Technology & Digital Applications Flashcards
7 cards from real Cloud Engineer practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Technology & Digital Applications flashcards as text
Which cloud design principle recommends distributing workloads across multiple Availability Zones to survive a datacenter-level failure?
Answer: High availability through multi-AZ deployment
Deploying across multiple Availability Zones ensures the application remains operational even if an entire AZ goes offline.
A cloud engineer uses Prometheus to collect metrics and wants to visualize them on dashboards. Which tool is the standard companion for this?
Answer: Grafana
Grafana is the de-facto visualization layer for Prometheus metrics, providing rich dashboards and alerting on top of Prometheus data sources.
What is the purpose of a cloud 'Landing Zone'?
Answer: A pre-configured, secure, multi-account cloud environment that enforces organizational standards
A Landing Zone is a well-architected, multi-account baseline environment with governance, security, and networking guardrails pre-configured.
A developer accidentally commits an AWS secret key to a public GitHub repository. What is the FIRST action a cloud engineer should take?
Answer: Immediately revoke or deactivate the exposed key in IAM
The exposed key must be revoked immediately because bots scan public repos in seconds and the key is already compromised.
Which service mesh feature enables automatic mTLS between microservices without changing application code?
Answer: Sidecar proxy encryption (e.g., Istio/Envoy)
Service meshes like Istio inject sidecar proxies that handle mutual TLS encryption between services transparently, without requiring code changes.
A cloud engineer needs to run a batch job once a day at 2 AM UTC without maintaining always-on infrastructure. What is the most cost-efficient solution on AWS?
Answer: AWS Lambda triggered by an Amazon EventBridge scheduled rule
Lambda with EventBridge (cron expression) runs serverlessly only when triggered, incurring charges only for the execution duration with no idle cost.
In a Kubernetes cluster, what is the role of etcd?
Answer: Distributed key-value store that holds all cluster state and configuration
etcd is the distributed key-value store that Kubernetes uses as its single source of truth for all cluster state, including pods, secrets, and configs.