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.
Terraform State Management
Practices for managing infrastructure state produced by Terraform and ensuring safety and recoverability. Topics include choosing and configuring remote state backends and locking to prevent concurrent modifications, encryption and access controls for state data, splitting state across workspaces or accounts, migrating and recovering state safely, handling secrets that appear in state, detecting and reconciling drift, and operational patterns for safe state changes and rollbacks.
Infrastructure Strategy and Platform Decisions
Focuses on making technical infrastructure and platform choices with consideration for business impact and organizational factors. Topics include build versus buy trade offs, vendor and platform evaluation, scalability and reliability considerations, migration and deprecation planning for legacy systems, total cost of ownership, developer productivity impact, organizational readiness, and stakeholder involvement. Candidates should show how to structure these decisions, evaluate technical and non technical risks, and communicate clear rationale and implementation plans.
Containerization and Virtualization Trade Offs
Examines trade offs between containers and virtual machines and the complexity of orchestrated environments. Topics include hypervisor and virtual machine basics, container isolation and resource models, performance and overhead comparisons, security and attack surface differences, when to prefer virtual machines versus containers, single container versus orchestrated multi container setups, operational complexity versus benefits, and criteria for selecting the appropriate platform at different scales.
AWS and Linux Troubleshooting
Demonstrate the ability to diagnose and remediate operational issues across cloud resources and Linux hosts. Expect scenarios such as virtual machine connectivity problems, security group or network access control misconfiguration, identity and access management permission errors, managed database access issues, and operating system problems like file permission errors, hung processes, disk exhaustion, and network connectivity faults. Candidates should describe evidence collection from system logs, common command line diagnostics, safe remediation steps, and how to escalate or rollback changes when necessary.
Infrastructure as Code Tools
Practical skills for authoring, deploying, and managing Infrastructure as Code templates and configurations across cloud platforms. Candidates should be able to author, read, and modify templates or configuration files for native platform tools such as AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager templates or Bicep, and Google Cloud Deployment Manager, as well as for multi cloud tools such as Terraform. Key areas include file formats such as YAML and JSON, declaring resources, passing parameters or variables, and emitting outputs, together with expressing resource dependencies, conditions, and mappings. Candidates should be able to write templates for common infrastructure patterns including networking such as virtual private clouds, subnets, and security groups, compute resources such as virtual machines and instances, and storage resources such as buckets and storage accounts. They should know how to deploy templates to create stacks or equivalent constructs, perform stack updates and change sets or plan and apply workflows, handle rollbacks and deletions, and manage state for tools that require it including remote state and state locking. Additional important skills are modularization through nested stacks or modules, template validation and linting, integration with continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, drift detection and remediation, and basic troubleshooting of template errors and deployment failures. Interview tasks may include writing or modifying short templates, explaining the lifecycle of a deployment, and comparing trade offs between native templates and multi cloud tooling.
Container Networking Fundamentals
Networking concepts specific to containerized environments and orchestration platforms. Topics include container network models such as bridge, host, and overlay networks, port mapping and network address translation for containers, and container network interface plugins and how they enable different connectivity models. Coverage includes service discovery and in cluster Domain Name System behavior, how networking differs between local single host containers and orchestrated clusters, load distribution mechanisms such as kube proxy and ingress concepts, network policies for traffic control and isolation, and common troubleshooting approaches for container networking issues. Practical skills include diagnosing container interface and route issues, interpreting container network namespaces, packet capture in container contexts, and understanding performance and security trade offs when designing container networking for production.
Governance, Policy Enforcement, and Guardrails
Implementing policy as code, compliance checking, and safety mechanisms into infrastructure systems. Topics include automated cost controls, security policy enforcement, resource naming standards, tagging strategies, and preventing common misconfigurations. Discussion of balance between flexibility and governance.
Kubernetes High Availability and Multi Cluster
Design and operate Kubernetes deployments that span multiple clusters and provide high availability and disaster recovery. Topics include multi cluster topologies and trade offs such as active active versus active passive, cross cluster networking and service discovery patterns, global traffic management and DNS failover, backup and restore strategies for stateful workloads, replication and data consistency approaches, cluster lifecycle and upgrade orchestration to achieve zero downtime, security and policy boundaries across clusters, and cross cluster observability and tooling for centralized operations. Interviewers assess architecture choices, failure modes, failover testing, and operational readiness.
Terraform Module Design and Organization
Best practices for authoring reusable infrastructure modules and organizing infrastructure code for scale and maintainability. Topics include designing clear and stable module inputs and outputs, naming and variable conventions, documentation and examples, semantic versioning and registries, composition patterns to avoid tight coupling, module testing and validation strategies, release and adoption processes for shared modules, and strategies to handle provider and account boundaries safely.