Cloud Architect Interview Questions
10 curated questions with evaluation guidance for hiring managers.
How do you design a cloud architecture that is both highly available and cost-effective?
Should discuss multi-AZ deployment, auto-scaling, reserved vs. spot instances, right-sizing, and designing for failure. Look for understanding of trade-offs between availability and cost.
When would you recommend a multi-cloud strategy versus a single cloud provider?
Should discuss vendor lock-in, compliance requirements (Indian data localization), best-of-breed services, operational complexity, and cost considerations. Look for pragmatic reasoning.
Describe your approach to cloud security and the shared responsibility model.
Should clearly explain what the cloud provider secures vs. what the customer secures. Should mention IAM, encryption, network security, compliance frameworks, and Indian regulations (DPDP, RBI data localization).
How do you design for data sovereignty and compliance with Indian regulations?
Should discuss data residency, RBI data localization for financial services, DPDP Act requirements, and selecting Indian cloud regions. Practical knowledge of Indian regulatory landscape is essential.
Walk me through how you would migrate a legacy on-premises application to the cloud.
Should discuss assessment (6 R's of migration), phased approach, testing strategy, cutover planning, and rollback procedures. Look for risk awareness and practical migration experience.
How do you implement disaster recovery in the cloud?
Should discuss RPO/RTO targets, pilot light vs. warm standby vs. multi-region active-active, backup strategies, and regular DR testing. Look for cost-aware DR design.
Explain how you would design a serverless architecture for a high-traffic event-driven application.
Should discuss Lambda/Cloud Functions, event sources, cold starts, concurrency limits, cost at scale, and when serverless is not appropriate. Look for understanding of serverless limitations.
How do you manage and optimize cloud costs across a large organization?
Should discuss tagging, cost allocation, reserved capacity planning, FinOps practices, showback/chargeback, and tools for cost visibility. Look for experience driving organizational cost awareness.
Describe your approach to infrastructure as code and GitOps for cloud infrastructure.
Should discuss Terraform/Pulumi, module design, state management, CI/CD for infrastructure, and drift detection. Look for mature IaC practices and team collaboration patterns.
How do you evaluate and adopt new cloud services? What criteria do you use?
Should discuss maturity, pricing model, SLA guarantees, integration with existing stack, and exit strategy. Look for balanced approach between innovation and stability.
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