Question 28: What are the five essential characteristics of cloud computing according to the NIST definition?
Question 44: What are the primary differences between private, public, community, and hybrid cloud deployment models?
Virtualization
Categories and Types of Hypervisors
Question 1: Briefly describe what critical instructions are and why they presented a challenge for x86 system virtualization
Question 27: Explain the concept of “trap and emulate” in virtualization and when it can be used
Question 29: Compare and contrast the three most common approaches to virtualization on x86 architectures
Binary Translation and Full Virtualization
Question 3: Explain the key difference between shadow page tables used in full virtualization and the memory management approach used in Xen
Question 33: What are shadow page tables in virtualization and why are they important?
Question 48: Compare and contrast the memory management approaches in binary translation vs. hardware-assisted virtualization. Explain which is more efficient and why
OS-Assisted Virtualization
Question 2: Briefly summarize why the physical main memory can simply be partitioned for Xen guests
Hardware-Assisted Virtualization
Question 4: Which statement about hardware-assisted virtualization is correct?
VM vs. Container
Question 7: Why are container images typically smaller than VM images? Give two reasons
Containers
Linux Containment Features
Question 5: Briefly explain what the chroot system call on Linux does and how it is useful for containerization
Question 6: Compare and contrast namespaces and cgroups in Linux containment
Question 49: Explain how Docker leverages both namespaces and cgroups to provide container isolation. Provide specific examples of which aspects of isolation each technology enables
Docker
Question 8: Explain the relationship between Dockerfile, image, and container
Kubernetes
Question 31: What is autoscaling in Kubernetes and how does the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler calculate the desired number of replicas?
Question 41: What are the key components of Kubernetes and how do they work together to manage containerized applications?
Cloud Infrastructure Management
OpenStack and SDN
Question 50: Describe the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) approach and explain how it benefits cloud infrastructure compared to traditional networking
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Question 9: Briefly explain how Infrastructure-as-Code addresses snowflake servers
Question 36: What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and how does it address the challenges of “configuration drift” and “snowflake servers”?
Question 51: In the context of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), explain the difference between declarative and imperative approaches. Give an example of each and discuss their trade-offs
VM Migration
Question 11: What is the primary purpose of live VM migration, and what components must migrate?
Question 12: List and briefly explain stages of Xen live migration
DevOps
Question 10: Explain the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment
Question 34: Describe the blue/green deployment strategy and its advantages
Question 37: Explain the concept of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) in cloud environments and list its key practices
Question 52: Explain the concept of “canary deployments” in continuous delivery. What specific advantages does it offer over blue/green deployments, and what types of applications would benefit most from this approach?
Cloud System Design
Fallacies of Distributed Computing
[No specific questions found]
Quality Attributes
Question 19: Explain the difference between availability and reliability in cloud systems
Failure/Faults
Question 39: What are the three main approaches to achieving fault tolerance in distributed systems, and how do they differ?
Dependability
[No specific questions found]
Availability
Question 18: Match scenarios to failover strategies (Active-Active/Active-Passive), justify
Question 20: What does “five nines” availability mean, and how much downtime does it represent annually?
Microservices
Question 23: What are microservices and two advantages over monoliths?
Question 24: What is a service mesh, and what microservices problem does it solve?
Question 26: What are the key disadvantages of the microservices architecture?
Question 57: A company currently uses a traditional monolithic application hosted on-premises. They want to migrate to a microservices architecture in the cloud. Outline a step-by-step migration strategy that minimizes risk and business disruption
Layering/Tiering
[No specific questions found]
Monolith vs. Distributed
[Covered in microservices questions]
Redundancy
[Covered in fault tolerance questions]
Scalability
Question 22: Differentiate horizontal and vertical scaling, give examples
Question 40: Compare and contrast the scaling approaches for stateless vs. stateful components in cloud architectures
Fault Tolerance Patterns
Question 56: What is the “shared responsibility model” in cloud computing? Explain how security responsibilities are typically divided between cloud providers and customers across different service models
Load Balancing
Question 55: Compare and contrast the three types of load balancing (DNS-level, IP-level, and application-level) in cloud environments. For each type, provide a specific scenario where it would be the most appropriate choice
Cloud Service Models
IaaS/PaaS/SaaS
Question 25: Select appropriate service model (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS) for scenarios
Serverless
Question 47: How do serverless/Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms work, and what are their advantages and limitations?
Community/Private/Public Cloud
[Covered in Question 44]
Data Center Basics
[No specific questions found]
Cloud Deployment Models
Question 46: Explain the concept of cross-cloud computing and the different approaches to implementing it
Question 53: You are designing a cloud architecture for a financial application that processes transactions. The application needs to [handle high volume, maintain consistency, scale dynamically, maintain availability]. Choose an appropriate architecture pattern and justify your choice
Edge and Fog Computing
Question 17: You are designing a cloud-based ML system with training and inference components. Why deploy the inference service at the edge rather than the cloud?
Question 54: Explain the concept of “data gravity” and how it affects cloud architecture decisions, particularly in multi-cloud and edge computing scenarios
Cloud Sustainability
Lifecycle Emissions
Question 15: What is the difference between embodied and operational carbon emissions in cloud computing?
Question 42: Describe the lifecycle emissions of datacenter hardware and explain why operational emissions might not be the only environmental concern
Measuring Footprint
Question 58: Explain the key challenges in accurately measuring the carbon footprint of cloud workloads at the application level. Describe two emerging approaches that aim to overcome these challenges
Practical Implementation Considerations
[No specific questions found]
Energy Efficiency
Question 14: Explain energy-proportional computing and its importance for cloud data centers
Question 30: Explain the concept of energy proportionality in data centers and why it’s important for cloud sustainability
PUE
Question 13: Name/explain an issue with PUE metric
Question 45: Describe the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, its limitations, and alternative metrics for measuring datacenter efficiency
Other Metrics (WUE/CUE/ERE/DCIE/GEC)
[Covered in Question 45]
Carbon-Aware Strategies
Question 16: What is carbon-aware computing and how does it differ from energy efficiency?
Question 32: Explain the carbon intensity concept and how it’s used in carbon-aware computing
Question 38: What are the differences between Average Carbon Intensity and Marginal Carbon Intensity when measuring the environmental impact of computing?
Question 60: Compare and contrast “carbon offsetting” with “carbon reduction” strategies for cloud providers. What are the limitations of each approach?
Question 61: A global company operates cloud workloads across multiple regions. Outline a carbon-aware scheduling strategy that would optimize for [lowest carbon emissions, lowest latency, regulatory compliance]
Question 62: How might advances in specialized hardware (like Arm processors, TPUs, or FPGAs) impact the sustainability of cloud computing?
Jevons Paradox
Question 35: What is Jevons’ Paradox and how does it apply to energy efficiency in cloud computing?
Question 59: Describe the “Jevons paradox” and explain how it relates to energy efficiency improvements in cloud computing. What strategies might counteract this effect?
Additional Topics
Database Design
Question 43: Explain the CAP theorem and its implications for distributed database design in cloud environments
Architecture Patterns
Question 21: A financial tech company processes high daily transaction volumes. Choose and explain the best architecture