11 Most Common Cloud Computing Interview Questions & Answers: For Beginners & Experienced in 2023

Cloud Computing Interview Questions and Answers

In today’s world, communications have evolved by leaps and bounds so much so that we can speak to one another, sitting in different corners of the world within a matter of few seconds. The wealth of information is no longer limited to voluminous books and libraries. Irrespective of the topic or theme of concern, detailed information is available at your fingertips.

The World Wide Web paved the path for such access to information. However, in contemporary times, even more, is few. So a static web server might give you access to certain information, but that may not suffice always. The advent of cloud computing has extensively resolved this limitation. Cloud computing has enabled users to access a wide range of servers.

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Understanding Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing refers to the virtual space that helps deliver hosted sources over the Internet. This includes databases, analytics, servers, networking as well as intelligence. All this is done keeping flexibility, innovation, and cost-effectiveness in mind. This has come to be of great help for businesses, both mid-size and small. Cloud computing makes use of machine learning, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. It goes without saying that with cloud computing, there have been many revolutions in the way data and documents are handled, making it an exceptional addition to the computing world.

Consequently, the applications of cloud computing have become extremely widespread and almost unavoidable. For any digital and software oriented career, interview questions on cloud computing have become a frequent occurrence. We have discussed some of the fundamental cloud computing interview questions here. 

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Cloud Computing—Its History

In the simplest sense of the term, the process of renting a computing resource is “cloud computing.” The idea first came about around the 1950s. The top phases that have shaped cloud computing in its current avatar are-

• Idea: The period lasted during the 1960s and came to be with an introduction of the concepts of utility as well as grid computing. These were relevant until pre-internet times.
• Pre-phase: This phase ranged between 1999 and 2006. For all applications used as a service at this time, the internet was the main mechanism for delivery.
• Cloud: The phase of cloud actually began in 2007 with the formalization of SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS. Since then, leading organizations in the web and computer domains have come up with amazing breakthroughs in cloud computing.

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Interview performance helps the interviewer to decide the salary of a cloud engineer in India. So, how you perform in the interview directly affects your CTC. We have a list of basic cloud computing interview questions for freshers and experienced people to help them prepare for their big day with the right information.

These basic cloud computing interview questions are not exhaustive but will familiarise you with the basic concepts of cloud technology and help you to prepare for any interview questions on cloud computing if you’re venturing into this field. Practicing cloud analyst interview questions beforehand will offer you an edge over other candidates who may or may not have prepared in depth for the position.

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Here are the top cloud computing interview questions and answers that will prepare you to deal with complex cloud computing questions extended by employers. These interview questions on cloud computing also work as excellent cloud computing interview questions for freshers or simply as basic cloud basic interview questions to excel in an interview.

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Top Cloud Computing Interview Questions

Having an idea about the most popular cloud computing interview questions or cloud computing questions can help you prepare better for related interviews.

1. What are the advantages of Cloud Computing?

This cloud computing question must be answered with all the examples relevant to this time. Extending an outdated answer might lead recruiters to think your knowledge is limited to books. Here’s how you can approach this cloud computing question.

Cloud Computing technology helps the users avail of a more extensive network of global web servers. This directly boosts the productivity and performance of the web platform and makes development efficient in terms of cost and time. Cloud computing also increments the data storage and data backup capacities of the web servers. Due to the boosted interaction between different web servers, the server capabilities are made much more powerful. 

2. Describe the different cloud service models?

There are predominantly three models of cloud service. Each come with their own sets of advantages and are at variance with each other with regards to one or the other features. Before opting for one of them, let’s understand their characteristics and gauge how they fit within our individual requirements. 

• IaaS- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consists of highly automated compute resources. Businesses can avail of on-demand hardware resources through IaaS without having to make any upfront hardware purchase. IaaS is highly scalable and can assist in quickly accessing and monitoring computers, database storage, and other networking services. 
• PaaS-Platform as a Service (PaaS) is helpful in customizing applications that require cloud components. PaaS helps in streamlining the workflow in the situations which involve more than one developer. While developers can manage the applications, businesses get to use the network and storage. 
• SaaS- Software as a Service (SaaS) refers to the service model where applications are delivered to the user using cloud platforms, and the third party can then manage the applications. They are incredibly convenient to use since they do not require any additional installations. 

3. What are some of the popularly used cloud computing services?

Cloud computing has come to be used widely across industries. Some of the top players, in this case, are Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services, and iCloud, which is exclusively for the iOs users. These are the broadly used cloud platforms. However, there are emerging cloud services available in the market. Other popularly used cloud computing services include Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Oracle.

4. What are the main differences between public, private, and hybrid clouds?

Cloud deployment models vary, and understanding their suitability for different scenarios is essential. 

Public Cloud: Owned and managed by third-party providers, the public cloud allows multiple organizations to share computing resources over the Internet. It offers scalability, cost-effectiveness, and offloading infrastructure management. However, data security concerns and limited customization might be drawbacks.

Private Cloud: Solely dedicated to one organization, the private cloud can be on-premises or hosted by a third party. It provides increased control, security, and customization, which is ideal for businesses with strict data privacy needs and specialized workloads. But it may involve higher initial costs and require in-house management expertise.

Hybrid Cloud: Combining public and private clouds, the hybrid cloud allows seamless integration and data portability. Businesses can enjoy scalability and cost savings for non-sensitive data in the public cloud while keeping critical applications and data secure in the private cloud. Proper integration and data synchronization are crucial in this approach.

5. How does cloud security work, and what are the primary concerns?

Cloud security encompasses a comprehensive array of measures and protocols to safeguard data, applications, and infrastructure within cloud environments. To achieve this, various methods are employed: 

Data Encryption: Cloud service providers use encryption techniques to protect data during storage and transmission, ensuring that unauthorized access cannot compromise sensitive information. 

Access Controls: Cloud platforms implement robust access control mechanisms to manage user permissions effectively, preventing unauthorized entry to critical resources. 

Identity and Access Management (IAM): IAM solutions manage user identities, authentication, and authorization, allowing only authorized users to access specific resources. 

Firewalls: Cloud providers utilize firewalls to monitor and control network traffic, creating a protective barrier against unauthorized access and potential threats. 

Major concerns in cloud security include 

Data Breaches: Unauthorized access to sensitive data is a significant concern, emphasizing the need for robust security measures to prevent data breaches and safeguard confidential information. 

Insider Threats: Individuals with legitimate access to cloud resources, such as employees, can unintentionally or maliciously jeopardize data and systems.

Insecure APIs: Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) can be entry points for attackers. Ensuring robust API security is crucial to prevent vulnerabilities. 

Data Loss: Data loss may occur due to accidental deletion or hardware failure, making robust data backup and recovery mechanisms essential. 

Compliance and Regulatory Issues: Cloud providers must adhere to data protection and privacy regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS, as non-compliance can lead to severe legal and financial consequences. 

Shared Tenancy: In multi-tenant cloud environments, multiple users share resources, necessitating sufficient isolation and security measures to prevent data leakage and unauthorized access. 

Misconfigurations: Improperly configured cloud resources can expose sensitive data or create entry points for attackers. Regular monitoring and adherence to best practices are crucial to prevent misconfigurations. By addressing these concerns with diligence, cloud security can be bolstered and data integrity maintained.

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6. Define Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud integrates private and public cloud services to support parallel, integrated, or complementary tasks.

7. What is the difference between the Hybrid Cloud and Hybrid IT?

The hybrid cloud term is supposed to be integrating public and private clouds.

Hybrid IT is what results when hybrid cloud efforts in organizations become more of advanced virtualization and automation environments with various features. And there haven’t been a lot of success stories of organizations being able to really build and maintain real hybrid clouds.

They’ve done some things with OpenStack, but, for the most part, private cloud-inspired environments powered by VMware dominate. Therefore, a substitute term — hybrid IT — actually better describes the bulk of hybrid scenarios. This does not, however, change the need for clarity in terminology.

The hybrid cloud must involve some combination of cloud styles (private, public, community), but physical location is not a definitive aspect of the style. The bottom line is that most users of the hybrid cloud term have really meant hybrid IT thus far.

8. What is The Packaging of Hybrid Cloud? What are the two main types of packaged hybrid cloud? 

Packaged hybrid means you have a vendor-provided private cloud offering that is packaged and connected to a public cloud in a tethered way. Azure Stack from Microsoft is an excellent example of this packaging, but there is another approach as well. We call these two main approaches “like-for-like” hybrid and “layered technology” hybrid (spanning different technology bases).

Azure and Azure Stack typify the like-for-like hybrid approach. Azure Stack is not exactly the same as Azure in the public cloud, but they try to approximate it. AWS Outposts, as announced, can be used in a private cloud model (where no other companies have access). If so, it represents an example of the like-for-like approach.

However, the broader strategy represented by AWS Outposts would encourage a more distributed model where each Outpost is opened to near neighbours. Oracle Cloud at Customer (one of the original attempts at this) is also another example of this approach, but it is evolving toward a new style of cloud computing we call distributed cloud (see the Distributed Cloud section). Like-for-like solutions provide the “full-stack” but not necessarily the hardware, all managed by a single vendor.

The layered hybrid approach is based on integration across different underlying technology — a portability layer of sorts. This is where Google and IBM have focused. Google, with its recently announced Anthos (formerly its cloud services platform) and IBM with its cloud private as well as the direction it is headed in with the pending acquisition of Red Hat and Openshift, which also fits into this model. There are many challenges regarding this approach’s ability to fulfill on the vision of distributed cloud

9. What is a Distributed Cloud?

The distributed cloud may be defined as the distribution of public cloud services to different physical locations. They are specifically used to meet various kinds of compliance needs and performance requirements.  In contrast, operation, governance, updates, and the evolution of the services are the responsibility of the originating public cloud provider.

Distributed cloud computing is a style of cloud computing where the location of the cloud services is a critical component of the model. Historically, the location has not been relevant to cloud computing definitions, although issues related to it are essential in many situations. While many people claim that a private cloud or hybrid cloud requires on-premises computing, this is a misconception.

A private cloud can be done in a hosted data center or, more often, in virtual individual cloud instances, which are not on-premises. Likewise, the hybrid cloud does not require that the individual components of the hybrid are in any specific location. However, with the advent of distributed cloud, location formally enters the definition of a style of cloud services.

Distributed cloud supports the tethered and untethered operation of like-for-like cloud services from the public cloud “distributed” out to specific and varied physical locations. This enables an essential characteristic of distributed cloud operation — low-latency compute where the to compute operations for the cloud services are closer to those who need the capabilities. This can result in major upgrades in performance and reduce the risk of global network-related outages.

 Furthermore, distributed clouds also provide us with guaranteed quality of service (QoS), especially for mission-critical applications and mobile users. 

Read: How to become a good cloud engineer?

10. Define what MultiCloud is?

Multicloud computing may be defined as the deliberate use of the same type of cloud services from multiple public cloud providers.

This term has been challenging because, while there are three main use cases, there are other uses of the term in common use as well. And one of them is the use of multiple cloud providers for different purposes. A prevalent situation is for an organization to use AWS for infrastructure and Office 365 for the cloud office.

This is very clearly two various providers, but also clearly for two very different purposes. This is not a deliberate use of the two in any coordinated way, so that’s not really indicative of the primary intent of multi-cloud. There are also other multi cloud-oriented situations, such as relying on application providers to support multiple platforms underneath.

But multi-cloud is really a deliberate strategy to deal with and leverage the potential benefits (for example portability and vendor independence) of multiple cloud providers for, in most cases, the same or similar types of scenarios or things

Answering such cloud computing basics interview questions in-depth will enable recruiters to know your basics are polished, and you can easily take up the role knowing its foundation. 

11. What is a multi-cloud strategy?

The way most organizations adopt the cloud is that they typically start with one provider. They then continue down that path and eventually begin to get a little concerned about being too dependent on one vendor. So they will start entertaining the use of another provider or at least allowing people to use another provider.

They may even use a functionality-based approach. For example, they may use Amazon as their primary cloud infrastructure provider, but they may decide to use Google for analytics, machine learning, and big data. So this type of multi-cloud strategy is driven by sourcing or procurement (and perhaps on specific capabilities), but it doesn’t focus on anything in terms of technology and architecture.

Two of the major factors that drive the deployment of a multi-cloud strategy are redundancy and vendor lock-in concerns. Apart from these, other factors might also include the need for more price-competitive cloud services, speed, capacity, or the various other advantageous features that accompanies a particular cloud provider of a particular location. 

The next step, as they mature, is toward what we call multi-cloud management or governance. This step comes after you have multiple providers, and you need to have some semblance of control over the resultant environment. It can be simple, a single pane of glass for monitoring and then progressing from there. There may also be a multi-cloud architecture where you actually have a desire to make the workloads portable, either as a possibility or in actuality.

This leads to a focus on portability, similar in concept to Java. You could even go into very advanced environments like cloud bursting or dynamic figuring, which is the dynamic allocation of where you’re going to run workloads based on availability or spot pricing. Those things are pretty rare today. But with more and more advanced cloud use cases, these scenarios are becoming more real. In fact, with the advent of these new packaged hybrid types of environments, we may see more of that because it’ll be easier to do.

There are instances when multi-cloud is not so much a strategy as it is a situation that must be dealt with. The result of a merger or acquisition can lead an organization this way, as can other situations best described as evolutionary. Much of what is described here is applicable, but it should be noted that there are exceptions

12. What is Cloud-Native

Cloud native is a frequently discussed topic in the cloud computing basic interview questions. Let’s find out its basic definition to get started. 

Cloud-native definition: Something is cloud-native if it is created to leverage cloud characteristics.

Those cloud characteristics are part of the original definition of cloud computing. It’s all about capabilities delivered as a service that is scalable and elastic, metered by use, service-based, ubiquitous by means of internet technologies, and shared. Sometimes people will trade off one or more of these. For example, sharing can be problematic for some, and they may accept less elasticity as a result of not enabling sharing.

13. What is meant by Edge Computing, and how is it related to the cloud?

Unlike cloud computing, edge computing is all about the physical location and issues related to latency. Cloud and edge are complementary concepts combining the strengths of a centralized system with the advantages of distributed operations at the physical location where things and people connect. Edge is very common in IoT scenarios and is very different from the cloud. Cloud has never been about location. In fact, it has always been about the independence of location. That’s why private, public hybrid and all these other terms exist

There are many edge scenarios, but one of the more popular ones is where you have cloud and edge together, and the cloud provider (like Amazon with Greengrass) controls, runs and defines the architecture for what is out at the edge.

Edge and cloud are complementary and both part of a broader concept — distributed cloud. While there has been some confusion around these terms, greater understanding is happening and the majority of those pursuing edge computing strategies are now viewing edge as part of their overall cloud strategy.

14. State some of the key features of Cloud Computing.

This is one of the most popularly asked basic cloud computing interview questions for freshers, which exhibits your basic knowledge and promising skills in the cloud analyst interview questions. The following list contains some of the top features of cloud computing that you can extend in the interview to answer this question.

• Quality Of Service– Cloud computing provides its users with the best quality of service experience. Any compromise or irregularity in the said services can cause potential damage to the popularity of the company, and might result in loss of customers. 
• Flexibility–  In this dynamic competitive environment, scalability is one of the crucial elements for any company. However, scalability does not require companies to restart their servers since it can be done at any stage. Hosting in Cloud is one of the key features of cloud computing that enables its users to enjoy additional flexibility. Furthermore, cloud computing also provides flexibility in payment options, so companies no longer need to spend extra money on needless resources. 
• Easy Maintenance– Cloud Computing resources are regularly updated with various features that help to improve their capabilities. The servers can be maintained quite effortlessly, which means the downtime is very low, often equivalent to zero. 

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Cloud Computing- Top Advantages

Besides understanding what the top interview questions on cloud computing, and cloud computing interview questions for freshers are, take a look at the top advantages of cloud computing. These are often a part of your cloud basics interview questions, so prepare well!

• Money Saving: When on Cloud, you can easily access all company data. This helps save time as well as money as you start on new projects. Cloud-computing-related services mostly follow a pay-as-you-go format to utilize the resources as per requirements.
• Security: A cloud’s host primarily monitors security, extending a similar way to manage, utilize and store data but making it even better and more efficient compared to traditional in-house systems. According to a RapidScale study, close to 94 percent of businesses felt that security had gotten better after shifting to Cloud systems.
•     Mobility: The cloud computing concept enables mobile access to all corporate data using smartphones and linked devices.
•     Flexibility: Cloud offers heightened flexibility for businesses over traditional hosting over local servers. Enhanced bandwidth also becomes an immediate possibility that doesn’t need costly or complicated IT upgrades.

 Data backup and restoration: Once the data is in the Cloud, it is much easier to back it up and restore it using the Cloud.

•  Collaboration: Cloud applications improve collaboration by enabling groups of people to easily and quickly share information in the Cloud via shared storage.
•  Cost: Cloud computing saves businesses money on both hardware and software maintenance.
•  Storage space: The cloud provides an enormous amount of storage capacity for storing our important data, such as documents, images, audio, video, and so on, in one location.
• The vast number of jobs: There are a lot of jobs available related to cloud computing in India. On Naukri, as of date 17/06/2022, there are 112300+ jobs available.

• Sustainability– Cloud infrastructures enable companies to cut down on carbon footprint, paper waste, and commuter-related emissions and enhance energy efficiency simultaneously. 
• Competitive Edge– Implementing cloud-based solutions in businesses helps users stay one step ahead of their competitors in this highly competitive market. According to a study conducted by Verizon, 77% of the users of this technology have claimed that it has given them a competitive advantage over their competitors. 

Conclusion

Having a grasp on cloud basic interview questions can greatly influence your chances of getting your dream job, hence make sure you read through all the cloud computing basic interview questions and answers. We hope this cloud computing interview questions and answers guide will help you strengthen and expand your cloud computing knowledge base.

Surely, cloud engineers have a bright future ahead. With years passing by, the demand for cloud engineers is only going to increase. So, brush up your knowledge of the cloud, practice cloud basic interview questions and take up our course in cloud computing to add certification to your profile!

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