General/High Level Cloud Questions — to test your theoretical cloud knowledge.

What is cloud computing?
Name Key cloud platform providers?
Which one would you choose — Azure, AWS or GCP if you have to make a decision?

Look at following link for general guidance:

Factors on how to choose a Public Cloud Platform Provider

This is a common question faced by organisations wishing to choose from number of cloud platform providers or to cloud…

pandeyvaibhav.medium.com

What is the need of cloud computing?
What problems does Cloud computing solves?
What are cloud computing service models?
What are cloud computing deployment models?
What is the difference between service and deployment models?
What is Hybrid Cloud Computing?
What is Edge computing?
What is IAAS, PAAS and SAAS and can you give common examples for each one of them?
What are key infrastructure services available on leading Cloud platforms?
What are key enabler for cloud services and platforms?
What is joint responsibility model in the cloud?
Do you know how Azure/AWS/GCP offers their services to its global customers? Think from Regions, Availability Regions, Data Centers, Edge networks perspective?
What are the differences in the Region, Zones and Data Centers?
What does blast radius means with reference to cloud services perspective?
What does an ephemeral compute means in cloud computing?
What does an Service Level Agreement mean in relation to public cloud service?
What is Site Reliability Engineering(SRE), apologies this questions is duplicated in number of my published articles but redundancy is important so that readers understand that this is very fundamental topic which will appear in almost very aspect of cloud journey.
How can you improve upon Non Functional Requirements by utilizing cloud computing services and infrastructure? Think from Availability, Scalability, Resilience, Disaster Recovery?
What are the enabling technologies for cloud computing?

Answer: Key Technologies which enables cloud computing are:

HTTP: HyperText Transfer Protocol.
REST: Representation State Transfer
API: Application Programming Interface
Virtualization:
Containerization:
JSON
YAML

Managing Azure/Public Cloud Infrastructure

What are different ways of spinning infrastructure within Azure cloud platform?
What are CLI based options to spin infrastructure on Azure Cloud Platform?
What is the quickest way to spin a infrastructure on Azure Cloud Platform?
What is an ARM template?
What are different types of ARM templates and why should you choose an standalone or Linked/Nested templates?
When should you choose to create infrastructure using ARM template and how can you trigger ARM templates?
What is Terraform? What language does Terraform use to describe infrastructure?
What is main.tf file in Terraform?
What is a state file in Terraform?
What are Terraform Modules and benefits do they offer?
How can you trigger infrastructure creation in an unattended manner?
What is an ARM?
What is CloudFormation within AWS? What is its Azure Equivalent?

Cloud Networking

What is Virtual Private Network in Azure?
What are different types of Network appliances in Azure
How can you block network traffic from particular region, country on Azure? What device should you configure?
How can you achive network isolation in Azure?
What is Virtual Private Cloud(VPC) in AWS or in GCP?
What is a Network Security Group(NSG) in Azure mean?
What is a Load Balancer Service, different types of load balancers in Azure/AWS or GCP?
Can you make a rough diagram on how you will configure an Load Balancer in a public cloud platform like Azure, AWS or GCP?

Cloud Security

What is an Identity Provider?
What is a Service Principle? When is it used and how can you create one using Azure CLI, Azure Powershell?
What are different ways of authenticating between services between Cloud hosted applications? Can you put a design in place?
What is OAuth? How can you utilize and what are the benefits?
What do you mean by JWT tokens and how they can be used.
What is Azure Active Directory?
What are different subscription levels in AAD?
What Conditional Access Policy? What Azure AD tier enables this offering?
What is Multi Factor Authentication? What Azure AD tier enables this offering?
What is Privileged Access Management, why should you use it? What Azure AD tier enables this offering?
What services are available with Azure Key Vault? How can you spin a Azure Key Vault?
What do you store in Azure Key Vault?
How can you read secrets from the Azure Key Vaults in your application?
What does Microsoft managed and customer managed key means?
How can you ensure security of your container images?

Cloud Compute

How do you choose different compute options within Azure/AWS or GCP?

Answer: You have number of options on all three platforms. You should ask few questions to yourself or your business like:

What type of workload to run — website dynamic or static, API, ML Model, repetitive tasks

You should also ask how often it should run — all the time, on-demand, scheduled, etc.

This diagram should help you with most compute services on Azure:

What compute options are available to you as a IAAS options within Azure/AWS or GCP?
What compute options are available to you as a PAAS options within Azure/AWS or GCP?
What compute options are available to you as a Serverless options within Azure/AWS or GCP?
How Cloudshell interface interfaces on Azure, AWS and GCP works?
What types of applications can be deployed to Azure App Services?
What does tier means in terms of cloud service offering?
How are cloud platforms providers bill for services they provide?
How can you deploy docker based application containers on Azure PAAS?
How can you implement API’s on a public cloud platforms like Azure, AWS and GCP? Whats services can you utilise?
What is API Management?
What is a service mesh concept and why should it be used?
What do you understand by the terms container?
What is the use of dockerfile?
What is the general syntax used in a Dockerfile?
What type of applications can be deployed to Azure Functions?
What are integration services are offered on Azure cloud platform?
What does runtime means in context of Azure Functions or GCP Cloud Functions?
Do you know types of runtime available in Azure or in GCP for Serverless functions services? Which one you will choose for your software development and why?
How can you protect confidential settings in your apps deployed in Azure cloud platform?
What integration services are made available by Azure cloud platform?
What integration services are made available by AWS cloud platform?
What integration services are made available by GCP cloud platform?

Cloud Applications Architecture & Design

How can we quickly move applications currently hosted in an On-Prem environment to cloud without incurring major costs in upgrades, re-platforming, etc?
How are you going to design cloud platform services that your organisation wants to use for different cloud, compute, storage and networking? Hint — what kind of governance, structure, control and security aspects you will put in place?

Cloud Storage

Storage

What is Azure Storage?
What types of services are available with Azure Storage?
Do you know different scenarios and when you should use what services?
What is an Azure Storage Access key?
What is a Azure Storage Shared Access Signature?
What are the key differences between Access Key and Shared Access Signature?

Databases

What are different database options available on Azure?
What is the difference between Azure PAAS SQL, Azure SQL and Managed SQL?
What does IOPS means?
How do you choose correct disc size for your use case?
What is CosmosDB and what are its advantages?
How can you encrypt your Database discs? Is it Microsoft managed service or customer has to manage on its own?

Disc Storage Options

What are different disc storage options available on Azure?
What is Gen 1 and Gen 2 Storage in Azure?

Costing Cloud Resources

Reducing Costs

What are the costliest services in any public cloud platform?
How can you quickly reduce costs on services or applications your company has hosted in any public cloud platforms?