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Explain cloud computing fundamentals

Lowe'sSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen
HardSoftware EngineerTechnical ScreenSystem Design

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This interview question evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Explain cloud computing fundamentals states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

Design, deploy, and operate a cloud-based, horizontally scalable, fault-tolerant web application serving millions of users:

  • Contrast IaaS, PaaS, and serverless; when to use each.
  • Choose compute (VMs, containers, functions) and justify the choice.
  • Describe load balancing, autoscaling policies, and stateless service design.
  • Select data stores for different workloads (relational, NoSQL, object storage, in-memory cache) and explain consistency, durability, and backup/restore.
  • Outline network design (VPC, subnets, security groups, firewalls, NAT, CDN) and zero-trust principles.
  • Plan IAM, secrets management, encryption in transit/at rest, and key rotation.
  • Ensure high availability and disaster recovery (multi-AZ/region, RTO/RPO).
  • Implement observability (metrics, logs, traces, SLOs) and cost governance.
  • Describe CI/CD, IaC, blue/green and canary releases, and rollback strategies.