Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
60 results for “Cloud Storage”
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.
Object Storage
Flat, HTTP-addressable storage for immutable blobs with rich metadata — effectively unlimited, cheap, and not a filesystem.
Durability vs Availability
Two different storage guarantees — whether data survives, and whether it can be reached right now — routinely conflated because both are quoted in nines.
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.
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.
Storage Tiering
Moving data between access tiers as it cools, so rarely-read data is not paying hot-storage prices.
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.
Account Vending
Automated creation of new cloud accounts pre-configured with the organisation's networking, identity, logging, guardrails and cost allocation.
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.
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.
Bloom Filter
A compact probabilistic structure that answers "is this key definitely absent, or possibly present?" — no false negatives, tunable false positives.
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.
Chargeback and Showback
Attributing cloud cost to the teams that generate it — either informationally (showback) or by moving it onto their budget (chargeback).
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 Lakehouse
A pattern that puts warehouse-style transactions, schema and governance on top of cheap open-format object storage.
Database Index
A secondary structure that lets the engine find rows without scanning, trading write cost and storage for read speed.
Dropbox's Move Off S3
Dropbox moved the majority of its file storage off Amazon S3 onto custom infrastructure, reporting savings that its S-1 filing put at roughly $75 million over two years.
Egress Cost
The charge for moving data out of a cloud provider or across its zones and regions — usually the least-anticipated line on a cloud bill.
Identity and Access Management
The system of record for principals, credentials and permissions, and the policy engine that decides what each principal may do.
Infrastructure as Code
Defining infrastructure in version-controlled declarative files that a tool reconciles against the real environment.
Instance Family
A group of instance types sharing a resource profile — general purpose, compute optimised, memory optimised, storage optimised, accelerated — chosen by which resource the workload…
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
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
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
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
Netflix built its own CDN; Dropbox moved storage off S3. Both are usually wrong. What conditions made them right, and how do you test for those conditions?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can extract the conditions from a famous decision rather than the decision itself. These two cases are the most comm
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 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 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
Design a URL shortener handling 100 million new links per month and 10 billion redirects. Where is the real difficulty?
What the interviewer is testing The classic warm up. What is being assessed is not whether you can shorten a URL — it is whether you do capacity arithmetic befo
In the 2017 AWS S3 outage, the status page could not report the outage because it depended on S3. What does that tell you about designing status and control systems?
The case, as publicly reported On 28 February 2017, an authorised engineer running an established playbook to debug an S3 billing issue in us east 1 entered a c
Cloud Storage
Object, block and file storage, and the access patterns each suits.
Cloud Architecture
General material on designing for cloud platforms.
Cloud Databases
Managed relational, key-value, document and analytical services.
Cloud Governance
Preventive policy, tagging, quotas and cost and security guardrails.
Cloud Migration
Per-application disposition, sequencing and the capability change underneath.
Cloud Pricing Models
On-demand, committed and spot, and the crossover arithmetic.
Multi-Cloud
Best-of-breed, portfolio and portable — three very different costs.
Storage Costs
Tiering, lifecycle policies, retrieval charges and minimum durations.
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.
Data Lakes & Lakehouses
Open formats on object storage with transactional metadata on top.
Disaster Recovery
Backup-restore, pilot light, warm standby and active-active postures.
Edge Computing
Moving compute towards the user, and what cannot follow it.
Infrastructure as Code
Declarative infrastructure, drift, state files and rebuild-from-empty.