Easy interview questions in Cloud Platforms, page 2
Serverless cold starts and how to mitigate them
A cold start is the latency to provision and initialize a fresh environment; mitigate with provisioned concurrency, smaller packages, and lighter runtimes.
Purpose and setup of a Dead-Letter Queue
A DLQ captures messages that repeatedly fail so they neither block the queue nor get lost; configure a redrive policy with a max receive count and alarm on it.
What is Infrastructure as Code?
IaC defines infra in version-controlled files, giving repeatability, peer review, and drift-free consistency, unlike error-prone console clicks.
Automate patching across a VM fleet
Use a patch or config tool to target by tag, roll out in canaried waves with health checks, and prefer immutable golden images long term.
Attribute cloud costs to teams
Tag resources with team and project metadata, activate them as cost-allocation tags, group the cost report by that tag, and enforce tagging with policy.
On-Demand vs Reserved vs Spot pricing models
On-Demand is flexible but priciest, Reserved trades a 1-3 year commitment for discounts, Spot is cheapest but interruptible.
Data lake versus data warehouse
Lakes store raw, schema-on-read data of any type cheaply; warehouses store curated, schema-on-write structured data for fast SQL; choose a lake for varied raw data and ML.
ETL versus ELT in cloud data platforms
ETL transforms before loading into the target; ELT loads raw first then transforms in the warehouse, leveraging cheap storage and elastic compute.
CSV vs JSON vs Parquet for analytics
CSV and JSON are row-based, human-readable, and bulky; columnar Parquet/ORC compress well and read only needed columns; choose columnar for analytics.
Pre-built AI service vs custom model
Choose a managed service for speed, no ML expertise, and common tasks; build custom for domain-specific needs, control, or cost at scale.
Feeding large object-store data into training
Stream data instead of copying it all to disk, use streaming/pipe modes, shard and prefetch in parallel, and pack many small images into larger files.
Explain the Well-Architected Framework pillars
Name the pillars, operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability, and explain each briefly.
Lift-and-shift versus replatforming migration
Rehosting moves apps unchanged for speed and low risk; replatforming makes targeted optimizations for cloud benefits; explain the speed-versus-value trade-off.
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