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.
Networking, VPC, and Connectivity
Deep understanding of AWS VPC architecture including subnets (public and private), route tables, Network Address Translation (NAT), internet gateways, and VPC endpoints. Knowledge of security groups and network ACLs. Understanding of VPN and AWS Direct Connect for hybrid connectivity. DNS and Route 53 routing policies.
Observability and Monitoring Architecture
Designing and architecting end to end observability and monitoring systems that scale, remain reliable under load, and do not become single points of failure. Topics include deciding which telemetry to collect and why including metrics logs traces and events, instrumentation strategies, collection models such as push versus pull, high throughput telemetry ingestion and pipeline design, time series storage and compression, aggregation and partitioning strategies, metric cardinality and retention tradeoffs, distributed tracing propagation and sampling strategies, log aggregation and secure storage, selection of storage backends and time series databases, storage tiering and cost optimization, query and dashboard performance considerations, access control and multi tenancy, integration with deployment pipelines and tooling, and design patterns for self healing telemetry pipelines. Senior level assessments include designing scalable ingestion and aggregation architectures, storage tiering and query performance optimization, cost and operational tradeoffs, and organizational impacts of observability data.
Cloud Basics AWS Fundamentals
Basic AWS concepts relevant to DevOps: EC2 instances, S3 storage, IAM for access control, basic networking (VPCs, security groups), and understanding how cloud services differ from on-premises infrastructure.
Networking Fundamentals
Foundational knowledge of how networks operate and how to reason about network behavior. Core concepts include the TCP IP model and common protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, DNS, and DHCP; subnetting and address allocation; routing and switching fundamentals; VLANs and layer two segmentation; NAT and private addressing; firewall and access control behavior; VPNs and tunneling; ports and application layer protocols. Candidates should also be able to apply these fundamentals to troubleshoot connectivity and performance issues at a conceptual level, explain the TCP three way handshake, congestion and retransmission causes, and reason about where problems occur in the stack.