Cloud Architect Interview Guide
Ace your Cloud Architect / Lead Platform Engineer interview. Enterprise-grade AWS & GCP architectures, EKS/GKE deep dive, 200+ real interview scenarios — all tied to one unified enterprise reference architecture.
How to Use This Guide
Section titled “How to Use This Guide”Every page is framed from the perspective of a central infrastructure team at an enterprise bank. You design the platform; downstream teams are your tenants.
Every topic ties back to one unified enterprise architecture — AWS Organizations with Network Hub, Security, Shared Services, and Workload accounts. This is not isolated knowledge — it’s one connected system.
Each page has: Theory | AWS vs GCP Tabs | Terraform | Architecture Diagrams | Interview Scenarios (4-8 per topic)
Study Roadmap
Section titled “Study Roadmap”Week 1: Foundations
Section titled “Week 1: Foundations” IAM Fundamentals Roles, policies, AssumeRole, GCP service accounts, impersonation, Workload Identity Federation
Landing Zones — Concepts Control Tower, OUs, SCPs, GCP Resource Manager, org policies, account factory
Landing Zones — Architectures 5 enterprise patterns: startup, mid-size, regulated, multi-cloud, global
Networking — VPC Design VPC fundamentals, subnets, CIDR, DNS, load balancing (ALB/NLB/GCP Global LB)
Networking — Connectivity Transit Gateway, GCP NCC, Shared VPC, Direct Connect, hybrid, multi-region
Networking — Security Network Firewall IPS/IDS, WAF, Shield, Cloud NGFW, Cloud Armor, NACLs vs SGs
Week 2: Kubernetes Core
Section titled “Week 2: Kubernetes Core” Control Plane & Internals API server, etcd, scheduler, kubelet — how EKS and GKE implement the control plane
Workloads Deployments, StatefulSets, Jobs, CronJobs, DaemonSets, pod lifecycle, sidecars
Storage PV/PVC, CSI drivers (EBS/PD/EFS/Filestore), encryption at rest, snapshots
Networking Services, Ingress, Gateway API, CoreDNS, Network Policies, cert-manager
Cloud Service Integration IRSA, EKS Pod Identity, GCP Workload Identity, External Secrets Operator
Week 3: Kubernetes Enterprise
Section titled “Week 3: Kubernetes Enterprise” Multi-Tenancy & RBAC Namespaces, RBAC, ResourceQuotas, OPA Gatekeeper, Kyverno, self-service
Autoscaling HPA, VPA, Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler, KEDA, scale-to-zero
HA & Disaster Recovery Multi-AZ, topology spread, PDB, Velero, active-active multi-cluster
CI/CD & Deployments GitHub Actions OIDC, ArgoCD, Helm, Kustomize, dev→staging→prod promotion
Troubleshooting 17 debug scenarios with exact kubectl commands and expected output
Enterprise Platform Design IDP, cluster strategy, golden paths, Backstage, Kubecost, governance
Week 4: Architecture Patterns
Section titled “Week 4: Architecture Patterns” Zero Trust & Compliance Defense-in-depth, encryption, GuardDuty/SCC, UAE compliance (NESA, PDPL)
Service Mesh Istio on EKS/GKE, ECS Service Connect, mTLS, Cilium, ambient mode
Secrets Management Secrets Manager, External Secrets Operator, rotation, Vault
Migration Strategy 6Rs, Cloud Adoption Framework, wave planning, database migration
Event-Driven Architecture EventBridge, Pub/Sub, SNS/SQS, Kinesis, saga, DLQ, exactly-once
API Gateway API GW, Apigee, per-tenant throttling, OAuth2/JWT, versioning
Week 5: Data and Apps
Section titled “Week 5: Data and Apps” Database Architecture RDS vs Aurora vs Cloud SQL vs AlloyDB vs Spanner, connection pooling
Data Platform — Pipeline Ingest→Store→Process→Warehouse→Serve, BigQuery slots, data governance
Data Platform — Architectures 5 patterns: traditional, streaming, lakehouse, Snowflake, data mesh
Web App Architecture 3-tier, microservices, serverless, CDN, caching, session management
Compute Services ECS Fargate, Cloud Run, Lambda, Cloud Functions — decision framework
Week 6: Operations
Section titled “Week 6: Operations” Metrics & Monitoring Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, Mimir/Thanos, SLOs
Logging Loki, Grafana Alloy, CloudWatch→Loki, Cloud Logging→Loki
Tracing OpenTelemetry, Tempo, distributed tracing, metric↔log↔trace correlation
SRE & Incidents On-call, runbooks, postmortems, SLO-driven operations
FinOps Cost levers, tagging, Savings Plans vs CUDs, Kubecost
The Enterprise Reference Architecture
Section titled “The Enterprise Reference Architecture”Every page ties back to this unified architecture:
AWS Organization Structure
Section titled “AWS Organization Structure”
Network Hub Architecture
Section titled “Network Hub Architecture”
Every page shows “Where This Fits” in this architecture.
Quick Reference
Section titled “Quick Reference” AWS vs GCP Service Map Comprehensive mapping by category
kubectl Debug Cheatsheet Commands organized by failure type
Terraform Patterns Modules, state, workspaces, for_each