Cloud fundamentals

Provider-neutral cloud interviews test IAM, VPC networking, managed databases, object storage, queues, serverless platforms, and cost awareness. Strong candidates explain the concept once and map it to AWS, GCP, or Azure examples when asked.

Subtopics: IAM, VPC/networking, managed databases, object storage, queues, serverless, cost awareness.

On interviews: draw a three-tier app in a VPC with public load balancer, private app subnets, managed database, object storage for uploads, and a queue for email—then list IAM roles and cost drivers.

Common pitfalls: one shared admin role for humans and CI; databases in public subnets; using relational DB as blob store; queues without idempotency.

The trade-off is portable mental models versus needing provider-specific names in real projects.

Checklist:

• Least privilege for humans and workloads separately.
• Private data tiers with controlled egress.
• Right storage for access pattern and durability.
• Estimate cost before choosing always-on compute.