Cloud Engineer interview questions and answers.

Questions

Technical questions to practise out loud

1. 01

   What is the difference between public and private subnets?

   A public subnet routes to an internet gateway and can host resources with public addresses; a private subnet has no direct inbound internet route and usually uses NAT or private endpoints for controlled egress.

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2. 02

   How do you apply IAM least privilege?

   Grant identities only the actions and resources required for a bounded task, prefer short-lived workload roles, constrain conditions, separate administration, analyze real usage, review exceptions, and continuously remove unused permissions.

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3. 03

   How do you design multi-zone autoscaling?

   Distribute stateless capacity across independent zones, balance traffic only to healthy instances, size minimum capacity for a zone loss, autoscale on demand signals with cooldowns, and keep stateful dependencies resilient too.

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4. 04

   How do you optimise cloud costs?

   Allocate cloud spend with tags and accounts, remove idle resources, right-size from utilization, autoscale, match commitments to steady load, use lifecycle storage tiers and spot for interruptible work, then monitor unit cost.

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5. 05

   How do you design cloud disaster recovery?

   Start from business RTO and RPO, choose backup-restore, pilot-light, warm-standby or active-active accordingly, replicate data consistently, codify infrastructure and DNS failover, and run regular isolated recovery tests.

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6. 06

   How do you use encryption in cloud systems?

   Use TLS in transit and managed encryption at rest, separate data keys from centrally controlled key-encryption keys, restrict and audit key use, rotate safely, protect backups, and design for revocation and recovery.

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7. 07

   How do you build cloud observability?

   Standardize metrics, structured logs and traces across accounts and services, propagate correlation and deployment metadata, centralize querying with controlled access, define SLO dashboards, and govern retention and high-cardinality cost.

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8. 08

   How do you manage cloud infrastructure as code?

   Manage cloud resources through reviewed, versioned modules with pinned providers, remote locked state, policy and security checks, reusable environment composition, drift detection, and staged plans for destructive changes.

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9. 09

   How do you secure cloud networking?

   Segment networks by trust, default-deny inbound and restrict egress, use private endpoints, least-privilege security groups, centralized inspection where justified, protected DNS, flow logs, and no broad administrative exposure.

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10. 10

    How do you plan a cloud migration?

    Inventory applications and dependencies, classify migration strategies, define security, data and availability requirements, build a landing zone, migrate a low-risk wave first, validate outcomes, and keep rollback and decommission plans.

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