Cloud & Infrastructure Topics
Cloud platform services, infrastructure architecture, Infrastructure as Code, environment provisioning, and infrastructure operations. Covers cloud service selection, infrastructure provisioning patterns, container orchestration (Kubernetes), multi-cloud and hybrid architectures, infrastructure cost optimization, and cloud platform operations. For CI/CD pipeline and deployment automation, see DevOps & Release Engineering. For cloud security implementation, see Security Engineering & Operations. For data infrastructure design, see Data Engineering & Analytics Infrastructure.
Legacy System Assessment
Evaluating legacy applications and infrastructure to determine cloud readiness, technical debt, dependencies, compliance and regulatory constraints, and organizational barriers to modernization. Topics include inventorying legacy assets, dependency and integration analysis, risk and cost assessment, migration approaches and trade offs (rehost, refactor, rearchitect, replace), prioritization of migration waves based on business impact and complexity, and planning mitigations for data, compliance, and continuity. Candidates should explain how they identify migration blockers, estimate effort and risk, and develop phased modernization strategies that balance business value and technical feasibility.
Cloud Infrastructure and Hybrid Architectures
Understanding cloud provider infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP), virtualization concepts (hypervisors, container orchestration), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) considerations, hybrid cloud and on-premise integration, cloud cost optimization, and vendor-specific architecture patterns.
Platform Architecture for Organizational Scale
Designing internal platforms and infrastructure to support large engineering organizations and evolving teams. Topics include developer experience and self service platform design, deployment platforms that enable safe frequent releases for hundreds of engineers, platform automation and observability patterns that provide cross service visibility, governance and operational policies, service onboarding and lifecycle, and how to evolve platform capabilities as headcount and service count grows. Candidates should discuss trade offs between centralized platform services and team autonomy, metrics for platform health, and approaches to encourage adoption while minimizing operational friction.
Infrastructure and Operations Strategy
High level infrastructure strategy and operational considerations including cloud selection, on premise versus cloud trade offs, multi cloud strategies, cost optimization, organizational impact of infrastructure choices, and long term infrastructure roadmaps. Includes considerations for platform teams, centralization versus decentralization of operations, vendor selection, compliance and security constraints, and how infrastructure strategy affects reliability, latency, and business objectives.
Cost Optimization and Business Justification
Covers evaluating and reducing costs across system architecture and procurement while building a financial case for change. Candidates should be able to identify cost drivers at the infrastructure and application level, including compute sizing, storage choices, data transfer, and managed service versus self managed trade offs. Expect concrete optimization techniques such as right sizing resources, using lower cost capacity options, reserved capacity, and moving to managed services when operational cost and reliability justify the premium. Also covers measurement and governance practices including cost tagging, billing analysis, budgeting, and continuous monitoring. On the business side, candidates should quantify savings and value using total cost of ownership and return on investment calculations, cost avoidance and efficiency metrics, payback period estimation, and sensitivity analysis for key assumptions. This topic includes evaluating procurement and supplier strategies, understanding short term versus long term value, balancing cost reductions with performance, maintainability, and supplier relationship health, and preparing clear cost estimates and business justification for stakeholders.
Infrastructure Automation and Provisioning
Covers designing, implementing, and operating automated infrastructure provisioning and configuration using Infrastructure as Code practices and complementary automation patterns. Candidates should be able to select and author declarative infrastructure definitions with tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, and Azure Resource Manager templates, and discuss configuration management tools such as Ansible, Puppet, or Chef. Core skills include modular and reusable code organization for multiple environments, variable and output management, remote state management and locking, idempotency and atomicity of operations, and version control integration for infrastructure artifacts. Candidates should understand testing and validation practices including linting, plan or dry run validation, unit and integration testing of infrastructure changes, and drift detection and remediation. The topic includes strategies for safe changes and rollbacks, change coordination, error handling and recovery, and deployment patterns such as canary and blue green where applicable. It also encompasses automation and orchestration patterns, immutable infrastructure and self healing practices, autoscaling and scaling policies, automated patching and updates, secrets handling patterns using secret managers, and integrating observability and monitoring into automated workflows. Finally, candidates should be able to reason about trade offs between imperative and declarative approaches, scaling Infrastructure as Code across large projects and teams, and security and compliance considerations for automated provisioning.
Amazon Web Services Core Services
Comprehensive knowledge of the foundational Amazon Web Services that are commonly used to design, deploy, and operate cloud applications. This includes compute services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud for virtual machines and instance families, Amazon Web Services Lambda for serverless functions, and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk for managed application platforms; storage services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service for object storage, Amazon Elastic Block Store for block volumes, and Amazon Elastic File System for shared file storage; database services such as Amazon Relational Database Service for managed relational databases, Amazon DynamoDB for NoSQL, and Amazon ElastiCache for in memory caching; networking and content delivery including Amazon Virtual Private Cloud networking concepts, subnets, security groups, load balancers, and Amazon CloudFront; container and orchestration options such as Amazon Elastic Container Service and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service; and management and security services including Identity and Access Management, Amazon CloudWatch monitoring and logging, Auto Scaling, and cost and service limit considerations. Candidates should understand core service characteristics, common configuration choices and trade offs, operational considerations such as high availability and fault tolerance, basic security and compliance approaches, performance and cost optimization, and guidance for selecting one service over another for typical application patterns.
Cloud Cost Optimization and Financial Operations
Covers strategies and organizational practices for minimizing and managing cloud and infrastructure spend while balancing performance, reliability, and business priorities. Candidates should understand cloud cost drivers such as compute, storage, data transfer, and managed services; pricing models including on demand pricing, reserved capacity commitments, savings plans, and interruptible or spot offerings; and engineering techniques that reduce spend such as rightsizing, autoscaling, storage tiering, caching, and workload placement. This topic also includes financial operations practices for continuous cost management and governance: resource tagging and cost allocation, budgeting and forecasting, chargeback and showback models, anomaly detection and alerting, cost reporting and dashboards, and processes to gate changes that affect spend. Interviewees should be able to estimate recurring costs and total cost of ownership, identify and quantify optimization opportunities, weigh trade offs between cost and business objectives, and describe tools and metrics used to monitor and communicate cost to stakeholders.
Cloud and Infrastructure Architecture
Design of cloud and infrastructure solutions from simple cloud applications to end to end cloud systems and large scale infrastructure. Topics include stateless versus stateful design, VPC and networking basics, security groups and firewalls, multi environment management, deployment topology, capacity planning, global distribution, cloud native services, infrastructure as code, and operational concerns for sustaining large scale cloud environments.