50 Cloud Computing Interview Questions and Answers for 2024

Prepare for your next cloud computing job interview with 50 popular and technical cloud computing interview questions and answers to land a top gig as a cloud engineer.

50 Cloud Computing Interview Questions and Answers for 2024
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Why Learn Cloud Computing Skills?

The job market in cloud computing is growing every day at a rapid pace. It is among the top skills that people want to upgrade. A quick search on Linkedin shows there are over 30000 freshers jobs in Cloud Computing and over 60000 senior-level cloud computing job roles.  As an increasing number of companies are switching over to clouds after seeing the absolute benefits and ease - the job growth in the cloud market is burgeoning. Companies need engineers that can help them transition over to Cloud Computing or senior engineers who can maintain and innovate on the already established Cloud Computing technology. It is more than a better time than any other to get into the domain of cloud computing.

Why Learn Cloud Computing Skills?

There are many cloud computing job roles like  Cloud Consultant, Cloud reliability engineer, cloud security engineer, cloud infrastructure engineer, cloud architect, data science engineer that one can make a career transition to .


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What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is the grouping of networks, hardware, services, and storage that delivers/sells computing over the internet. Building data storage and computing architecture locally were getting more expensive during the advent of Big Data technologies. And maintenance was an overhead when things needed to be scaled down or up. The need of the hour was computing and storage services that could be sold by providers over the internet, like any tangible commodity. Thus came in the picture, Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing and its jargon might seem daunting and complex to the uninitiated - freshers and the seasoned alike. But the selection of ‘Cloud computing Interview Questions’ will help bridge the gap in the understanding. The basic underlying principle behind Cloud Computing and its architecture is no rocket science. After going through these technical interview questions, it will become more apparent how to tackle a Cloud Computing job interview—effectively providing a clearer picture and grasp of Cloud Computing technology. Let’s champion cloud computing together. 

 

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50 Cloud Computing Interview Questions and Answers f0r 2024

Cloud Computing Interview Questions

Knowing how to answer the most commonly asked cloud computing questions can increase your chances of landing your dream cloud computing job roles. Being knowledgeable on the kind of cloud computing questions you’re going to be asked in an interview is a valuable skill, but requires a lot of research. We’ve listed the top cloud computing interview questions with answers to help you prepare for your cloud interview. These top 50 cloud questions and answers will help you identify and assess the  key skills needed for a cloud computing job.

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Basic Interview Questions on Cloud Computing 

1. What are the various available cloud service models?

IAAS - IaaS rents hardware/infrastructure as a service to enterprises - for example, memory, computing, servers. Organisations deploy their applications on Cloud Providers infrastructure.

SAAS - SaaS offers users software as a service that resides on the cloud. Software and applications are used on a subscription basis. Cloud providers are responsible for the maintenance and upgrade of the software. Communication with Applications happens over API calls advised by the Cloud provider—for example, Google Drive.

PAAS - PaaS provides enterprises with a platform where they could deploy their code and applications. PaaS packages the platform for development and testing along with data, storage, and computing capability.

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2. What are the component layers found in Cloud architecture? 

Cloud Controller (CLC) - CLC sits at the topmost layer and controls virtual resources like servers, networks, and storage.

Walrus - It acts as a storage controller for users and deals with virtual machine images and user data.

Cluster Controller - It controls the execution of all the virtual machines stored on the nodes. 

Storage Controller - Storage controller handles storage in block form that is dynamically attached to virtual machines

The Node Controller - It controls the functionality of the hypervisor that controls VM activities. The hypervisor is a hardware-supported emulation technique that allows multiple OS to run on the same host OS. also called virtual machine manager.

3. What are some popular use cases for cloud computing?

  • Cloud storage - Storage over the internet through a web interface turned out to be a boon. With the advent of cloud storage, customers could only pay for the storage they used. From Google Drive to more privately operated proprietary applications, cloud storage is everywhere. 
  • Big data analytics - Big data and Cloud technologies go hand in hand and essentially make systems faster, scalable, failsafe, high-performance, and cheaper.
  • Test and Development - Cloud provides ready-to-use, customised, and fully set up resources. It offers the infrastructure for the testing and development of applications and services without the downside of installing and maintaining the on-premise resources, servers, and environment. 
  • Disaster Recovery - Data recovery is cheaper and faster in Cloud Computing technology. Since a cloud ideally stores the data on many different servers in different locations, the probability of complete data loss reduces. 
  • Data Backup - Data backup is more effortless and comes with security and availability of resources. Older backup strategies had loopholes with the physical disc getting corrupted or running out of stock.

4. What is On-Demand functionality?

Cloud consists of a shared pool of resources and systems. The resources lent to the customer can be changed on customers’ demand. On-Demand design saves customer’s overhead and provides easy scalability.

5. What are the platforms that use Cloud Computing?

  • Map-reduce - Map-reduce enables users to use resizable Hadoop clusters within Amazon infrastructure. Amazon’s counterpart of this is called Amazon EMR ( Elastic Map-Reduce)

  • Hadoop - Hadoop allows clustering of hardware to analyse large sets of data in parallel. 

  • Apache Spark - Apache Spark is an open-source analytics engine that computes and processes large datasets. The processing happens in memory for the sake of high performance. It provides parallel processing and fault tolerance by cluster management. Apache Spark forms the complete big data solution along with HDFS, Yarn, Map-Reduce.

6. What are the different modes of deployment available on the Cloud?

There are four modes, namely private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud, community cloud.

Public - A public cloud is free to use for anyone. E.g. AWS Cloud Connect. 

Private - Private cloud is the collection of resources that private organisations use for their own needs.

Community cloud - It allows multiple organisations in a group to access services and systems to share information and computing.

Hybrid cloud - Hybrid cloud is a mix of private and public clouds that can switch from one to another, depending on the conditions and requirements.

7. What is the difference between scalability and elasticity?

Scalability is the characteristic that allows resources to be increased/decreased, corresponding to the customer’s workload. Say, for example, the traffic starts to increase on the customer side, and the current resource allocation is falling short. We would need to scale up our product and get more resources from the cloud provider on-demand in such a case.

Elasticity refers to commissioning and decommissioning large amounts of resources dynamically depending on where the traffic is high or low. Elasticity comes in handy when in a shared cloud, two customers are competing for resources. One customer can forfeit some unused resources to the other customer who is falling short and requires resources.

8. How is Cloud computing different from mobile computing?

Mobile Computing, as the name suggests, is related to Mobile devices and tablets. It is responsible for accessing the internet and performing searches and application tasks for mobile systems. Compared to Cloud computing, Mobile computing is more customer-centric. In contrast, customer-oriented cloud computing aims at the enterprise level and deals with organisations and their services.

9. Why use Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the process/idea of renting/delegating computing resources from dedicated servers and cloud providers over the internet. Services can be storage, web servers, infrastructure, etc. With the use of cloud computing technologies, organisations can ensure quality control and make their products scalable, modular, and collaborative. The term Cloud-native defines a product that leverages cloud technology.  

10. What is cloud-native?

Cloud-Native are technologies and services built to leverage cloud architecture. 

11. What are some examples of popularly used Cloud Computing services?

Windows Azure, Amazon Web services, and iCloud are the very popular ones. Oracle Cloud and IBM cloud are present as market competitors as well.

12. What is Edge computing?

Edge Computing is done at a centralised place with resources present locally. A direct benefit is low latency and less dependency on outside resources.

13. What do you know about the Multi-cloud strategy?

The strategy dictates to not rely completely on a single cloud service provider and distribute the traffic among multiple cloud service providers. Different functionalities can be leveraged from different cloud providers, thus reducing work from one particular provider. This helps in increasing independence and lowers the risk of failure in the case the provider faults or there occurs a traffic overload. Multi-cloud comes in use as a design to govern from a singular access point ( portal )over the multiple cloud architecture. It can be as simple as a portal to overlook all the clouds and their functionality.

14. What are the basic types of Data Centers? 

  • Containerized or High-Density data Centers - These are faster but take more power and generate heating issues. Also, it is cheaper for the customer.

  • Low-Density Data Centre - Servers are placed some distance apart in a low-density data centre. That is why the name low-density. Due to the more spaces between two servers, heating is never an issue. 

15. How is security ensured in Clouds? 

  • Identity management
  • access control
  • authentication
  • Authorisation

16. What is Elastic Utility Computing Architecture - EUCALYPTUS?

It is an open-source software infrastructure in cloud computing to create private, public, and hybrid clouds. And link programs to the systems and build data centres.

17. What is a cloud VPN?

Cloud VPN helps companies transition their VPN services to the cloud. There are two types of VPN services that are available - Remote Access and Site to Site connection.

A VPN appliance is installed on-site in the company network in a Site-to-Site connection. This appliance connects to a virtual VPN endpoint in the cloud. The VPN results in a  tunnel between the cloud and the enterprise. This connection doesn’t need the public IP address and acts similar to a physical connection. 

Remote Access enables users to connect to machines located elsewhere globally. For example - VPNaaS. 

In the connection logic, users install VPN software on their machines and connect to cloud VPN. The cloud VPN forwards the connection to the concerned SaaS application.

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18. What are the prerequisites for moving to a cloud platform?

  • Compliance issues
  • Data storage types
  • Reduction of downtime
  • Business continuity
  • Ensure availability and access
  • Maintaining data integrity
  • Fail-safe for loss of data

19. What is the difference between RTO and RPO in Cloud Computing services?

The Recovery Time Objective is the maximum time a company has accepted to wait for recovery when a system fails in the cloud. This contract is between the cloud provider and the client.

A Recovery Point Object is the maximum amount of data loss that the organisation can accept in its contract. The data loss is measured in time. 

20. Give architectural details for VPC - Virtual Private Cloud?

VPC manages storage and compute resources for organisations by providing a layer of isolation and abstraction. 

The architecture for VPC with public and private subnets is as follows : -

Creating a new VPC instance

A VPC comes by default with these components :

  • Route table

  • Network ACL

  • Security Groups

An empty VPC with IPv4 CIDR address block. 

An empty VPC with IPv4 CIDR address block. 

Credits - Amazon Offical Doc on VPC

The next step is to create two subsets, one public and the other private. We create an Internet Gateway and connect it to our VPC next. So the traffic that flows to the VPC has to pass through the internet gateway. Now we create a new EC2 instance and place it inside the subnet. Here is the final architecture diagram.

A VPC with public and private subnets

A VPC with public and private subnets. Credits-  Amazon official Documentation

Cloud Computing Interview Questions for Experienced

1. What is Virtualization in Cloud Computing?

Virtualisation provides an abstraction between the back end and user programs. It enables creating an environment where multiple software can use the same hardware. Virtualisation also manages the service level policies. Following are a few types of virtualisation seen in Cloud Computing.

  • Server Virtualization partitions a server into multiple serves so it can distribute incoming traffic among them. The use case is load balancing.

  • Hardware Virtualization is where Virtual Machine Manage installs on the hardware. It provides easy access and monitors of resources like memory, processors, etc.

  • Storage Virtualisation takes multiple Network storage devices and clubs them into one single group, providing abstraction. The group is easier to maintain when compared to numerous devices inside it.

  • Operating System Virtualisation is when multiple OSs run on the same hardware. It is possible by installing the VMM onto the host OS instead of the hardware.

  • Desktop Virtualisation allows remote access to workstations across global data centres, managed over the internet.

  • Application Virtualisation ensures applications that run on one operating system can run on other operating systems as well. It creates an abstraction between the OS and the application.

2. How is Data protection in S3 achieved?

Data can be encrypted in S3 using SSE-S3, SSE-C, SSE-KMS.

  • SSE-S3 provides the solution S3 oversees Key management and protection using multiple layers of security. 

  • SSE-C lets S3 perform encryption and decryption of data and control the key used for encryption. Key management and storage are implementation-dependent and not provided by AWS.

  • SSE-KMS uses the Amazon Key Management service to store the keys used in encryption. KMS also provides an additional layer of security by keeping master keys. Special permission is needed to be able to use the master key.

3. What are the differences between ELB, NLB, and ALB?

Application Load Balancer (ALB) - ALB allows routing based on port numbers. It can also route requests to Lambda, and it can direct requests to many ports on the target. Application Load Balancer supports only layer 7 - HTTP/2 and Web Sockets. It can return primary responses on its own so the server can be set free of replying to redundant requests. ALB find use in Microservices and application

Network Load Balancer (NLB) -  Network Load Balancer supports Layer 4 that is TCP and UDP. It is faster and high-performance since it is lower in the OSI model. It uses static IPs and can also be assigned elastic IPs. An example would be real-time data streaming or video streaming.

Classic Load Balancer (CLB) or Elastic Load Balancer (ELB version1) - ELB is the oldest Load balancer and the only one which offers application-specific sticky session cookies. It works both on Layer 7 and Layer 4. ELB also supports EC2-Classic. 

4. Explain the types of EC2 instances? 

Memory-Optimized Instances - They provide fast performance for applications that process Bigdata in memory. Memory Optimised instance includes support for enhanced networking, up to 25gbps of Network Bandwidth. They come packaged with EBS installed and optimised.

Use cases are in-memory caches and open-source databases. 

Compute Optimised Instances - Compute Optimised instances provide high-performance computing resources and fast batch-processing. They are used ideally for media transcoding, gaming servers, ad-server engines. Compute Optimised Instances use the AWS Nitro system, which combines dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisors. Just like Memory-optimized, Compute Optimised Instances come with optimised EBS as well.

Accelerated Computing Instances - These Instances use co-processors and hardware accelerators to improve upon the performance. They get used in graphics processing, floating-point calculations, data pattern matching. Accelerated Computing Instances use extra hardware power to combat software limitations and latency. These also support the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)

Storage Optimised Instances - Storage Optimised instances are ideal for workloads that need high sequential read and write. These instances use their local storage to store data.

Storage optimised instances provide low latency and high-speed random I/O operations. They get used in NoSQL databases like Redis, MongoDB, data warehousing.

General Purpose instances provide a mixture of computing, memory, and networking resources. General Purpose Instance find their use in applications that consume multiple resources in equal proportions, for example, web servers, code repositories.

5. What is Cloudformation’s function? 

CloudFormation helps in creating and maintaining an AWS infrastructure and stacks. Stacks are a collection of AWS services. And CloudFormation enables users in creating stacks quickly with minor overhead. One could ideally configure the AWS infrastructure through a text or JSON file in Cloud Formation.

6. How does AWS provide defence from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks?

Amazon AWS provides Shields for security against attacks. AWS Shields uses two tiers of security- Standard and Advanced

Standard AWS Shield, which comes by default with AWS, can be used as a first-measure security gate. It protects network and transport layers.

Subsequently, one can also subscribe to Shield Advanced for another layer of added security. The AWS Advanced Shield provides integration with AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF). AWS WAF provides custom rules to filter out traffic with threat signatures.

Web Application Firewall provides three main actions: allow all requests for a rule, block all requests, and count all requests for a new policy.

Advanced Shield also extends 24x7 support from AWS DDoS response team. 

7.Enumerate the difference between AWS Aurora vs AWS RDS?

Aurora is the database engine that gives reliability and speed at par with industry-standard databases. It backs up data in AWS S3 in real-time without any performance impact. It backs up storage in a routine fashion without the hassle of Database administrators interfering.

RDS (Amazon Relational Database System) is the traditional relational database that provides scalability and cost-effective solutions for storing data. It supports six database engines, i.e. MySQL, Postgres, Amazon Aurora, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle.

8. How can DDos attack be prevented and minimised?

  • Shield ( Standard and Advanced )
  • WAF ( web application firewall )
  • Route 53 ( DNS ) 
  • ELB ( Elastic Load Balancing)
  • VPC ( Virtual Private Cloud)
  • CloudFront 

9. What are the limitations of ELB?

  • ELB isn’t compatible with EKS containers running on Fargate.
  • It can route traffic on more than one port in an instance
  • ELB doesn’t support forwarding data to IP addresses. It can only forward it to the EKS/ECS container or EC2 instance.
  • It also doesn’t support web sockets.
  • In ELB, there is no concept of target groups in routing.

10. How are target groups used to provide an additional level of redirection in Load Balancing?

Target groups are another layer of abstraction and redirection created in load balancers. They are tagged into three types while creating target groups - instances (marked by instance ID), IP address, and Lambda functions. Dedicated listeners listen to the traffic coming in the load balancer and route traffic to the appropriate target group. The target group then routes the data to specific IPs, instances, and containers. The Target group checks the health of its targets and figures how to split the oncoming traffic.

Amazon Web Services(AWS) Interview Questions and Answers

1.   What are the key components of an AWS architecture?

Route 53, email service, identity management, and access management, simple storage device, elastic block stores, cloud watch

2.    How does AWS provide security for its customers?

Infrastructure security  

The Network firewall built into Amazon VPC lets you create a private network and control access to applications and services.

Data encryption 

AWS CloudSHM provides hardware-based cryptographic key storage, helping users in enforcing their compliance requirements. AWS services like AmazonEBS, AmazonS3, Amazon Lambda have built-in encryption features in them. These encryptions provide another layer of security.

Identity and access control 

Amazon Identity and Access Management let you enable permissions for each user account and offers various multi factors authentication that is hardware-based and software-based.

Monitoring and logging 

With AWS CloudTail, one can AWS deployments in the cloud by getting the history of API calls and commands executed.

Amazon CloudWatch provides scalable and flexible monitoring solutions for the cloud.

Amazon Guarduty is a solution that checks and scans for malicious activities in the system.

3.   What is Amazon Machine Image - AMI?

AMI is an image of the operating system, application server, and applications that will run on the cloud server. Running an image will create an instance on the cloud. AMI includes metadata of the root volume. It also has permission to decide on AWS instances that will be allowed to run it.

4. What is AWS lambda?

Lambda is a computing service that runs your code without requiring and managing servers. Each client request will instantiate a new lambda function. Lambda charges you for only the time when the code was running.

5.    How can AWS  vertically scale in AWS?

Vertical scaling is adding more RAM and processor power to the existing machine. AWS provides instances up to 488 GB ram or 128 virtual cores. To initiate vertical scaling, one first needs to decouple the tiers in our application. These tiers will be distributed and handled by web servers. Finally, we can run the newer instance and make appropriate changes reflecting the vertical scaling.

AWS Ops Automator automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. The solution can resize the instances by restarting your existing instance with a new size. Or, the solution can resize your instances by replacing the current instance with a new, resize instance.

6.   What are important features of Amazon S3

  • S3 Storage class provides enterprise-wide insights and best practices for running storage buckets more efficiently and safely. 
  • S3 batch operations make jobs run in parallel by running them in batches. Batching together jobs helps to increase efficiency.
  • S3 Intelligence tier is the feature where highly accessed data objects move to low-cost buckets. 
  • Identity and access management (IVM) manages access to different parts of Amazon S3.
  • Access Control List allows access to certain traffic to every bucket or object.
  • Versioning is to store multiple versions of the same file on the storage.
  • S3 offers Multi-Factor Authentication Delete so that the data doesn’t get deleted by human error or accidents.

7. DB used in AWS 

MariaDB, Postgres, MongoDB, Oracle, MySQL are some common databases used in AWS.

8. Different types of load balancers in AWS

  • Classic Load Balancer - Classic load Balancer is the only one among the three that supports EC2 classic instances.
  • Network Load Balancer - used when needing high performance and static IPS 
  • Application load balancer - used when you need flexible application management and TLS termination.

9.   What is elastic IP

EC2 instances use Elastic IP for communication over the internet or in a private network. You first allocate to your AWS account and then can map it to instances. It can avoid system failure when a resource fails. Fail-safe is ensured by remapping the faulted instance’s IP to a new instance.

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10.How is elastic IP allocated?

Elastic IPs are allocated by going to the EC2 console 

https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Go to Network and security > Elastic IP > allocate elastic IP > Navigation

11. What is Elastic Load Balancing ( ELB )?

 ELB distributes oncoming traffic among multiple EC2 instances and helps in fault tolerance.

a.       Load balancer – involves distributing incoming requests among EC2 instances registered with it.

b.      SSL termination – ELB offers SSL encryption and decryption build into the EC2 instances attached to ELB

c.       Control service – This automatically scales the system by adding more load balancers to the EC2 instances.  

12. What is Amazon Route53?

Route53 is a highly scalable and available domain name system (DNS) provided under Amazon AWS. These are the three prime functions

a.       Register domain names

b.      Route internet traffic to resources

c.       Send health checks to resources and devices.

13. What is the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instance?

Elastic Cloud Compute instance developers manage to compute on-demand in the AWS cloud. It gives control over web scaling and computing resources.

EC2 instances are resizable upon requirement. Depending on the data traffic the organisation faces, EC2 instances shrink or expand in size. One can access EC2 instances over many geographical locations called availability zones.

14. What are some benefits of CloudFront?

Cloud front is a Content delivery network developed by amazon that delivers data with high speed and low latency globally through its worldwide web of data centres. 

  • It caches content in edge locations and local regions, resulting in quicker data availability. If the data isn’t present at the edge location, it retrieves it from the specified path, like an S3 bucket.

  • Data transfer happens over HTTP and HTTPS

  • Copies of the files are ideally held across multiple edge locations globally. The redundancy increases reliability and availability. 

  • By default, copies of objects ( or files )remain cached at the edge locations 24 hours before expiring. 

15. What is the Elastic BeanStalk?

Elastic BeanStalk acts as a console for deploying Amazon services by reducing the complexity of the environment. It takes care of the setup of resources. One simply has to upload the app, and Elastic Beanstalk takes care of the setup and managing resources/services. Services like load balancing, scaling, health monitoring, and on-demand provisioning get handled by EBS.

Elastic Beanstalk provides Amazon AWS resources like EC2 and builds the supported platform for the project to run. It supports PHP, GO, Java, Node, .NET, Python, and Ruby. The Elastic BeanStalk console can manage most deployment tasks through the Elastic Beanstalk Console, like changing the size of EC2 instances and monitoring resources.

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16. What is S3 in AWS?

S3 or Simple Storage Service provides key-based object storage through a web service interface. Key can be any string that is assigned when an object gets created in the storage. It offers read-write consistency. Once the object is updated, the subsequent request receives the updated version of the object.

17. How is AWS IVM helpful in threat detection?

Firewall with policies.

18. How are S3 and EBS different from each other?

Simple Storage Service and Elastic Block storage are the two kinds of storage options provided by AWS for data storage. The differences arise mainly from their compatibility with other AWS services.

  • EBS is used only with EC2 instances. S3 comes with no such limitation, popularising its use outside EC2.  
  • EBS comes as a mountable volume while S3 provides read/write through software.
  • S3 suffers from write delays while EBS soars. 
  • EBS can bind with only one EC2 instance. On the other hand, multiple instances of EC2 can bind with S3.
  • S3 used versioning and cross-region replication for data backup. At the same time, EBS relies on snapshots and automated backups. 
  • S3 resources can be provisioned or decommissioned in runtime, supporting scalability. EBS needs manual intervention to increase or decrease resources.
  • Generally, S3 can store larger amounts of data when compared to EBS.
  • S3 replicates data across multiple availability zones while EBS stores replicas in only one availability zone. 
  • Amazon S3 stores large data sets, but EBS is the block storage unit for the EC2 instances, like hard drives for PCs.
  • Use cases for EBS are Software development and testing, NoSQL databases, organization-wide application.
  • USe cases for S3 back and restore, Big Data analytics, disaster recovery.

Google Cloud Platform(GCP)  Interview Questions and Answers

1. What is the difference between Google Compute App and Google Compute Engine? 

Google Compute Engine is an IAAS product that provides easy to run and flexible virtual machines with Windows and Linux as host OS. It runs on local storage, KVM, or durable storage.

Google Compute Engine integrates with other GCP technologies (e.g., BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage)  to make more complex systems.

While Google Compute App is a PaaS offering under Google Cloud Platform, it provides the platform for customers to run their services or applications. It offers Infrastructure and environment both to the client, so it forms the larger umbrella with IaaS under it.

2. Libraries for cloud storage on GCP

  • XML API and JSON API, used predominantly.
  • Google cloud platform console
  • Google storage client libraries
  • gsutil command-line tool. 

3. What is Google BigQuery?

Google Bigquery is a data warehouse that helps in storing data on the cloud. Data gets allocated dynamically. The data block size is needed only while provisioning resources and not before. This technique avoids storage wastage by not pre-allocating resources.

4. Authentication in google compute engine API

  • Directly with access tokens
  • Through client libraries
  • Oauth 2.0

Windows Azure Interview Questions and Answers

1. What are the different roles in Azure?

    1. Web Role - It to deploy Web Applications. 

    2. Worker Role - It provides a solution for background services along with Web Role.

    3. Virtual machine Role - It is used for managing virtual machines.

2. What are the different types of Blob Storage?

Blob storage provides storing of unstructured data. It uses HTTP/HTTPS to access data from anywhere over the internet. These are the three types of storage.

  1. Block Blob Storage - It contains small blocks with unique IDs.
  2. Append Blob Storage - It doesn’t allow updating or deleting data. Only append function is permitted.
  3. Page Blob Storage - It is larger than the other two, up to 8TB, used essentially for larger data sets.

3. How does Azure Advisor make Azure efficient?

Azure Advisor analyses the configuration and usage and provides suggestions to optimise Azure. It comes packaged with Azure for free. 

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How to prepare for a Cloud Computing Job Interview?

The role that a company is hiring for will mostly dictate the questions in the interview. It will also depend on the experience level of the interviewee. Freshers get asked more conceptual and use-case dependent questions. At the same time, experienced Cloud Engineers should expect more architecture and design-related questions. 

  • Prepare for one particular Cloud technology extensively. 

It is best to choose a technology one has experienced already and master it. All Cloud Computing technologies share the basic architecture and design. So, knowing one technology ( say, Microsoft Azure ) in and out will help to relate to other technologies better. It is advisable to learn the architecture of one specific technology. Some hands-on is also appreciated since it can set one apart from others candidates.

A fresher might start with Amazon Web Services since it has the most number of studying resources over the internet.

  • Familiarise with Cloud Computing Terminology

The interviewee must be able to converse easily in Cloud Computing jargon. To have the knowledge and to be able to convey it properly are separate fortes altogether. It isn’t mandatory to know all the keywords and nit-picks on industry vocabulary, but it helps to know the basic terminologies. 

  • Speak your thoughts 

A common Interview advice, but one that gets overlooked quite often, is to Speak your Thoughts. Doing so ensures that the interviewer is in sync with the interviewee’s thought process. And many times, interviewers aren’t strictly after the right answer, but the problem-solving mindset. 

Say, for example, AWS CloudFormation and AWS Elastic Beanstalk both provide deployment and monitoring ease for apps using AWS. They offer the same services with different degrees of control and usability. The interviewee can use one service to explain the same question ( or concept ) when he doesn’t know the other technology. This would be possible if the interviewee were transparent with his thought process and knowledge level.

  • Know the differences between the Cloud Platforms 

It can be advantageous to know the difference between the available Cloud Computing Technologies. Knowing the difference will help in understanding how different architectures tackle the same problem. In summary, learn the difference between AWS, GCP and Microsoft Azure. For Example, Kubernetes automates deployment, testing, scaling and operation of application containers across clusters of hosts. Google first deployed it to automate the deployment process by running containers in clusters. Soon, other technologies picked up and came out with their proprietary Kubernetes version.

The next step to go from here would be to study the individual Cloud Computing technologies - Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform. Amazon Web Service stands as the most popular among them and an industry favourite. These  AWS Interview Questions will help you get a jump start. Another good topic to start would be Big Data since Cloud Computing, and Big Data are generally coupled with applications.

Here is a list of recommendations for further reading around the related topics

  1. AWS vs Azure 
  2. 15 Cloud Computing Projects for Beginners 
  3. 15 AWS Project Ideas for Beginners
  4. Prepare for your Next Machine Learning Job Interview with Commonly Asked NLP Interview Questions and Answers
  5. Prepare for Your Next Big Data Job Interview with Kafka Interview Questions and Answers

In parting words, it is most important to remember that Cloud Computing is only all ‘good and fine’ until it isn’t raining, haha.

 

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