APIs, Networking & Integration Topics
API design, management, and integration patterns including REST, GraphQL, and other protocols. Covers API contract design, versioning strategies, error handling, idempotency, deprecation planning, and SDK/integration frameworks. Includes system-to-system integration, webhook patterns, and integration platform considerations. Excludes network infrastructure and network-layer protocols (see Network Architecture under Cloud & Infrastructure or a dedicated networking category if needed).
Service Integration and Interoperability
Focuses on how services and components work together within cloud and distributed systems, and on patterns and trade offs for integrating systems. Candidates should explain common integration patterns across compute, storage, databases, networking, and monitoring, describe when to use managed platform services versus custom implementations, and demonstrate application programming interface first thinking including interface design, versioning, and contract management. Discussion should cover interoperability challenges such as data formats, authentication and authorization, latency and throughput considerations, fault isolation, orchestration, and observability. Candidates should also be able to reason about security and operational concerns when integrating services, testing integration points, and strategies for graceful degradation and compatibility across service boundaries.
Cloud SDK and API Integration
Demonstrate effective use of cloud provider software development kits and service application programming interfaces to build reliable integrations. Candidates should cover authenticating and authorizing API calls, client library usage patterns, handling rate limits and throttling, error models and retry policies, schema and contract management for APIs, using service emulators and mocks for testing, and combining SDK based interactions with automation and infrastructure as code workflows. Interviewers will evaluate trade offs between using managed SDKs direct API calls and higher level tooling.