30+ Interview Questions for Cloud Engineers

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Updated August 1, 2023

Knowing how to answer some of the most often-asked interview questions for cloud engineer positions can improve your odds of succeeding in landing the role. Regardless of your background and experience, the way you answer interview questions can have a direct impact on its outcome. Being familiar with the questions that you're likely to encounter during an interview is a valuable skill, but it requires research.

In this article, we list some of the most widely encountered interview questions in cloud engineer interviews and provide some sample answers to help you prepare.

Interview questions about experience and background

Here are some interview questions to expect regarding your experience and background:

What are the main qualities you look for in a new job?
What do you consider to be your biggest strengths?
Do you have more experience as a team player or working alone, and which do you prefer?
Can you describe a major professional challenge that you were faced with? How did you manage to overcome it?
How would you deal with a client who wants an application with higher availability than their budget can handle?
Why do you think you are right for this role?

In-depth cloud engineer interview questions

Here are some of the general questions you should expect in an interview for a cloud engineer position:

What are the main large-scale cloud computing software platforms available at the moment?
What is cloud privacy?
What are the different layers of cloud computing architecture?
How do you use APIs in cloud services?
What are the different phases involved in cloud architecture?
Can you talk about the different data center deployments of cloud computing?
What are the most important components of AWS?
What is Hypervisor in cloud computing, and what are its types?
What are the layers of Platform as a Service architecture?
What is the difference between cloud computing and mobile computing?
What version control systems have you used in previous roles and why?
What kind of DevOps have you previously used and why?
Did you ever experience a major security breach at one of your previous cloud computing-related jobs and if so, how did you handle it?
What is a multi-cloud strategy?
What is edge computing, and how is it related to cloud computing?
Can you tell me about your experience with UDP?
How do you keep up with the latest trends and practices in cloud computing?

Cloud engineer interview questions with sample answers

Predrag Tasevski, head of cybersecurity at Mondu and a mentor for Springboard’s Cyber Security Career Track, provides sample answers for some of the top cloud engineer interview questions:

1. What are the main differences between cloud architecture and standard architecture?

Sample answer: “These terms are often used interchangeably and are easily confused. Standard architecture means you have servers that are maintained on-premise by the organization. Cloud means that the server is located elsewhere and the maintenance is outsourced to the cloud provider, which is known as shared responsibility. Cloud architecture is becoming popular because maintaining standard architecture is expensive.

Cloud is also easy to deploy and scale. Scaling standard architecture requires purchasing hardware, installing, testing, and deploying it to production. With cloud architecture, you just need to write a few lines of code to scale it as much as you want.

Another key difference is availability and uptime. Cloud architecture ensures everyone has equal access to the data, regardless of location.”

2. What are the most important metrics in cloud computing?

Sample answer: “Confidentiality, integrity and availability, otherwise known as the CIA triad, are the most important metrics. When working with a cloud service provider, you should also consider response time. If something bad happens, what is the response time for someone to fix the issue?

Other important metrics are computing resources, as these affect your ability to scale the system up or down. So this means hardware resources, like memory and storage.”

3. What is a good way of securing data for cloud transport?

Sample answer: “There’s no difference between securing data for cloud transport versus standard architecture. This process includes things like encryption, a virtual private network (VPN), multi-factor authentication, access control, data loss prevention (DLP) and vulnerability assessments.”

4. What do you think are the main benefits of cloud computing?

Sample answer: “The main benefit of cloud computing is that it allows users to freely and easily backup and store large amounts of data on powerful and secure servers. This is usually much more cost-effective than storing data locally, therefore, improving productivity.”

5. Can you briefly explain some of the different cloud service models?

Sample answer: “There are three main cloud service models:

Infrastructure as a Service: This allows users to access various hardware resources without needing to purchase and install them. It's highly scalable, mainly due to it being highly automated, meaning that it offers each user exactly the resources they need.
Platform as a Service: This is a way to manage and customize applications that require cloud components. It's especially helpful in situations where multiple developers work on the same project, allowing each to contribute separately toward a common goal.
Software as a Service: This is a service model that implies various apps being made available to the end-user via cloud platforms and subscriptions. They are usually very convenient to use, as they don't require additional installations and run on multiple devices from any location with an internet connection."

6. What are the different types of models commonly used for deployment in cloud computing?

Sample answer: “Public cloud is cloud infrastructure owned and operated by a third-party cloud services provider such as AWS, Google Cloud Provider or Microsoft Azure. This is also known as a shared cloud because computing resources are shared by different organizations, even though their data remains segregated. A private cloud means only one person or organization owns the hardware and services, which means they are responsible for maintaining it.

Private cloud is popular with government agencies and fintech companies because of compliance regulations. A hybrid cloud is a combination of public and private clouds. Companies often use hybrid clouds to keep costs down. They’ll use the private cloud to store sensitive data, such as customer information, and the public cloud for non-confidential data.

Finally, community cloud is cloud architecture shared by a group of organizations with similar requirements for security, compliance and performance. For example, a group of pharmaceutical companies might use a community cloud because they’re subject to the same compliance regulations.”

7. Briefly describe how security management is handled within cloud computing.

Sample answer: “Security is a crucial aspect of IT-related services of any kind, especially those entirely based on remote servers. The main aspects are identity management, which provides specific users with the authorization to access cloud services; access control, which is the permission given to users to have full controlling authority over another user within the same cloud environment; and authentication and authorization, which are the protocols that provide various permissions solely to authorized and authenticated users.”

Please note that none of the companies mentioned in this article are associated with Indeed.