Common Technical Interview Questions and Answers Update on March 30, 2020

Question 41

True or false: Open source tools can be used to manage private and public clouds.

A. True
B. False

Correct Answer

A. True

Explanation

IT and development teams can use a range of open source tools to manage applications and resources across a variety of cloud deployments. Some popular open source tools for cloud admins and developers include Chef, Puppet and Ansible.

Question 42

What does it mean when a public cloud provider has an availability of five nines?

A. No downtime
B. Unavailable for potentially five minutes a day
C. Unavailable for potentially five minutes a month
D. Unavailable for potentially five minutes a year

Correct Answer

D. Unavailable for potentially five minutes a year

Explanation

When an enterprise evaluates a provider, it needs to make sure the provider can meet application availability requirements. Five nines, or 99.999%, means that there is a chance your application will experience an estimated five minutes of downtime a year. To see your provider’s availability percentages, check the SLA.

Question 43

When an enterprise migrates an application to the cloud as is, without making any modifications, what is this called?

A. Rehost
B. Refactor
C. Rearchitect
D. Remove

Correct Answer

A. Rehost

Explanation

Rehost, also known as lift and shift, is when an enterprise moves an application from on-premises to cloud-based infrastructure without making any changes to the application’s design. This approach is often the fastest way to move an application to the cloud but might not enable an application to take full advantage of the benefits of cloud, including scalability. In some cases, refactoring or rearchitecting — which involve making changes to an application prior to migration — could be better options.

Question 44

Which of the following tools does not offer features to track and manage public cloud costs?

A. Azure Cost Management
B. RightScale
C. AWS Glue
D. CloudHealth

Correct Answer

C. AWS Glue

Explanation

Azure Cost Management, a native tool on the Azure cloud platform, along with third-party tools, RightScale and CloudHealth, offer features to help a business track, analyze and manage their public cloud spending. AWS Glue, however, is not a cost management tool; it is a managed service to automate extract, transform and load processes.

Question 45

True or false: Enterprises can physically ship their data to some public cloud providers to upload that data into the cloud.

A. True
B. False

Correct Answer

A. True

Explanation

Not every enterprise has access to a fast network. Without one, migrating data to the cloud can be a lengthy process. However, AWS, Microsoft and Google offer offline data migration services. In this model, an enterprise uploads and stores its data on a physical appliance, it ships that appliance to its chosen cloud provider and the provider then uploads that data to the cloud. Popular physical migration services include AWS Snowmobile, Azure Import/Export and Google Transfer Appliance.

Question 46

Which of the following terms refers to a deployment model in which an application runs in an enterprise’s private cloud or data center but uses public cloud resources to support spikes in user demand?

A. Cloud spiking
B. Cloud bursting
C. Cloud bubble
D. Cloud blasting

Correct Answer

B. Cloud bursting

Explanation

Cloud bursting refers to a deployment model where an application primarily runs on premises or in an enterprise’s private cloud but bursts to the public cloud when demand for compute capacity spikes.

Question 47

True or false: It is only possible to use a public cloud instance or VM on demand, rather than reserve one in advance.

A. True
B. False

Correct Answer

B. False

Explanation

While on-demand instance types are popular in public cloud, some cloud providers also let users reserve VMs or instances ahead of time. Examples of these reserved instance types include Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances and Azure Reserved VM Instances.

Question 48

Microservices are most closely related to what other established term?

A. API
B. AWS
C. SEO
D. PaaS

Correct Answer

A. API

Explanation

In recent years, API-based and microservices architectures have become common terminology among IT pros. While the two types of technology are related, it’s important to know the difference. Microservices is a type of architecture that divides functionality between small web services. APIs, on the other hand, are interfaces that can be used to interact with applications. Microservices often use APIs to communicate to other microservices.

At one point, microservices were more commonly associated with SOA, since they’re largely an outgrowth of that approach. But as the techniques and technologies matured, the ubiquity of APIs has pushed them to the forefront for microservices architects.

Question 49

When would a microservices architecture be favorable for a company?

A. If a cloud architecture requires scalability.
B. If an application would benefit from low coupling.
C. A and B.
D. None of the above.

Correct Answer

C. A and B.

Explanation

Microservices architectures are made up of loosely coupled, yet still independent services that can be deployed and scaled individually. To scale this type of application architecture, IT teams can scale specific components to optimize resource usage. Also, these services are not interdependent, enabling IT team to test them discretely.

Question 50

What is a notable disadvantage to using microservices?

A. There is the potential for too much granularity.
B. Complex testing is required.
C. Latency issues can occur during heavy use.
D. All of the above.

Correct Answer

D. All of the above.

Explanation

A microservices architecture requires extra effort to design communication pathways between services. Microservices are designed to relieve the frustrations of monoliths; however, failure is inevitable if IT teams don’t know the nuances of this architectural approach prior to deployment.