Cloud architecture in a Senior interview
Our cloud questions ask what a managed service promises in the mode you picked, and where that promise ends and your part begins. Most are written on AWS and Google Cloud, and they test the mechanism behind a setting rather than where it sits in the console.
An axis of our Senior fullstack target.
The check comes with every pass, covers all 10 competencies of our Senior fullstack target, and takes about 20 minutes. It reports each one as Ready, Borderline or a Gap for this level. It never predicts a pass.
Patterns our questions are designed to test at Senior
These are the distinctions the questions on this axis are written to separate — our judgement from writing them and having them reviewed, not a measurement of candidates. We have run no study, so nothing here is a statistic and none of it is phrased as one.
- 1.
Asking the wrong layer for permission
A project owner refused by an organisation policy; a VPC firewall rule at priority 0 that never takes effect because a hierarchical policy above it has already denied the traffic; in Amazon ECS, an S3 permission added to the task execution role, which pulls the image, instead of the task role the application runs as. Each looks like a missing permission, and adding permissions where the decision is not made changes nothing.
- 2.
A guarantee read without its conditions
The availability SLA for Google Cloud's HA VPN applies only with two tunnels and dynamic routing, and covers the Google side of the connection. A regional GKE cluster keeps its control plane up during upgrades and still drains your nodes when they are upgraded, and Compute Engine's live migration keeps a VM running but pauses it briefly. Our questions ask what the guarantee covers in the configuration given, and what is left to you.
- 3.
Capacity that only looked separate
Two Lambda functions without reserved concurrency draw on one account pool, and concurrency is request rate times duration, so a slow dependency of one throttles the other. Our questions give the numbers and ask which limit is hit first, and who is hit by it.
- 4.
A feature credited with what it does not do
CloudFormation drift detection reports differences and reverts nothing. In Cloud KMS, rotation encrypts new writes with the new version and leaves older objects on the version that wrote them, so destroying that version makes them unreadable. In Google Cloud Secret Manager, a disabled secret version is still billed. Our questions ask what the feature leaves to you.
What a strong answer sounds like: A strong answer says which layer made the decision (an organisation policy, the service, or your own configuration) before it changes anything in its own.
How the check measures it
3 questions drawn on this axis alone — 2 medium and 1 hard for a Senior target, because the bar is the level. Hard counts for one and a half times a medium, which is what makes the verdict relative:
| Medium right | Hard right | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 2 of 2 | 1 of 1 | Ready |
| 1 of 2 | 1 of 1 | Ready |
| 2 of 2 | 0 of 1 | Borderline |
| 0 of 2 | 1 of 1 | Borderline |
| 1 of 2 | 0 of 1 | Gap |
| 0 of 2 | 0 of 1 | Gap |
Three questions is coarse and the report says so beside every verdict. It is enough to separate this axis from the others in your target, which is what the check is for — there is no total, no percentage and no single number anywhere in the report.
What there is to practise
Questions here most often also test security, networking, reliability & failure modes and data modelling & storage. Few questions on this axis test it alone, which is why the check reports every competency separately rather than averaging them.
One of them, in full
A question from the free demo, not written for this page. A demo quiz opens with it; the answer, the explanation and the source come when you submit — no account needed.
Answer it on the demoOne axis is not the loop
This axis is one of 10 in our Senior fullstack target, and being strong here says nothing about the others. The check covers all of them in one sitting and reports each separately, so what comes back is a profile rather than a score.