Cloud fundamentals interview questions
4 questions across 2 sections, in the order you would learn them. Every answer here is one that works — but an answer you have read is not an answer you can give, so use Test yourself and say it out loud first.
The cloud you actually need
Read the section that teaches thisIf this comes up in an interview
How do you manage permissions for a service?
A dedicated identity per service with least privilege: exactly the resources it needs and nothing more. Broad wildcard grants are convenient and turn a small compromise into a large one.
How do you handle secrets in production?
A managed secret store, injected at runtime as environment variables, never baked into an image or committed. Scoped per environment and rotatable without a code change.
How do you avoid a surprise cloud bill on an AI project?
Budget alerts from the first day, resource tagging so the bill can be attributed, shutting down idle GPU instances which cost the same as busy ones, and deliberate log retention rather than keeping everything forever.
Deploying one AI service, step by step
Read the section that teaches thisIf this comes up in an interview
Walk me through deploying a containerised AI API to production.
Build the image in CI and push it to a registry. Deploy to a managed container service with its own least-privilege identity, secrets read from the secret manager, a health check, minimum and maximum instance counts, and a timeout that fits the model calls. Add logs with request ids, budget alerts, and a rollback path to the previous image.
Then they push further
Users complain the first request in the morning is slow. Why?
The service scaled to zero overnight and the first request waits for a container to start. Keep a minimum of one instance, shrink the image, and move slow start-up work out of the request path.
How do you roll back a bad deploy?
Managed services keep previous revisions. Shift traffic back to the last good revision, which takes seconds, then investigate. That only works if deploys are immutable images with clear versions.
What gets marked up. Strong answers cover secrets, least privilege identity, scaling limits and rollback. Hard-coded keys or no cost controls are marked down.
These are the questions for one topic. The whole question bank covers every topic on the site.