, mitigate downtime and data-loss risk.
Diagnosing slow auto-scaled PaaS workloads
WHAT IT TESTS: layered debugging under load. OUTLINE: application metrics like request latency, throughput, and DB query time; infrastructure metrics like CPU, memory, and scaling lag. RED FLAG: jumping to add instances without isolating the real bottleneck.
Blue/green versus canary deployments
WHAT IT TESTS: deployment-strategy fluency. OUTLINE: blue/green flips all traffic between two full environments; canary shifts a small slice gradually while watching metrics. RED FLAG: confusing the two or ignoring cost, rollback, and observability trade-offs.
High availability versus fault tolerance
WHAT IT TESTS: grasp of resilience tiers. OUTLINE: HA minimizes downtime via redundancy and failover; fault tolerance survives failure with zero interruption. RED FLAG: treating them as synonyms or equating multi-AZ with true tolerance.
Difference between metrics and logs
WHAT IT TESTS: observability fundamentals. OUTLINE: metrics are aggregated numeric time series good for trends and alerting; logs are discrete timestamped event records good for detailed root-cause analysis.
Design a multi-tenant model serving platform
WHAT IT TESTS: multi-tenant ML serving design. OUTLINE: share infrastructure to cut cost while enforcing tenant data isolation, fair resource allocation against noisy neighbors, and per-tenant performance via quotas and autoscaling.
Event bus versus message queue for triggers
WHAT IT TESTS: messaging pattern selection. OUTLINE: a queue is point-to-point buffered work for one consumer group; an event bus routes and filters one event to many decoupled subscribers. Event bus wins when many independent services must react.
Optimize cost of a big-data analytics platform
WHAT IT TESTS: practical cloud cost optimization. OUTLINE: storage tiering and lifecycle plus compression and partitioning; compute via spot instances, right-sizing, and efficient file formats; query and pipeline optimization to scan less data.
Strangler Fig with serverless and an event bus
WHAT IT TESTS: applying incremental migration with serverless. OUTLINE: API Gateway acts as the routing facade, new features run as Lambda functions, an event bus decouples and fans out to new services, and traffic shifts feature by feature until the monolith…
Configure a Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler
WHAT IT TESTS: Kubernetes autoscaling mechanics. OUTLINE: HPA adjusts replica count toward a target CPU metric, needs the metrics server and pod resource requests, and scales a deployment between min and max.
When to choose bare metal over a VM
WHAT IT TESTS: hardware-level trade-offs. OUTLINE: bare metal suits latency-sensitive or high-throughput workloads needing no hypervisor overhead, single-tenant isolation for compliance, or direct hardware and licensing access.
Balance agility and compliance in regulated cloud
WHAT IT TESTS: compliance-aware architecture. OUTLINE: PaaS for speed where allowed, IaaS where control is required, enforced by encryption, IAM least privilege, network isolation, policy-as-code guardrails, and continuous audit logging.
Migrate an OLTP database with minimal downtime
WHAT IT TESTS: near-zero-downtime data migration. OUTLINE: take an initial bulk load, then use change data capture to replicate ongoing changes until source and target are in sync, validate, then cut over during a brief window with a rollback plan.
Design an enterprise cloud landing zone
WHAT IT TESTS: cloud foundation and governance design. OUTLINE: multi-account or subscription structure, centralized identity and SSO, network topology like hub-and-spoke, guardrails via policy and SCPs, and centralized logging.
Technical challenges of a multi-cloud strategy
WHAT IT TESTS: realism about multi-cloud complexity. OUTLINE: data consistency and egress costs across providers, cross-cloud networking and latency, and federating disparate IAM systems, plus operational and tooling overhead.
Managed services versus self-hosting trade-offs
WHAT IT TESTS: cost and control trade-offs. OUTLINE: managed services cut operational burden and speed delivery but cost more and limit control; self-hosting offers full control and tuning at the price of patching, scaling, and reliability work.
Explain the Strangler Fig pattern
WHAT IT TESTS: incremental modernization strategy. OUTLINE: a facade routes traffic, new services gradually replace legacy features one slice at a time, and the old system is retired when fully strangled.
Design a highly available web application
WHAT IT TESTS: reliability architecture. OUTLINE: redundant stateless instances across multiple zones behind a load balancer with health checks, auto-scaling, and a replicated multi-AZ datastore.
Lift-and-shift versus replatforming migration
WHAT IT TESTS: knowledge of the migration 6 Rs. OUTLINE: rehosting moves apps unchanged for speed and low risk; replatforming makes targeted optimizations for cloud benefits; explain the speed-versus-value trade-off.
Explain the Well-Architected Framework pillars
WHAT IT TESTS: foundational cloud design vocabulary. OUTLINE: name the pillars, operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability, and explain each briefly.