1. What distinguishes AWS, Azure, and GCP from one another?
Ans:
AWS, Azure, and GCP are leading cloud service providers, but they have different features, pricing, and strengths. AWS is well known for offering a vast array of services and well-established ecosystem. Azure works well with Microsoft products, making it a good fit for businesses that already use Windows tools. With its reasonably priced large data processing offerings, GCP is very good at machine learning and data analytics. Every platform has a unique global data center configuration, price structure and user interface.
2. How can you ensure high availability in a cloud environment?
Ans:
Ensuring high availability involves deploying applications across multiple regions or availability zones to prevent service disruptions. Load balancers help distribute traffic evenly, while redundancy in storage and compute layers minimizes single points of failure. Health checks, automatic failover, regular backups, and disaster recovery strategies are essential components for maintaining continuous service availability.
3. Can you describe how AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) functions?
Ans:
One service offered by AWS is Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets control access to AWS resources securely. With IAM, you can create users, groups, and roles and assign them specific permissions with policies. IAM makes guarantee that only systems and users with permission can access resources, following the principle of least privilege. It also supports multi-factor authentication, federated access, and temporary credentials.
4. What distinguishes public, private, and hybrid clouds?
Ans:
Public cloud is available over the internet and shared among multiple users, like AWS or Azure. Private cloud is used solely by one organization and is typically hosted in-house or by a third-party provider. Hybrid cloud combines both public and private, allowing data and applications to move between environments for more flexibility, security, and cost savings depending on business needs.
5. How would you move an on-premise application to the cloud?
Ans:
My migration strategy begins with evaluating the current application architecture and identifying components suitable for cloud deployment. I then choose a migration strategy such as lift-and-shift, re-platforming, or refactoring. After selecting the cloud provider and provisioning infrastructure, I conduct extensive testing before going live, followed by continuous monitoring to ensure performance and reliability.
6. What tools have you used for automating infrastructure?
Ans:
Common tools for infrastructure automation include Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Ansible for configuration management and CloudFormation in AWS. These tools help automate the provisioning, configuration and management of cloud resources, reducing manual effort and ensuring consistency across environments.
7. How do you manage security and compliance on cloud platforms?
Ans:
Security in the cloud is handled through IAM policies, encrypting data both at rest and in transit, regular audits, and system patching. Compliance involves meeting standards like GDPR, HIPAA, or ISO by enabling logging, monitoring, and access controls. Tools like AWS Config, Azure Security Center, and GCP Security Command Center help enforce compliance and identify vulnerabilities.
8. What is auto-scaling, and how have you used it?
Ans:
Auto-scaling automatically adjusts computing resources based on demand. For example, in AWS, auto-scaling launches new EC2 instances when traffic increases and terminates them when demand decreases. This helps maintain stable performance and optimize costs, especially for web applications with fluctuating workloads.
9. Could you explain your experience using cloud-based CI/CD pipelines?
Ans:
In cloud environments, CI/CD pipelines are created using tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, or Azure DevOps. The process includes automated code integration, testing, and deployment. This approach speeds up updates while minimizing errors. I’ve used pipelines to deploy containerized applications to Kubernetes clusters and serverless functions in various environments.
10. How do you track and cut cloud costs in real time?
Ans:
Cost tracking is done with software like AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, or GCP Billing. Optimization involves scaling instances using spot instances or reserved capacity and cutting unnecessary resources. Real-time dashboards and the detection of cost errors further support proactive cost reduction.
