Cloud Computing Interview and Exam Questions: Part 1
On my cloud computing exam, I demonstrated eventual consistency by writing "answers will converge later" on every question. The grade was highly available, but not consistent with my expectations.
Quick tests on cloud basics are a hiring superpower. A 5-minute screen on elasticity vs scalability, what CAP actually says during a partition, or what stubs do in RPC separates buzzword tourists from engineers who can steer production. It saves teams from burning an hour on candidates who can’t distinguish CPU from queue depth, and it spotlights the folks who can reason about trade-offs, not just name the latest framework. In short, you learn who deserves the deep-dive loop and who should be gently escorted back to the blogosphere.
Knowing the answers to these questions turns you from “person who hopes the cloud behaves” into “person who makes the cloud behave.” Interviews stop feeling like oral defenses of your dignity and start feeling like guided tours through your brain. You’ll spot CUVE-style cost traps before the CFO does, choose CP vs AP without flipping a coin, and explain RPC timeouts without invoking mysterious cosmic rays. In design reviews, you’ll trade awkward silence for crisp trade-offs, and in on-call you’ll replace panicked guesswork with “ah, that’s a partition plus a too-eager retry policy.” Translation: fewer 3 a.m. pages, more smug, well-rested you.
And yes, this isn’t random trivia, it’s the through-line of modern systems. Map/Reduce vs Spark? You’ll know which knob to turn. Containers vs VMs? You’ll know when YAML is enough and when you need a hypervisor. Load balancers, gossip, CAP—suddenly the whiteboard is your playground, not your punishment. If you want the full arc, the questions are distilled from the beats in my book. Read it, ace the interviews, lower the bill, and the next time someone says, “Kubernetes ate my homework,” you’ll gently correct them, fix the HPA target, and still make it to lunch.
Knowing the answers to these questions turns you from a person who hopes the cloud behaves into person who makes the cloud behave. Interviews stop feeling like oral defenses of your dignity and start feeling like guided tours through your brain. You’ll spot CUVE-style cost traps before Finance does, choose CP vs AP without flipping a coin, and explain RPC timeouts without invoking mysterious cosmic rays. In design reviews, you’ll trade awkward silence for crisp trade-offs, and in on-call you’ll replace panicked guesswork with “ah, that’s a partition plus a too-eager retry policy.” Translation: fewer 3 a.m. pages, more smug, well-rested you.
And yes, this isn’t random trivia, it’s the through-line of modern systems. Map/Reduce vs Spark? You’ll know which knob to turn. Containers vs VMs? You’ll know when you need a hypervisor. Load balancers, gossip, CAP: suddenly the whiteboard is your playground, not your punishment. If you want the full arc, the questions are distilled from the beats in my book. Read it, ace the interviews, lower the bill, and the next time someone says, “Kubernetes ate my homework,” you’ll gently correct them, fix the HPA target, and still make it to lunch.
