Interview questions in Cloud Platforms, page 3
Shared responsibility model across service tiers
Provider secures the cloud infrastructure; you secure what you put in it; the line shifts with abstraction. For OS patching, you patch IaaS VMs but the provider patches a managed database OS.
Dynamic database credential rotation for microservices
A secrets manager issues short-lived per-service credentials, services authenticate by workload identity and fetch or refresh secrets without restart, leases expire and rotate automatically.
Centralized logging and threat detection across accounts
Organization-wide trails ship logs to a locked-down central security account, store in immutable append-only storage, and aggregate threat detection findings centrally with least-privilege…
Architecting for HIPAA or PCI DSS compliance
Isolate sensitive data in restricted networks and accounts, encrypt at rest and in transit with managed keys, enforce least-privilege access, and keep immutable audit logs.
Choosing relational vs NoSQL managed databases
Choose relational for complex relationships, joins, flexible queries, and strong transactions; choose NoSQL for known access patterns needing massive horizontal scale.
Read replicas in managed relational databases
A read replica is an async copy of the primary that serves read-only queries, offloading the primary and scaling read-heavy workloads; expect replication lag.
How does caching reduce database load?
Cache-aside reads, RAM-speed lookups, TTL plus invalidation.
RDS Multi-AZ versus Read Replicas
Multi-AZ is a synchronous standby for failover, replicas are async for read scaling, combine both when needed.
Strong versus eventual consistency in NoSQL
Strong reads see the latest write at higher latency and cost, eventual reads may be stale but are cheaper and faster, match the choice to stakes.
Data warehouse versus OLTP database
Warehouses use columnar storage for analytical scans, OLTP uses row storage for fast transactions, each fits a different workload.
Add a second access pattern to a key-value store
Add a global secondary index on EmailAddress, weighing extra storage, write amplification, and eventual consistency.
Design a global low-latency database
A distributed store with replicas near users, a tuned consistency level, accepting lag, conflicts, and cross-region cost.
CAP theorem and real database tradeoffs
During a partition you pick consistency or availability, CP systems reject requests, AP systems stay available but stale.
The cloud shared responsibility model
The provider secures the cloud (hardware, OS, runtime), you secure what runs in it (code, data, config, access).
Why not store uploads on local PaaS disk?
PaaS instances are ephemeral and unshared, so local files vanish on restart and are invisible to peers; store uploads in object storage.
Deploying to Heroku via Git
Push to the remote, a buildpack detects the language, builds a slug, and runs the Procfile process.
Securely supplying secrets to an app
Never hardcode credentials, inject them as environment variables or pull from a secrets manager, and rotate them.
CI/CD pipeline for a container PaaS
Run tests, build the image, push the tag to a registry, then deploy it to Cloud Run. The registry is the build-to-deploy handoff.
Offload long-running tasks from web requests
Enqueue the job to a queue, return immediately, process with separate workers, report status out of band.
Cold starts in serverless environments
A cold start is the delay to provision a fresh instance and initialize the runtime; mitigate with provisioned concurrency and by shrinking init work.
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