Cloud Services

Cloud interviews test whether you can choose managed services, design secure networking, and reason about cost and operations—not whether you memorized every product SKU. Strong answers connect provider offerings to workload shape, data model, identity boundaries, and team ownership.

This domain spans AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Cloudflare edge services, and provider-neutral fundamentals (IAM, VPC, managed databases, object storage, queues, serverless, cost awareness).

On interviews: for a Node.js API with uploads and async jobs, sketch compute choice, object storage, queue, database, IAM roles, VPC placement, and what you would monitor before launch.

Common pitfalls: over-provisioned always-on VMs for bursty traffic; public buckets; long-lived admin keys in CI; ignoring egress and log volume costs.

The trade-off is vendor convenience and speed versus portability, least privilege, and predictable bills.

Checklist:

• Match compute to traffic shape and state model.
• Use roles and short-lived credentials for workloads.
• Separate public edge from private data tiers.
• Use child topics for provider-specific depth.