Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
60 results for “Cloud Governance”
Cloud Exit Plan
A documented, costed assessment of what leaving a provider or service would require — increasingly a regulatory expectation and a better lock-in control than portability itself.
Account Vending
Automated creation of new cloud accounts pre-configured with the organisation's networking, identity, logging, guardrails and cost allocation.
Capital One's Data Centre Exit
A major US bank closed all eight of its data centres and moved fully to public cloud, treating governance automation as the enabling technology rather than a constraint.
Landing Zone
A pre-configured, governed cloud environment — accounts, networking, identity, logging, guardrails — into which workloads can be deployed safely.
Policy as Code
Expressing governance rules as executable code evaluated automatically, so compliance is prevented at creation rather than reported after the fact.
Service Quota
A per-account, per-region cap on how much of a resource may be used — a common and easily-avoided cause of scaling failures and DR failures.
Tagging Strategy
A defined, enforced set of metadata labels applied to every resource, without which cost allocation, ownership and lifecycle automation are all impossible.
Well-Architected Review
A structured self-assessment of a workload against defined pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability.
Cloud Pricing Models
The purchase options for cloud compute — on-demand, committed use, and spot — which differ by up to 90% for identical hardware.
Multi-Cloud
Deliberately running across more than one cloud provider — a decision with a much higher cost than the lock-in it is usually adopted to avoid.
Virtual Private Cloud
A logically isolated network inside a cloud provider, with an address range you control and explicit rules for what may enter and leave.
AI Gateway
A shared proxy in front of model providers that centralises routing, keys, quotas, caching, logging and safety policy.
Application Discovery
Establishing what applications exist, what they depend on, who owns them and whether anyone uses them — the step whose absence makes every later step a guess.
Application Portfolio Management
Maintaining an inventory of every application with its owner, cost, business value and technical health, and using it to decide what to invest in, replace or retire.
Architecture Decision Log
The ordered, immutable collection of a system's decision records, read as a history rather than as a specification.
Architecture Decision Record
A short, immutable document capturing one architectural decision, its context, the alternatives, and its consequences.
Architecture Principle
A durable, agreed rule that constrains design decisions in advance, stated with its rationale and its implications.
Architecture Review Board
A forum that reviews significant designs against standards, risks and strategy before commitment.
Autoscaling
Adding and removing capacity automatically in response to a demand signal, to track load without paying for peak all the time.
Availability Zone
One or more physically separate data centres inside a cloud region, with independent power, cooling and network, connected by low-latency links.
Backup Strategy
A plan for what is copied, how often, where to, how long it is kept, and — the part that decides whether it is real — how the restore is verified.
Blast Radius
The set of things that break, or become reachable, when one component fails or is compromised.
Blast Radius Reduction
The set of deliberate partitions — accounts, regions, zones, cells, tenants, deployment stages — that bound how far any single failure or compromise can reach.
Block Storage
A virtual disk attached to one instance at a time, presented as raw blocks and formatted with a filesystem — the storage databases and stateful workloads run on.
Chargeback and Showback
Attributing cloud cost to the teams that generate it — either informationally (showback) or by moving it onto their budget (chargeback).
Compliance Framework
A published set of control requirements an organisation is assessed against, which turns security posture into evidence somebody else will check.
Configuration Drift
Divergence between the infrastructure described in code and the infrastructure actually running, usually caused by manual changes.
Connection Proxy
A pooling layer between applications and a managed database that multiplexes many client connections onto a small number of database connections.
Control Plane and Data Plane
The separation between the machinery that makes changes to a system and the machinery that serves its traffic.
Cross-Zone Data Transfer
Charges incurred when data moves between availability zones within a region — invisible on architecture diagrams and a recurring surprise on cloud bills.
Data Catalog
A searchable inventory of datasets with their schema, owner, meaning, freshness, quality and classification.
An organisation is starting cloud adoption. Three teams want to deploy next month. What must exist first, and what can wait?
What must exist before anything reaches production Account structure. Separation by environment and by workload, because an account is the strongest isolation b
A DR test fails: the secondary region cannot launch enough instances. What happened, and what standing checks prevent it?
What happened Service quotas in the secondary region are far lower than in the primary , because nothing has ever run there at scale. Quotas are per account and
A dashboard has been wrong for three weeks. Nobody knows which upstream produced the table it reads. What is the governance failure, and what fixes it?
The failures, and there are three 1. No lineage. The question "which upstream produced this?" should be answerable in seconds by following a derived dependency
Design the network layout for a three-tier application in one cloud region. What are the decisions you cannot easily change later?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you know which network decisions are cheap and which are effectively permanent. This is a knowledge question with a clea
Equifax was breached in 2017 through a vulnerability with a patch available two months earlier. Beyond "patch faster", what architectural and governance failures does that imply?
The case, as publicly reported Apache Struts vulnerability CVE 2017 5638 was disclosed in March 2017 with a patch available. An internet facing dispute portal a
Finance wants to cut cloud spend by committing to one-year and three-year reservations. What do you commit to, and what could go wrong?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can turn a blunt cost mandate into a portfolio decision with a stated risk, rather than either refusing it or over c
The cloud bill has tripled in six months while traffic grew 40%. How do you find out why, and what do you expect to find?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you approach cost with the same rigour as latency, and whether you know where cloud money actually goes. How to find out
You are asked to choose between a cloud data warehouse and a lakehouse for a new analytics platform. How do you decide?
What actually differs The gap has narrowed considerably, so the decision turns on fewer things than the marketing suggests. Format ownership. In a lakehouse, da
You are asked to lead a migration of 300 applications to cloud. What happens in the first ninety days?
Days 1–30: discovery, and the foundation in parallel Discovery from evidence, not interviews. Network flow logs for dependencies (the only trustworthy source),
A serverless API works in testing and fails under load with connection errors. The database is at 5% CPU. Explain and fix.
The mechanism Serverless functions scale by creating independent execution environments , each with its own process and its own connection pool. Two hundred con
A team tells you backups run nightly and are retained for 30 days. What is missing from that answer?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you know that a backup is not a control until it has been restored — one of the most reliable ways to find an unrecovere
A team wants to build a new internal API on serverless functions. It will serve steady traffic of about 200 requests per second during business hours. What do you advise?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can apply the serverless trade off to a specific workload rather than treating it as a default good or a default bad
Choose storage for four workloads: a Postgres data directory, user-uploaded images, a shared build cache, and seven years of audit records.
Postgres data directory — block storage It needs low latency random reads and writes and a filesystem, and it attaches to one instance. That is precisely block
Cloud Governance
Preventive policy, tagging, quotas and cost and security guardrails.
Architecture Governance
Preventive, automated controls rather than review meetings.
Cloud Architecture
General material on designing for cloud platforms.
Cloud Databases
Managed relational, key-value, document and analytical services.
Cloud Migration
Per-application disposition, sequencing and the capability change underneath.
Cloud Pricing Models
On-demand, committed and spot, and the crossover arithmetic.
Cloud Storage
Object, block and file storage, and the access patterns each suits.
Cost Governance
Budgets, anomaly alerts, quotas and preventive policy.
Data Governance
Ownership, lineage, quality, catalogues and who may see what.
Multi-Cloud
Best-of-breed, portfolio and portable — three very different costs.
Autoscaling
Signals, delays and bounds — and the maximum that caps a runaway bill.
Availability Zones
The unit of correlated physical failure, and what zones do not protect against.
Backup Strategies
Scope, immutability, separation, and the restore drill that makes it real.
Compute Models
Instances, containers and functions, and what each is priced and shaped for.
Containers
Images, registries, immutability and the deployment model they enable.