CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

To be Referred topics for Interview on Cloud Computing:

Topics:
✓ Basics of Cloud Computing
✓ Simulation tools for Cloud Computing
✓ Aws Basics
✓ Azure Basics
✓ Google Cloud Basics
By the End Student can learn:

✓ A clear definition of what Cloud Computing is

✓ A comprehensive understanding of Cloud Computing
✓ An understanding of Cloud Computing benefits and key
concepts
✓ An understanding of when and where to use it using the
appropriate industry models

Prerequisites

✓ A basic understanding of server hardware components

✓ A basic understanding of what a Data Center is

*For Reference please go through additional material available online

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

1) What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is an internet based new age computer technology. It is the next stage
technology that uses the clouds to provide the services whenever and wherever the user need
it. It provides a method to access several servers world wide.

2) What are the benefits of cloud computing?

The main benefits of cloud computing are:

o Data backup and storage of data.

o Powerful server capabilities.
o Incremented productivity.
o Very cost effective and time saving.
o Software as Service known as SaaS.

3) What is a cloud?

A cloud is a combination of networks ,hardware, services, storage, and interfaces that helps
in delivering computing as a service. It has three users :

1. End users
2. Business management users
3. cloud service provider

4) What are the different data types used in cloud computing?

There are different data types in cloud computing like emails, contracts, images , blogs etc.
As we know that data is increasing day by day so it is needed to new data types to store these
new data. For an example, if you want to store video then you need a new data type.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

5) Which are the different layers that define cloud architecture?

Following are the different layers that are used by cloud architecture:

o CLC or Cloud Controller

o Walrus
o Cluster Controller
o SC or Storage Controller
o NC or Node Controller

6) Mention platforms which are used for large scale cloud computing?

The platforms that are used for large scale cloud computing are

• Apache Hadoop
• MapReduce

7) Explain different models for deployment in cloud computing?

The different deployment models in cloud computing are

• Private Cloud
• Public Cloud
• Community Cloud
• Hybrid Cloud

8) What is the difference in cloud computing and computing for mobiles?

Mobile computing uses the same concept as cloud computing. Cloud computing becomes
active with the data with the help of internet rather than individual device. It provides users
with the data which they have to retrieve on demand. In mobile, the applications runs on the
remote server and gives user the access for storage and manage.

9) How user can gain from utility computing?

Utility computing allows the user to pay only for what they are using. It is a plug-in managed
by an organization which decides what type of services has to be deployed from the cloud.

Most organizations prefer hybrid strategy.

10) For a transport in cloud how you can secure your data?

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

To secure your data while transporting them from one place to another, check that there is
no leak with the encryption key implemented with the data you are sending.

11) What are the security aspects provided with cloud?

• Identity management: It authorizes the application services

• Access control: permission has to be provided to the users so that they can control the
access of another user who is entering into the cloud environment.
• Authentication and Authorization: Allows only the authorized and authenticated user
only to access the data and applications

12) List out different layers which define cloud architecture?

The different layers used by cloud architecture are

• CLC or Cloud Controller

• Walrus
• Cluster Controller
• SC or Storage Controller
• NC or Node Controller

13) What are system integrators in Cloud Computing?

In Cloud Computing, systems integrator provides the strategy of the complicated process
used to design a cloud platform. Integrator allows to create more accurate hybrid and private
cloud network, as integrators have all the knowledge about the data center creation.

14) What is “ EUCALYPTUS” stands for?

“ EUCALYPTUS” stands for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture For Linking Your Programs
To Useful Systems”

15) Explain what is the use of “EUCALYPTUS” in cloud computing?

“Eucalyptus” is an open source software infrastructure in cloud computing, which is used to

implement clusters in cloud computing platform. It is used to build public, hybrid and private
clouds. It has the ability to produce your own data center into a private cloud and allows you
to use its functionality to many other organizations.

16) What is the requirement of virtualization platform in implementing cloud?

The requirement of virtualization platform in implementing cloud is to

• Manage the service level policies

• Cloud Operating System

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

• Virtualization platforms helps to keep the backend level and user level concepts
different from each other

17) Before going for cloud computing platform what are the essential things to be taken in
concern by users?

• Compliance
• Loss of data
• Data storage
• Business continuity
• Uptime
• Data integrity in cloud computing

18) Mention some open source cloud computing platform databases?

The open source cloud computing platform databases are

• MongoDB
• CouchDB
• LucidDB

19) What are the security laws which are implemented to secure data in a cloud ?

The security laws which are implemented to secure data in cloud are

• Processing: Control the data that is being processed correctly and completely in an
application
• File: It manages and control the data being manipulated in any of the file
• Output reconciliation: It controls the data which has to be reconciled from input to
output
• Input Validation: Control the input data
• Security and Backup: It provides security and backup it also controls the security
breaches logs

20) Mention the name of some large cloud providers and databases?

• Google bigtable
• Amazon simpleDB
• Cloud based SQL

21) Explain the difference between cloud and traditional datacenters?

• The cost of the traditional data center is higher due to heating and
hardware/software issues

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

• Cloud gets scaled when the demand increases. Majority of the expenses are spent on
the maintenance of the data centers, while that is not the case with cloud computing

22) Explain what are the different modes of software as a service (SaaS)?

• Simple multi-tenancy : In this each user has independent resources and are different
from other users, it is an efficient mode.
• Fine grain multi-tenancy: In this type, the resources can be shared by many but the
functionality remains the same.

23) What is the use of API’s in cloud services?

API’s ( Application Programming Interface) is very useful in cloud platforms

• It eliminates the need to write the fully fledged programs

• It provides the instructions to make communication between one or more
applications
• It allows easy creation of applications and link the cloud services with other systems

24) What are the different data centers deployed for cloud computing?

Cloud computing consists of different datacenters like

• Containerized Datacenters
• Low Density Datacenters

25) In cloud computing what are the different layers?

The different layers of cloud computing are:

• SaaS: Software as a Service (SaaS), it provides users access directly to the cloud
application without installing anything on the system.
• IaaS: Infrastructure as a service, it provides the infrastructure in terms of hardware
like memory, processor speed etc.
• PaaS: Platform as a service, it provides cloud application platform for the developers

26) How important is the platform as a service?

Platform as a service or PAAS is an important layer in cloud computing. It provides application

platform for providers. It is responsible for providing complete virtualization of the
infrastructure layer and makes it work like a single server.

27) What is a cloud service?

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Cloud service is used to build cloud applications using the server in a network through
internet. It provides the facility of using the cloud application without installing it on the
computer. It also reduces the maintenance and support of the application which are
developed using cloud service.

28) List down the three basic clouds in cloud computing?

• Professional cloud
• Personal cloud
• Performance cloud

29) As a infrastructure as a service what are the resources that are provided by it?

IAAS ( Infrastructure As A Service) provides virtual and physical resources that are used to
build a cloud. It deals with the complexities of deploying and maintaining of the services
provided by this layer. Here the infrastructure is the servers, storage and other hardware
systems.

30) What are the business benefits involved in cloud architecture?

The benefits involved in cloud architecture is

• Zero infrastructure investment

• Just in time infrastructure
• More efficient resource utilization

31) What are the characteristics of cloud architecture that separates it from traditional one?

The characteristics that makes cloud architecture above traditional architecture is

• According to the demand cloud architecture provides the hardware requirement

• Cloud architecture is capable of scaling the resource on demand
• Cloud architecture is capable of managing and handling dynamic workloads without
failure

32) Mention what is the difference between elasticity and scalability in cloud computing?

Scalability is a characteristics of cloud computing through which increasing workload can be

handled by increasing in proportion the amount of resource capacity. Whereas, elasticity, is
being one of the characteristics that highlights the concept of commissioning and
decommissioning of a large amount of resource capacity.

33) Mention the services that are provided by Window Azure Operating System?

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Window Azure provides three core services which are given as

• Compute
• Storage
• Management

34) In cloud architecture what are the different components that are required?

• Cloud Ingress
• Processor Speed
• Cloud storage services
• Cloud provided services
• Intra-cloud communications

35) In cloud architecture what are the different phases involved?

• Launch Phase
• Monitor Phase
• Shutdown Phase
• Cleanup Phase

36) List down the basic characteristics of cloud computing?

• Elasticity and Scalability

• Self-service provisioning and automatic de-provisioning
• Standardized interfaces
• Billing self service based usage model

37) In cloud architecture what are the building blocks?

• Reference architecture
• Technical architecture
• Deployment operation architecture

38) Mention in what ways cloud architecture provide automation and performance
transparency?

To provide the performance transparency and automation there are many tools used by cloud
architecture. It allows to manage the cloud architecture and monitor reports. It also allows
them to share the application using the cloud architecture. Automation is the key component
of cloud architecture which helps to improve the degree of quality.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

39) In cloud computing explain the role of performance cloud?

Performance cloud is useful in transferring maximum amount of data instantly. It is used by

the professionals who work on high performance computing research.

40) Explain hybrid and community cloud?

Hybrid cloud: It consists of multiple service providers. It is a combination of public and private
cloud features. It is used by the company when they require both private and public clouds
both.

Community Cloud: This model is quite expensive and is used when the organizations having
common goals and requirements, and are ready to share the benefits of the cloud service.

41) In cloud what are the optimizing strategies?

To overcome the maintenance cost and to optimize the resources ,there is a concept of three
data center in cloud which provides recovery and back-up in case of disaster or system failure
and keeps all the data safe and intact.

42) What is Amazon SQS?

To communicate between different connectors Amazon SQS message is used, between

various components of AMAZON, it acts as a communicator.

43) How buffer is used to Amazon web services?

In order to make system more efficient against the burst of traffic or load, buffer is used. It
synchronizes different component . The component always receives and processes the
request in an unbalanced way. The balance between different components are managed by
buffer, and makes them work at the same speed to provide faster services.

44) Mention what is Hypervisor in cloud computing and their types?

Hypervisor is a Virtual Machine Monitor which manages resources for virtual machines. There
are mainly two types of hypervisors

Type 1: The guest Vm runs directly over the host hardware, eg Xen, VmWare ESXI

Type 2: The guest Vm runs over hardware through a host OS, eg Kvm, oracle virtualbox

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Cloud Computing Simulation tools in the Market

CloudSim

CloudSim is a new, highly generalised and extensible Java based simulation tool kit, and is
actually regarded as a software framework. It supports several core functionalities like
queuing and processing of events, the creation of CloudSim entities, communication among
components and the management of the simulation clock. CloudSim has been developed by
the CLOUDS Laboratory of the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department of
the University of Melbourne, Australia by Prof. (Dr) Rajkumar Buyya. This tool kit enables
seamless modelling, simulation and experimentation in cloud computing and application
services. It can be termed as ‘running a model of an environment by taking the hardware as
base, where technology-specific details are abstracted.’
CloudSim features include basic classes for deriving data centres, virtual machines,
applications, users, computational resources, and policies for managing diverse parts of the
system like scheduling and provisioning. It implements general application provisioning
techniques, which can be extended easily with minimal effort.

The CloudSim simulator example depicting the creation of a data centre with one host running
one cloudlet on it is demonstrated in Figure 1.

The latest version of CloudSim is 4.0. Its features are listed below:

• Supports modelling and simulation of large scale cloud computing data centres.
• Supports modelling and simulation of virtualised server hosts, along with
customisable policies for provisioning host resources to virtual machines.
• Supports dynamic inclusion of simulation elements, discontinuations and restarts.
• Has support for user defined policies for allocating hosts to virtual machines (VMs).
• Supports the creation of various data centre network topologies, message-passing
applications and energy-aware computational resources.
• Has the capability to simulate a federated cloud environment that inter-networks
resources from both private and public domains. This is a critical feature for
research into cloudbursts and automatic application scaling.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

CloudAnalyst

CloudAnalyst, a GUI based simulator derived from CloudSim, has some extended features and
capabilities. CloudAnalyst was proposed by Bhathiya Wickremasinghe and Rajkumar Buyya at
the CLOUDS Laboratory of the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department of
the University of Melbourne, Australia. The simulator supports the evaluation of social
network tools according to the geographical distribution of users and data centres. It can be
applied to determine the behaviour of large scale Internet applications in the cloud, and also
enables a modeller for looping simulations and to conduct a series of simulations with slight
variations in parameters.

CloudAnalyst is regarded as a powerful simulation framework for deploying real-time data

centres and monitoring load balancing, cloud cluster monitoring and data centre data flow in
real-time. It allows users to save simulation configurations as XML files and exports live results
in PDF format.
The features of CloudAnalyst are listed below.

• Graphical user interface: Easy-to-use GUI for setting up and viewing results of all
sorts of cloud computing experiments.
• Simulation definition via a high degree of configuration and
flexibility: CloudAnalyst is equipped with modellers that have a high degree of
control over the experiment by modelling entities such as data centres, virtual
machines, memory, storage and bandwidth.
• Experiment looping: CloudAnalyst can save simulation scenarios and loop them
again and again via simulation variations. It can save the results as XML files and
even save PDF files of the results.
• Efficient output: CloudAnalyst provides graphical output of simulation results in
the form of tables and charts, apart from a large amount of statistical data.

GreenCloud

GreenCloud provides a simulation environment for energy-aware cloud computing data

centres. It is regarded as the most sophisticated packet-level simulator available till date for
energy-aware cloud computing data centres, with a focus on cloud communications. It offers
a detailed fine-grained modelling of the energy consumed by the data centre’s IT equipment
such as computing servers, network switches and communication links.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

The GreenCloud simulator was developed by Dzmitry Kliazovich (Project Leader), research
fellow at the Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication of University of Luxembourg
with other team members. This simulator is used to develop novel solutions in monitoring,
resource allocation, workload scheduling as well as communication protocols, optimisation
and network infrastructure.
GreenCloud has been developed as an extension of the NS-2 packet-level network simulator.
It distinguishes between three energy consumption components—computing energy,
communicational energy and energy components related to the physical infrastructure of a
data centre.

The latest version of GreenCloud is 2.1.2.

GreenCloud simulator calls a set of the following simulation scripts:

• setup_params.tcl: Contains general server configuration, switches, tasks,

monitoring and migration.
• [Link]: Creates the data centre network topology.
• [Link]: Creates data centre servers and VMs.
• [Link]: Defines the behaviour of cloud users.
• [Link]: Sets up runtime results-reporting procedures.
• [Link]: Calculates and reports simulation statistics.
The features of GreenCloud simulator are listed below:

• The simulator mainly focuses on the cloud network and, particularly, energy
consumption monitoring in cloud computing technologies.
• It supports simulation of CPU, memory, storage and networking resources.
• Supports researchers in exploring methods to minimise electricity consumption by
improving power management, as well as dynamically managing and configuring
the power-aware capability of the system’s devices.
• Has a user-friendly GUI and is open source.

iCanCloud

iCanCloud is a cloud computing simulation platform which is based on SIMCAN and supports
the simulation of large storage networks. The iCanCloud simulation framework was
developed by A. Nunez and J.L. Vazquez-Poletti with the objective of predicting the trade-offs
between cost and performance of a given set of applications executed in specific hardware.
The simulator then provides users information about such costs. iCanCloud was designed to
optimise flexibility, accuracy, performance and scalability, and has turned into a powerful

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

simulator for designing, testing and analysing all sorts of existing and non-existing cloud
architectures.

iCanCloud is being developed over the OMNeT++ platform. The latest version is 1.0 and
requires OMNeT++ 4.6 and INET 2.5. It can be installed on all versions of Ubuntu and on MAC
platforms.
The features of iCanCloud are listed below:

• Both existing and non-existing cloud computing architectures can be modelled and
simulated.
• A flexible cloud hypervisor module provides an easy method for integrating and
testing both new and existent cloud brokering policies.
• Customisable VMs can be used to quickly simulate uni-core/multi-core systems.
• iCanCloud provides a wide range of configurations for storage systems, which
include models for local storage systems, remote storage systems like NFS, and
parallel storage systems (like parallel file systems and RAID systems).
• iCanCloud provides a user-friendly GUI that makes it easier to generate and
customise large distributed models. This GUI is especially useful for managing a
repository of preconfigured VMs, a repository of preconfigured cloud systems, and
a repository of preconfigured experiments to launch experiments from the GUI and
generate graphical reports.
• iCanCloud provides a POSIX-based API and an adopted MPI library for modelling
and simulating applications. Also, several methods for modelling applications can
be used in iCanCloud—using traces of real applications, using a state graph, and
programming new applications directly in the simulation platform.
• New components can be added to the repository of iCanCloud to increase its
functionality.

EMUSIM

EMUSIM stands for Integrated Emulation and Simulation. It combines emulation (AEF-
Automated Emulation Framework) and Simulation (CloudSim) to enable more accurate
models of software artefacts to be used during simulations. EMUSIM was developed by
Rodrigo N. Calherios at the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory,
Department of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Australia.

EMUSIM automatically extracts information about application behaviour via emulation and
then uses this information to generate a corresponding simulation model. The EMUSIM
simulator is of great use when the tester has no idea about the performance of the software

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

under the varied levels of concurrency and parallelism which impede simulation. These can
replace in-site experiments that would require infrastructure that is either unavailable for the
tester or too expensive to run in the public cloud. EMUSIM is open source software under the
GPL License.

The latest version of AEF is 1.3, released in August 2010.

The features of EMUSIM are listed below:

• Offers a combination of simulation and emulation to evaluate the effect of varying

resources and patterns of requests on cloud applications.
• Accurately models applications to supply information regarding performance.
• Reduces the cost of running cloud based simulation, because rather than local and
limited infrastructure usage, a pay-as-you-go public cloud is used for evaluation
purposes.
• Supports loosely coupled CPU-intensive applications.

GroudSim

GroudSim (Gr-Grid oud-Cloud) is an event-based simulator designed for scientific applications

on grid and cloud environments. It only requires one simulation thread. GroudSim was
developed by S. Ostermann, K. Plankensteiner and D. Bodner, and can also be termed as a
grid and cloud simulation tool kit for scientific applications based on a scalable simulation-
independent discrete-event core.
GroudSim provides a comprehensive set of features for complex simulation scenarios, ranging
from simple job executions on leased computing resources to calculation of costs, and
background load on resources. GroudSim mainly focuses on the IaaS area of cloud computing.
It can be easily extended to additional models like SaaS and PaaS in cloud computing.

SimEngine is the main class of GroudSim, which implements the time advance algorithm, the
clock and the future events list, keeping track of the registered entities used for tracing during
a simulation. The grid and cloud resources classes share most of the common functionality
implemented in the Groud package and override the specialised behaviour in the Groud.
The features of GroudSim are listed below:

• It is a powerful Java based simulation tool kit for scientific applications. It combines
grid and cloud infrastructures, and is based on a discrete-event simulation tool kit.
• Improvised performance as compared to process based approaches in other
simulators.
• Can be extended easily by adopting probability distribution packages.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

The most unique feature in GroudSim is GroundEntity, which has its own definition for error
behaviour. The user can change this configuration during each error occurrence.

DCSim (Data Centre Simulation)

DCSim is regarded as an extensible data centre simulator designed in Java. It provides a stable
and easy framework for developing and performing high-end experiments on data centre
management techniques and algorithms. DCSim, being an event-driven simulator, simulates
a data centre IaaS offering to multiple clients.

DCSim provides the additional capability of modelling replicated VMs, sharing incoming
workloads as well as dependencies between VMs that are part of a multi-tiered application.
The features of DCSim are listed below:

• Contains a multi-tier application model that allows the simulation of dependencies

between VMs.
• Facilitates rapid development, evaluation and feedback on data centre
management policies and algorithms.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

AWS Interview Questions-basics:

Q1). How will you compare two popular cloud service providers – AWS and Azure?
To understand the difference between the two most popular cloud service providers i.e. AWS
and Azure, let us refer to the table given below.

Q2). I have a few private servers and I distributed some of the workloads on the public cloud
too. Which type of architecture is this?
When you use both services like private and public cloud together then it’s the hybrid cloud.
it is easier to understand a hybrid architecture when private or public clouds are hosted on
the same network virtually.

Q3). There is a video transcoding application to process videos in a queue. If the processing
of a video is interrupted in between then it is resumed by another instance. Currently, there
is a huge backlog of videos that needs to be processed and we require more instances for
the same. But we need these instances until the backlog is not clear. So, what would be the
most efficient way to achieve the purpose?
You should use on-demand instances for this purpose. You must be wondering why? Firstly,
you need instances immediately to process the videos. Secondly, you don’t need them when
the backlog is clear. Reserved instances are out of the picture here because instances are
needed for a certain time span only. Spot instances are also not suitable because work is
urgent and you cannot stop the work just because of the spot price spiked. Hence, on-demand
instances are the right choice in this scenario.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Q4). How are stopping and terminating an instance two different processes?

• Stopping an Instance: When an instance is stopped, it performs a normal shutdown.

However its Amazon EBS volume remains attached and you can start the same
instance later when needed. The benefit of stopping an instance is that you are not
charged anything for that particular instance, once it is stopped.
• Terminating an Instance: When an instance is terminated, it performs a normal
shutdown and all Amazon EBS volumes attached to the instance are deleted at the
same time. Once an instance is terminated, you cannot start it over again.

Q5). If I want to run my instance on single-tenant hardware, which option I have to set for
the instance tenancy attribute?
The instance tenancy attribute should be set to the Dedicate instance here to run the instance
on single-tenant hardware. Rest of the options are invalid.

Q6). What are the costs associated with an Elastic IP address (EIP)? You don’t have to pay
anything when only one IP address is attached with your running instance. But you need to
pay in the following conditions:

• When more than one EIPs are associated with your running instance.
• When EIP is attached to the stopped instance.
• When EIP is not attached to any instance.

Q7). Can we use reserved instances for multi-AZ deployments in AWS?

Reserved Instances are the pricing models available for all Amazon EC2 Instances.

Q8). How is a Spot Instance different from the Reserved or On-demand Instance?
Spot instances, Reserved instances, and On-demand instances all are pricing models. Spot
instance gives the flexibility to the users to buy compute capacity with no upfront investment
but at the same time you have to pay hourly that is lower than on-demand instance rate in
each region.

Spot instances are similar to bidding, and the bidding price for these instances is called the
Spot Price. The price may fluctuate based on the supply and demand curve for instance but
you never pay more than maximum price as specified. When spot prices move higher than
the maximum price, the EC2 instances shut down automatically in that case. But the reverse
is not true, if spot prices come down, EC2 Instances are not launched automatically. It can be
done manually.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

For Spot and On-demand instances, there is no commitment from the user side. However, in
case of Reserved Instances, one has to stick to the time period that was chosen earlier.

Q9). What are the network performance parameters when you launch an instance in the
cluster placement group?
The network performance parameters depend on the instance type and network
specifications. If an instance is launched in cluster placement group then you can expect the
following performance parameters:

• For a single flow, 10 Gbps speed

• For multi-flow, 20 Gbps speed
• For the network traffic outside the placement group, speed is limited to 5Gbps.

Q10). Which instance type can be used to deploy a 4-node Hadoop cluster in AWS?
Each Hadoop cluster is based on the master-slave concept where master machine processes
the data and slave machine stores the data like data nodes. Since all the processing is done at
the master machine, a high capacity CPU and RAM is needed here and as all the storage is
done at the slave machine, a high capacity hard disk is needed.

You are free to decide the configuration of the machine based on the workload. If you are not
interested in configuring machine manually then you can straight away launch an Amazon
EMR instance that configures the server automatically for you. You dump the data to be
processed in S3, EMR picks the data from there, processes it, and dumps it back to the S3.

Q11). When you are designing an architecture for a solution, where do you think AMI fits?
AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) are like templates for the virtual machine or an instance
derived from an AMI. Aws offers pre-ready AMIs that you can choose to launch an instance.
A few of them are not free that you can buy from the AWS marketplace.

You are free to create your own custom AMI that helps you to save space on the AWS as it is
more cost effective and suitable for your project.

Q12). How to decide on the best availability zone?

To choose the best availability zone, you should first compare the prices for different regions.
But price is not the single factor to make the final decision; you also need to consider the
performance. Let us look at the latency as well. It’s the time taken by a server to respond to
your requests. Based on these factors, it is easier to decide on the best availability zone from
different regions.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Q13). Is one Elastic IP address enough for every running instance?

Each instance has its own private and public address. A private address is associated
exclusively with an instance and it is returned when an instance is stopped or terminated.
Similarly, a public address is also associated exclusively with an instance until it is stopped or
terminated. However, one can assign an EIP (Elastic IP address) to an instance that stays
longer till the time the user does not detach it manually. In case, you are hosting multiple
websites on your EC2 server then you need multiple EIP addresses in that scenario.

Q14). How to maintain the security for Amazon EC2 instances?

There are multiple best practices to secure an Amazon EC2 instance. They are given as below.

• To control the access of AWS resources, you should use IAM (Identity and Access
Management) protocol.
• To give access to trusted users or networks, you should restrict unwanted access by
following certain security principles.
• To maintain secure access, review the rules of security groups regularly and only open
up permissions that are required.
• To manage the security risks, disable the password-based logins for instance launched
from an AMI.

Q15). Can we use S3 bucket with EC2 Instances too?

Yes, it can be used with the root devices backed by local instances storage. With Amazon S3,
developers have access to reliable and expensive data storage infrastructure that used by
Amazon to run its global websites.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Azure Interview Questions Basics

Q1. What is Azure Cloud Service?

Answer: Cloud service can convey multiple web applications in Azure, characterizing several
parts to disseminate handling and permit adaptable scaling of your application. A cloud
service comprises a minimum of one web part, as well as specialist parts, each with its own
application documents and design. The fundamental favorable position of cloud service is the
capacity to help more complex multilevel structures.

Q2. Explain the Azure feature scalability of cloud computing?

Answer: A vertical scaling is where the configuration yields to increase the existing capacity
of the machine. Just like expanding the size of the RAM from 4GB to 32GB. Horizontal scaling
is where the physical aspect is increased like putting multiple machines at work instead of
replacing the existing machine.

Q3. Explain in detail SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS?

Answer: SaaS stands for Software as a Service is devoid of platform infrastructure software
that can be used without direct purchase.
PaaS stands for Platform as a Service that helps you to get a platform to deliver without
directly giving authorization to the OS Software.
IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Software that enables you to get the hardware from the
provider as the desired service which can be configured by the user.

Q4. Which are the deployment models of the cloud?

Answer: Private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud.

Q5. What do you mean by the Windows Azure platform?

Answer: It is collectively a PaaS developed by Microsoft programmed to run a deployment
vehicle and a runtime for the data center to host the cloud computing.

Q6. What is meant by table storage?

Answer: The table is a collaborated entity that in turn is a set of properties that are paired up
of name and value. Table storage is an interface that is capable of storing a bulk amount of
structured but non-relational data. It is a service of the NoSQL data store that takes
authenticated calls from either outside or inside the Azure cloud.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Q7. What is the service fabric in Azure?

Answer: Service fabric is a middleware platform of the following generation that gives a more
scalable outcome. It renders with the more managed and reliable enterprise.

Q8. What do you mean by SAS? List some features of SAS.

Answer: SAS means Statistical Analytical System. It is a software suite performing analysis of
multiple variables. It is linked to predictive analysis, data handling, advanced analytics, or
corporative intelligence. It produces a smooth interface that offers graphical and clicks-based
solutions. It is user-friendly for the technical or the non-technical with advanced features.

Q9. What is the use of Azure CDN?

Answer: Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) lets you reduce load times, save bandwidth,
and speed responsiveness—whether you are developing or managing websites or mobile
apps or encoding and distributing streaming media, gaming software, firmware updates, or
IoT endpoints.

Q10. Define log analytics.

Answer: It is a tool in the Azure portal to edit and run log queries from data collected by Azure
Monitor logs and interactively analyze their results.

Q11. What is VNet in Azure?

Answer: Azure VNet subnets are defined by the IP Address block assigned to them.
Communications between all subnets in the AWS VPC are through the AWS backbone and are
allowed by default. AWS VPC subnets can either be private or public. A subnet is public if it
has an internet gateway (IGW) attached.

Q12. Define the application partition scheme in Azure?

Answer: The application partitions are domain partitions that are replicated to the domain
controllers. Its purpose is to reduce replication traffic within a particular domain area.

Q13. How will you stop a Virtual Machine within a PowerShell?

Answer: Stop-AzureRmVM –ResourceGroupName MyResourceGroupBm –Name “MyVM” –
Force

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Q14: Your marketing team has an application hosted on Azure Web App that has a Service
Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.95 percent. The application uses an Azure SQL database that
has an SLA of 99.99 percent. What will be the composite SLA for the application?
Answer: The composite SLA is the product of both SLAs. So, it will be 99.99 x 99.95 = 99.94%

Q15. Your company deploys an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) running Windows. The VM
hosts data files that must be available to other VMs running Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Data must be secure both at rest and in transit. You are given the responsibility to select an
appropriate storage solution for the above scenario.
Answer: Azure File Storage. As it lets you migrate your on-premises file to Azure without the
need to provision or manage highly-available file server VMs.

[Link] Azure service enables users to identify email messages that should be protected
through authorization, encryption, and identity policies for security perspective and why?
Answer: Azure Information Protection (AIP). When the Azure Information Protection client is
installed, integration occurs with end users’ existing workflows. And after a document has
been protected, the users and administrators are able to use a document tracking site. This
gives them information on who is accessing these documents and when. If the users suspect
any form of misuse, they have the option to revoke access to the document(s) in question.

Q17. A company investigates moving on-premises data centers in multiple locations to the
cloud. The data is mission-critical, and all offices always need access to data resources.
Changes to resource requirements are projected to be incremental and relatively easy to
predict. Which cloud features could be used to ensure this? Why?
Answer: Fault Tolerance and High Availability. For business applications and services are not
that simple to achieve. We must understand fault domains, availability sets, and upgrade
domains, and be able to adjust fundamental concepts.

Q18. What do you know about Azure Load Balancer?

Answer: An Azure Load Balancer distributes virtual machine (VM) traffic evenly across
multiple instances. It operates at layer 4 of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model.

Q19. In Azure single zone is a geographical grouping of Azure regions which is used to
determine to bill based on ‘hours of activity.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Answer: Data Transfers. Bandwidth refers to data moving in and out of Azure data centers, as
well as data moving between Azure data centers; other transfers are explicitly covered by the
Content Delivery Network, ExpressRoute pricing, or Peering.

Q20. Which Azure Function hosting plan type allows for the highest CPU and RAM resources
and why?
Answer: App Service Plan. The Free and Shared tiers of App Service plans to allocate CPU
quotas to each app that runs on the shared resources. The resources can’t scale-out.

Q21. Which Azure resource can be described as Infrastructure as a Service (laaS)? Virtual
Machine or Office365 and why?
Answer: Virtual Machine. For most of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) scenarios, Azure
VMs are the main workload in the case of organizations using cloud computing.

Q22. You are migrating a 3-tier .NET application from on-premises to Azure. Which Azure
service will you use to host the service?
Answer: Azure web-app, if it is a web-based application without a lot of dependencies, but
otherwise Azure Load Balancer with Azure VM.

Q23. What is Azure Cosmos DB and when to use it?

Answer: Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database service for modern app
development. Get guaranteed single-digit millisecond response times and 99.999-percent
availability, backed by SLAs, automatic and instant scalability, and open-source APIs for
MongoDB and Cassandra.

Q24. How to debug code written in .NET running in Azure Virtual Machine?
Answer: The Snapshot Debugger takes a snapshot of your in-production apps when the code
that you are interested in executes.

Reference: [Link]

Q25. What are Blob storage and Page Storage? When to use them?
Block blobs are for your discrete storage objects like jpg’s, log files, etc. that you would
typically view as a file in your local OS. Max. size 200GB 4.77TB. Regular (non-Premium)
storage only.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Page blobs are for random read/write storage, such as VHD’s (in fact, page blobs are what is
used for Azure Virtual Machine disks). Max. size 8TB. Supported by both regular and Premium
Storage. Azure Blobs Provides client libraries and a REST interface that allows unstructured
data to be stored and accessed at a massive scale in block blobs.

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Google Cloud Interview Questions Basics

1. In which of the VMs Persistent Disk Storage can be attached ?

Ans. Persistent Disk Storage can be attached to VMs in Google Compute Engine(GCE) and
Google Kubernetes Engine(GKE).

2. When HDDs are preferred over SSDs storage ?

Ans. HDDs are usually preferred when storing large amounts of data and performing batch
operations that are less sensitive to disk latency than interactive applications.

3. Which version of Redis is currently supported on Google Cloud ?

Ans. Redis 3.2

4. Which Service is used in Google Cloud(GCP) for In-Memory Cache ?

Ans. Memorystore

5. Which database service is used to scale databases resources vertically ?

Ans. Cloud SQL

6. Which database service is used to ensure consistency and transaction integrity for
extremely large amount of data ?

Ans. Cloud Spanner

7. Which Service is used for Data Warehouse and Analytics Applications to handle large
amount of columns and rows ?

Ans. BigQuery

8. What are different NoSQL databases used in GCP ?

Ans. Below are the three NoSQL databases used in GCP :-

a) Cloud Datastore

b) Cloud Firestore

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

c) Cloud Bigtable

9. What is the main advantage of Using Cloud Firestore NoSQL database ?

Ans. Its main advantage is for storing, synchronizing and querying data across distributed
applications like mobile apps.

10. Is Bigtable a wide-column database or document database ?

Ans. It is a wide-column database. Check more about Bigtable on Official Documentation.

11. What are different data storage systems available in Cloud Firestore ?

Ans. There are two data storage systems available in Cloud Firestore:-

a) Using Firestore in Datastore mode.

b) Using Firestore in Native mode.

12. How to Create a bucket name test_bucket in GCP ?

Ans. gsutil mb gs://test_bucket/

13. What is the syntax to create a bucket using gsutil command in GCP ?

Ans. gsutil mb gs://test_bucket/

14. What is the permission required to create backups in GCP ?

Ans. [Link]

15. What is the permission required to import data in GCP ?

Ans. [Link]

16. What is the syntax to create a backup using gcloud command ?

Ans. gcloud -namespaces='[NAMESPACE]' gs://[BUCKET_NAME]

17. What is the syntax to import a backup file in GCP ?

Ans. gcloud datastore import gs://[BUCKET]/[PATH]/[FILE].overall_export_metadata

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

18. Which BigQuery command can be used to estimate how much data will be scanned ?

Ans. bq --location=[LOCATION] query --use_legacy_sql=false --dry_run [SQL_QUERY]

19. What is the command to create a topic in GCP ?

Ans. gcloud pubsub topics create [TOPIC-NAME]

20. What is the command to create a subscription in GCP ?

Ans. gcloud pubsub subscriptions create [SUBSCRIPTION-NAME] --topic [TOPIC-NAME]

21. How to configure cbt in Cloud SHELL ?

Ans. Use below command to configure cbt in cloud shell:-

gcloud components update
gcloud components install cbt

22. How to create a table "example-table" using cbt command ?

Ans. cbt createtable example-table

23. How to list all the tables using cbt command ?

Ans. cbt ls

24. How to create a family called "test-family" using cbt command ?

Ans. cbt createfamily example-table test-family

25. How to display the contents of table "example-table" ?

Ans. cbt read example-table

26. What is the command to create a cluster named "Test-Cluster" in "us-west2-a" zone ?

Ans. gcloud dataproc clusters create Test-Cluster --zone us-west2-a

27. How to Submit a Job "[Link]" on the Cluster "Test-Cluster" Using gcloud command
?

Ans. gcloud dataproc jobs submit spark --cluster Test-Cluster --jar [Link]

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

28. What is the command syntax to manually change the Bucket Storage Class ?

Ans. gsutil rewrite -s [STORAGE_CLASS] gs://[PATH_TO_OBJECT]

29. How to Copy [Link] file from /root folder to Test-Bucket ?

Ans. gsutil cp /root/[Link] gs://Test-Bucket/

30. What is the command to download [Link] file from Test-Bucket bucket to /root
directory ?

Ans. gsutil cp gs://[Link] /root/

31. Which parameter is used to tell BigQuery to automatically detect the schema of a file
on import ?

Ans. --autodetect

32. What is Pub/Sub in Google Cloud ?

Ans. It is an asynchronous messaging service that decouples services that produce events
from services that process events.

33. What is the command to Install Kubectl command line tool in Google Cloud ?

Ans. gcloud components install kubectl

34. What is the command to authenticate through Docker Container Registry ?

Ans. gcloud auth configure-docker

35. How to set project in GCP using gcloud command ?

Ans. gcloud config set project <project_id>

36. How to set Compute zone to "us-east1" in GCP using gcloud command ?

Ans. gcloud config set compute/zone us-east1

37. How to create a Google Kubernetes Clusters "test-cluster" using gcloud command ?

Ans. gcloud container clusters create test-cluster --num-nodes=2

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

38. How to check all the instances running in GCP using gcloud command ?

Ans. gcloud compute instances list

39. Which Google Kubernetes Clusters location type provides high availability ?

Ans. Regional

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH
 CLOUD COMPUTING BASIC INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Reference Sources:
[Link]

[Link]

[Link]

[Link]

[Link]

[Link]

[Link]

Prepared by
Cloud Computing Cluster Team
Department of IT
BVRITH