50+ Cloud Computing Interview Questions You Must Know

By 2030, the global cloud computing market is predicted to generate US$ 2,390,184.5 million in sales. From 2025 to 2030, the global cloud computing market is predicted to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 21.2%.

By 2025, the global market for public cloud computing is projected to have grown to a value of 723.42 billion USD. This includes the platform, infrastructure, software, administration, security, advertising, and business processes that are provided by public cloud services.

Preparation for an interview on cloud computing is based on sound knowledge of concepts, security, and best practices. This guide will take you through the roughest cloud questions and answers, thanks to which you will walk through any of the situations above.

Sites you must follow with this guide:

• Master Key Topics: Learn cloud computing's fundamental and advanced concepts to tackle any interview question on cloud computing.
• Cloud Security: Understand cloud security, its relevance, and how to address security-related risks.
• Core Security Components: Get to learn the moderation among these components regarding encryption, access controls, and compliance.
• Boost Confidence: Have well-structured answers to the cloud computing interview questions that are asked time and again.
• Bonus PDF Download: Attain even more intermediate and advanced-level cloud questions to maximize your refinement.

With this guide, you will get the information and self-confidence to clear any cloud computing interview and further expand your career in the realm of cloud security!

1. What is Cloud Technology?

A cloud is a mixture of networks, services, hardware, storage, and interfaces, which assists in the delivery of computing as a service. It generally has three users. They are end-users, business management users, and cloud service providers. The end-user is the user of services offered by the cloud. The liability for the data and the services by the cloud lies with the cloud business management user. The cloud service provider is the one responsible for taking care of or handling the maintenance of the IT resources of the cloud. The cloud serves as the shared hub center for its consumers to satisfy their computing requirements.

2. What are the Cloud Storage Levels?

Cloud storage device mechanisms implement general levels of storing data, including:

• Files: These are groups of data that are organized into files that reside in folders.
• Blocks: A block is the smallest level of data that is accessed individually. It is the lowest level of storage and closest to the hardware.
• Datasets: Data sets structured into table-based, delimited, or record format.
• Objects: Data and its related metadata with it are stored as web-based resources.

Every one of the above levels of data storage has a corresponding type of technical interface. This interface is for a specific type of cloud storage device and the cloud storage service exposes its API.

3. What are the three service models present in cloud deployment?

The three service models that can be deployed in the cloud are infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and application as a service.

4. What is infrastructure as a service?

Infrastructure as a service offers access to the operating system of the server and enables users to install whatever applications they want on it.

5. What is a platform as a service?

Platform as a service offers a dashboard through which users can upload files, and AWS automatically places them on the server.

6. What is software as a service?

Software as a service is a pay-as-you-go model in which users pay a monthly fee to use the software, irrespective of the server it resides on or the software installed on the server.

7. What is the difference between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS?

• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

1. Provides virtualized computing resources like servers, storage, and networking.
2. Users manage operating systems, applications, and configurations.
3. Example: AWS EC2, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines.

• PaaS (Platform as a Service)

4. Offers a platform with tools and frameworks for developers to build applications.
5. Manages underlying infrastructure like servers and databases.
6. Example: Google App Engine, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Microsoft Azure App Services.

• SaaS (Software as a Service)

7. Delivers fully managed applications accessible via the Internet.
8. Users only interact with the software; no infrastructure management is required.
9. Example: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Dropbox.

Each model differs in terms of control, flexibility, and ease of use, catering to various business needs.

8. What is the benefit of cloud computing for hosting websites?

Cloud computing offers an affordable approach to solving hosting problems, without the requirement of expensive servers, troubleshooting, and maintenance.

9. Describe the Cloud Computing Architecture.

Cloud computing architecture consists of front-end (user interface, client devices), back-end (servers, storage, databases), and network (internet connectivity). It includes service models like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, along with components of cloud security such as firewalls, encryption, and identity management. This architecture ensures scalability, security, and efficient resource management for cloud-based applications.

10. What are the Cloud service providers in a cloud ecosystem?

Cloud service providers are commercial companies or vendors that develop their capabilities. Commercial vendors sell to cloud consumers. As opposed to this, a company may choose to become an internal cloud service provider to its own employees, partners, and customers, either as an internal service or as a profit center. Cloud service providers also develop applications or services for such settings.

11. Who are the Direct customers in a cloud ecosystem?

Users often take advantage of services that your business has created within a cloud environment. The end-users of your service have no idea that you’re using a public or private cloud. As long as the users are concerned, they’re interacting directly with the services and value.

12. Who are the Cloud Consumers in a cloud ecosystem?

The people and teams in your business unit utilize various forms of cloud services to achieve a task. A cloud consumer might be an individual developer who utilizes computing services from the public cloud.

13. What are the primary constituents of the cloud ecosystem?

The components of the cloud ecosystem that decide the way you perceive the cloud architecture are:

• Cloud consumers
• Direct customers
• Cloud service providers

14. How do you deploy disaster recovery (DR) for a business-critical cloud application?

Disaster recovery (DR) is critical for business continuity during outages, attacks, or hardware failure. A robust DR plan consists of the following:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Establish tolerable data loss (RPO) and downtime window (RTO).
• Backup and Replication: Leverage cross-region replication, AWS Backup, or Azure Site Recovery to have up-to-date backups.
• Failover Plans: Use active-active (hot standby) or active-passive (warm/cold standby) architectures.
• Testing and Automation: Periodically test DR plans using chaos engineering tools such as AWS Fault Injection Simulator or Gremlin.

15. What are the challenges of operating Kubernetes at scale in a cloud environment?

Operating large-scale Kubernetes clusters is operationally and performance-intensive. Key areas to tackle are:

• Cluster autoscaling: Utilize Cluster Autoscaler or Karpenter to scale node numbers dynamically according to workload needs.
• Workload optimization: Deploy horizontal pod autoscaler (HPA) and vertical pod autoscaler (VPA) to manage efficient resource use.
• Networking and service mesh: Utilize Istio or Linkerd to manage inter-service traffic and security.
• Observability and troubleshooting: Utilize Prometheus, Grafana, and Fluentd to monitor logs, metrics, and traces.
• Security hardening: Employ pod security policies (PSP), role-based access control (RBAC), and container image scanning to avoid vulnerabilities.

16. How do you monitor cloud performance and troubleshoot issues?

Monitoring solutions assist in the identification of performance bottlenecks, security risks, and overuse of resources. Popular monitoring tools are:

• AWS CloudWatch: Monitors metrics, logs, and alarms.
• Azure Monitor: Offers application and infrastructure insights.
• Google Cloud Operations: Provides real-time logging and monitoring.

17. How does containerization enhance cloud deployments?

Containers bundle applications along with dependencies, resulting in them being lightweight, portable, and scalable. Containers consume fewer resources compared to virtual machines because several containers can run on a single OS.

Docker and Kubernetes facilitate quicker deployment and rollback. They also scale up with ease using orchestration tools such as Kubernetes and Amazon ECS/EKS.

18. What is a service mesh, and why is it used in cloud applications?

A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that facilitates service-to-service communication in microservices-based cloud applications. It offers:

• Traffic management: Facilitates intelligent routing and load balancing.
• Security: Enforces mutual TLS encryption for secure communication.
• Observability: Monitors request flows and logs for debugging.

Popular service meshes are Istio, Linkerd, and AWS App Mesh.

19. What is a multi-cloud strategy, and when would a company want to use it?

A multi-cloud strategy is taking several cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) to prevent vendor lock-in and enhance resiliency.

Firms opt for this strategy whenever they require disaster recovery geographic redundancy, wish to take advantage of exclusive services by various providers (e.g., AWS for computational power, GCP for machine learning), or need regional rules compliance that only allows certain providers.

20. What is the cloud usage monitor?

The cloud usage monitor mechanism is a self-contained and lightweight piece of software that is tasked with gathering and processing the IT resource usage metrics. Cloud usage monitors may be of varying types based on what kinds of usage data these are intended to gather and how the usage data must be gathered. The following are 3 generic agent-based implementation types.

• Monitoring Agent
• Resource Agent
• Polling Agent

21. How is Resource Replication done in Cloud Computing?

Resource Replication is the development of multiple copies of the same IT resource. It is generally done when an IT resource's performance and availability need to be increased. The virtualization technology is utilized to put into practice the resource replication mechanism in order to duplicate the cloud-based IT resources.

22. What are some of the main characteristics of Cloud Computing?

The following are some of the most important features of cloud computing:

• Agility: Facilitates rapid and cost-effective re-provisioning of resources.
• Location Independence: This implies that the resources are accessible from anywhere.
• Multi-Tenancy: The resources are shared by a large number of users.
• Reliability: Computation and resources can be reliable for access.
• Scalability: Dynamic data provisioning facilitates scalability.

23. What is a virtual private cloud (VPC), and why is it significant?

A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a logically separate part of a public cloud that enables users to launch resources in a private network environment. It offers enhanced control over networking settings, security policies, and access management.

In a VPC, users may specify IP address ranges with CIDR blocks. Subnets can be established to isolate public and private resources, and network ACLs and security groups assist in enforcing network access policies.

24. What is a load balancer and how does it work in the cloud?

Load balancers send incoming network traffic to several servers to provide high availability, fault tolerance, and improved performance.

There are various types of load balancers:

• Application load balancers (ALB): Function at Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS), routing traffic according to content rules.
• Network load balancers (NLB): Function at Layer 4 (TCP/UDP), offering ultra-low latency routing.
• Classic load balancers (CLB): Legacy choice for balancing between Layer 4 and 7.

25. What is IAM (identity and access management), and how is it used?

IAM is a system that manages who has access to cloud resources and what they are allowed to do. IAM ensures the principle of least privilege and protects cloud environments.

Users and roles in IAM establish identities with certain permissions, policies authorize or deny access through JSON-based rules, and MFA provides an additional security feature for important operations.

26. What are network ACLs and security groups, and how do they compare?

Security groups and network ACLs (access control lists) manage incoming and outgoing traffic to cloud resources but operate at different levels.

• Security groups: These are firewalls that permit or block traffic by rule. They are stateful, so modifications in incoming rules automatically carry over into outgoing rules.
• Network ACLs: Regulate traffic at the subnet level and are stateless. They need direct inbound and outbound rules for traffic to go back and forth.

27. Describe Docker's role in cloud computing.

Docker is an increasingly popular application development, shipping, and operation platform using containers.

It streamlines the generation and deployment of containers by making available a normalized format (Docker image) containing all of the dependencies.

Docker Engine enables containers to run reliably on any infrastructure, making it easy to deploy and scale applications on cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

28. What is Kubernetes, and how does it connect to cloud computing?

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that organizes and manages containerized applications across clusters of hosts.

It offers functionalities like service discovery, load balancing, self-healing, and rollouts and rollbacks.

Kubernetes makes it easy to deploy and manage containerized applications on hybrid and multi-cloud environments, facilitating the use of cloud computing resources more efficiently.

29. Explain the application of APIs in cloud services.

APIs for cloud services provide a means of interaction and integration of applications with cloud platforms, services, and resources programmatically. APIs dictate how software entities should communicate to allow developers access to cloud offerings like storage, databases, processing, and artificial intelligence capabilities. APIs enable cloud services automation, orchestration, and integration within applications, giving flexibility and scale.

30. What is a microservices architecture?

Microservices architecture is an architectural pattern that organizes an application as a set of loosely connected, independently deployable services. Each service is designed around discrete business capabilities and can be independently developed, deployed, and scaled. Microservices encourage modularity, flexibility, and continuous delivery, enabling complex applications to be more easily developed and maintained in cloud-native environments.

After I started my preparation for the interviews in cloud computing, I felt overwhelmed by the immense variety of subjects-from security to deployment models to best practices. It was the time when I got a structured guide to Cloud Computing Interview Questions, and everything changed for me because it helped me to know why cloud security is something important and how to confidently approach these tricky questions.

After diving deeper into the components of cloud security encryption, identity management, and compliance went through real-life cloud security interview questions and answers, which boosted my confidence considerably. With the help of this cloud questions guide, I was able to pass the interview and get my dream job!

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• Advance Your Cloud Expertise

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• Learn from Cloud Experts

Gain access to expert-led webinars, training, and real-world case studies covering cloud architecture, security best practices, and optimization strategies at your own pace.

• Expand Your Professional Network

Engage with cloud professionals through LinkedIn, forums, and industry events to stay updated on trends, share insights, and unlock new career opportunities. Also, explore GSDC as they provide a different range of certifications.

Mastering Cloud Computing Interview Questions is essential for anyone looking to land a job in this ever-evolving field. By understanding different cloud questions, their key concepts, security measures, and best practices, you’ll be well-prepared for any interview. Don’t forget to download our exclusive PDF for even more advanced and intermediate-level questions to refine your skills and stay ahead.