Are you looking to get hired all your next cloud architect technical interview? If so,
this video is for you.
My name is Michael Gibbs and I'm the founder and CEO of Go Cloud Architects. And we're
an organization dedicated towards building high performance cloud computing careers.
Today, we're going to talk about cloud architect interview questions. And the reason we're
going to do this is, the technical interview is one of the ways the employer assesses whether
you're technically competent and ready for the job.
In addition to just getting your technology baseline, some of the other things we're looking
for in the cloud architect interview, specifically, in the technical interview, is how well you
can communicate technology. See, as an architect, you're going to have to present technology
on a frequent basis. So when we ask you these cloud architect interview questions, we not
only find out if you understand the technology, we find out how you communicate them. So this
is very important to be prepared.
Today, we're going to cover five questions and some are going to be technical interview
questions, and some of them are not going to be, because they can all pop up on your
technical interview. Because at Go Cloud Architects, we care so much about cloud architect training
and cloud architecture training, we'll make sure that we sneak some cloud architecture
training inside of these interview questions to make you a better cloud architect and more
prepared to get hired.
So we're going to start with the first question, which is actually not a technical question,
but it's the thing that kicks off most interviews, including technical interviews. So if you
want to boost your cloud architect interview skills, you definitely want to get this one,
because it's the one that starts your interview.
The first question on most interviews is simply, tell me about yourself. So this question,
when the employers ask, is your opportunity. It's the first part of the program. It's your
chance to sell the employer on why they need you. So when you think about this, you should
always have a 60 to 90 second pre-made, tell me about your self response. And it needs
to be you. It needs to be authentic to you, and perfect for you.
So for example, if someone said, "Tell me about yourself to me," I would simply say,
"Hi, I'm Michael Gibbs. I've been working in technology for over 25 years. I've worked
in networking. I've worked in security. I've worked in cloud computing. I've been an industry
recognized thought leader. And I absolutely love technology. I've mentored others. I've
coached others. And I've worked the gamut from sales, marketing, and architecture. I
know that if I was part of your team, I can make a big impact.
So what are we really trying to show them? We're trying to show the hiring manager very
quickly what our expertise are and how those expertise can help the hiring manager, so
they know exactly what they are. They should show that you're energetic, you're enthusiastic,
you're motivated, should show all your good qualities, in tell me about yourself.
Now, let's talk about a technical question. Another common question that's asked is, what
is the difference between a hybrid cloud and a full cloud environment? And what are the
advantages of each? Well, first and foremost, you need to know what a hybrid cloud is, and
then you need to know what a full cloud environment or a cloud native environment is. And then
thereafter, you need to know the difference.
So let's walk through these architecturally speaking. In a hybrid cloud environment, you
have your data center, which has a lot of servers, compute storage, networking security,
and you also have the Cloud, and you have the two connected, so you can get the benefits
of your current infrastructure. Maybe you have hundreds of millions of dollars worth
of servers, switches, and storage. So you can still use that. And then still connect
to the Cloud to get a lot of the benefits of the Cloud, like agility, auto scaling,
and amazing things that come with the Cloud.
So this is a very good option for many people. And the reason it's such a good option is
you've already got an investment in your infrastructure. You can leverage your infrastructure and still
leverage the benefits of the cloud. It gets more interesting, because if you have the
connection cut between all your connections to the Cloud, in a hybrid cloud environment,
you're still up and running without your connections to the Cloud.
Now let's discuss performance. There are environments that require extremely low latency, specific
applications, and you'll never get the latency on the Cloud that you actually will in your
own data center. Why? Because you have this fiber optic connection to the Cloud and it
takes time for the speed of light to actually go over the fiber. Not that long, it could
be milliseconds, but those milliseconds can be in certain applications, a competitive
disadvantage.
Let's take a financial application. For example, you place a trade based on algorithmic trading.
Basically, as soon as you gets some news, you buy, sell, or what have you. Now let's
say that, if we're in the financial world and a stock is going up, if you could buy
that trade a nanosecond faster than the competition, you could have a competitive advantage, you
could buy it cheaper. And when stock prices were going down, if you could sell a nanosecond
faster than your competition, again, you could sell it at a higher price, before it goes
down. So you could buy cheaper and you could sell higher.
So this is really why hybrid cloud environments work because you get the benefits, for example,
of your current infrastructure, you get lower latency, and you also get the survivability
of a failure, but you also get control. See if the Cloud provider were to say to you,
by the way, we don't want you on the Cloud, you still have your data center. If the Cloud
provider were to triple your rates, you still have your data center, so that's the advantage
of the hybrid cloud.
Now let's talk about a pure cloud. In a pure cloud, all of your things are in the Cloud.
Now, because they're in the Cloud, it's going to be much simpler. You don't have a network
to maintain, which means the network engineers, you need a lot less of them. You don't maintain
as many switches and routers. You don't have as many servers to deal with. You don't have
complicated routing. You don't have complicated network management. You don't have complicated
server management. Everything's easy because it's all done for you in the Cloud. So moving
completely to the Cloud makes life simpler.
If you are a new organization and you've never invested in technology before, you don't need
the capital expense, for example, of purchasing these big data centers. And it's not just
the compute and the storage and all the applications and the network, but it's the power, the cooling,
the space. These data centers take up a lot of space. So if a new organization is considering
moving to the Cloud and they go straight to the Cloud, they don't have anything to buy.
So they don't have those big capital expenses. Instead, they trade them for ongoing expenses
or operational expenses.
So the Cloud environment, when it's pure cloud, are faster, which is great, because you can
spin up an instance or a computing, a virtual machine in the seconds. Where in the data
center, if you need a new server, you might have to order a new server. Now you can still
do virtualization in the data center, and you can even run your own Cloud in your own
data center, like an OpenStack Ansible Cloud or a Nutanix Cloud.
So there's lots of options to do really great hybrid clouds, but just understand that when
you're on the Cloud, you've got more speed. And when you're in the data center, you have
more control and more performance. Now you know the differences between the hybrid cloud
and the pure cloud, and the advantages and disadvantages of each. So as a cloud architect,
you can not only present yourself on an interview, but better design things for your customers.
The next question is a security question, and it's going to test your knowledge of security.
The question is going to be, how can autoscaling help with DDoS protection? Now, when you initially
hear this, if you don't understand security, and you don't understand DDoS attacks, autoscaling
and DDoS, they seem so unrelated, but they're not.
See here's what happens in a distributed denial-of-service attack or in a DDoS attack. There's a hacker
who infects multiple computers, and then they launched an attack on your system through
those multiple computers. And what they're typically doing, is they're trying to send
something at you, that's going to use up all your servers resources. Meaning, network bandwidth,
or CPU performance, or memory, or a saturated buffer in the operating system. And they're
trying to do this to basically take control or overwhelm your system.
So that's the way a DDoS attacks, you get a large volume of stuff that attacks your
system. So let's say you've got a web server that can do 10,000 web requests per second,
and you normally have 5,000. This web server's solid. Now let's say you get a DDoS attack
that's 30,000 web requests per second. It's going to overwhelm your actual customers,
the DDoS attack is going to take over it, and your web is going to be predominantly
down.
Now, let's say you had autoscaling. Let's say that each of your servers could handle
5,000 web requests, and you spun up 10 different instances, and what that means is you've got
5,000 times 10. So if you're getting attacked with 30,000 requests per second, but you can
now handle 50,000, because of all auto-scaling, guess what? The DDoS attack was thwarted by
autoscaling. So autoscaling is one of the many things that's part of a comprehensive
DDoS protection. So understand how the pieces and parts go together and you'll be in great
shape. So now you know how autoscaling can assist with DDoS protection?
Now, someone actually asked me on YouTube that they were asked on an interview, what
is CIDR or Classless Inter-Domain Routing? So let's talk about that, and some basic networking
skills, every cloud architect should have. So it used to be, about 25 years ago, when
I first went into networking, they were phasing this concept of classical networking out,
but there were these concepts of address classes. And a Class A network began with a zero all
the way to 127. And it had a subnet mask that was /8 or 255.0.0.0, and what happened is
this was one giant network that could basically house about 16 million hosts.
But of course, they'd all have to be in a single subnet, which would be ridiculous,
because if you assign an address like that and you put it on one ethernet port of your
router, all the 16 million addresses would be used up all by that subnet, and you, obviously,
would run out of addresses really quickly. Because if you've got a computer that's got
four ethernet cards in it, they all need to be on a separate subnet. And what are you
going to use? 16 million addresses for every single subnet, of course not. So basically,
what happened is people looked at the Class A, the zero to 127, and the Class B the 128
to 191 with a /16, meaning 255 255.0.0.
And then we had the Class C, which began with the 192 all the way to .223, and that had
a /24 subnet mask, which is 255 255 255.0. And then we said, we don't need these address
classes anymore, functionally, they're basically useless for us. So we're basically, going
to take one of these networks and we're going to subnet them down, so we have as many IP
addresses as we need, and as many subsets as we need, and we can maximally use the IP
address based that we're given, especially because we're short on addresses.
So Classless Inter-Domain Routing, also known as CIDR, is basically saying we are no longer
going to use the classical boundaries, meaning Class A /8, Class B /16, Class C /24. Instead,
we are going to subnet them down and make the subnets the size that we actually need
them. Now, you know about Classless Inter-Domain Routing.
The next question that people are often asked is, what qualities make you good fit for the
job? Now, here's where I tell my students to leverage their life experience, leverage
their work experience, leverage their strengths, and really their assets. And here's what I
mean by this. Let's say, you're a job as a cloud architect, and it's your first cloud
architect job. Let's say, you don't have a big career in tech. You're living an experience.
Let's say you worked in customer service for a few years.
Now you might say customer service and cloud architecture are unrelated and they are, but
they're still traits that carry over from customer service that are going to make you
great cloud architect. Let's talk about them as an example. In customer service, you interact
with people. If you're good in customer service, you're going to have fantastic people skills,
interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, soft skills.
Why? Because you're going to be dealing with frustrated people and you're going to need
to learn how to calm them down and make them satisfied, so that means some excellent communication
skills. And you really need to have some empathy, because when someone's telling you about their
problem and they're really upset about it, you have to be able to address that.
So now let's talk about what you do as a cloud architect. You meet with clients, you ask
questions, you present things, very business-oriented role. Now remember from customer experience,
you learned emotional intelligence, you learned empathy, and you learned communication. Now,
when you're speaking to an executive, you are better positioned to bring out the best
in the executive, ask the right questions, bring out the best in your team, and come
up with the best design. See that's how, what you did in your past experiences can definitely
help you in your future job.
So if someone asks you what qualities make you a good fit for the job, think about the
experiences you had. Maybe you were part of a team, like a team captain, which shows leadership
and teamwork. Think about what employers desire and how you can leverage your past experiences,
and it will help you get your first cloud architect job.
Now, the next question often ends interviews, both technical and non-technical interviews.
And that's when someone says, "Why should I hire you now?" If you know me and you've
seen some of my videos, I tell you that sales skills are critical for cloud architects,
or anyone for that matter in a technology career, but sales skills are very critical
for a cloud architect. But whether you're a cloud engineer, doesn't matter, here's where
sales skills help.
When someone says, "Why I should hire you?" This is your chance to sell, convince the
employers that they need you, and you will make such a massive impact on their team.
So let's look at things from a hiring manager's perspective. The hiring manager has a challenge.
They've got a lot of work to be done, and they obviously don't have enough people to
do it. And that's why they're hiring, so they're too busy. What do hiring managers desire?
I'm going to tell you right now.
The hiring managers desire people that are technically competent, that are trustworthy,
that are safe, meaning they know what they know, and they know what they don't know,
that are emotionally intelligent, that are energetic, that are enthusiastic, that are
passionate about what they do, and like to bring out the best in others, and work in
teams. So when someone says, "Why should I hire you?" Think in terms of things the hiring
managers desires.
So I would say, for example, "I'm a technology professional with 25 years experience. I am
highly motivated. I am energetic. I am enthusiastic. I've been writing and speaking in front of
1,000 people audiences for the last 20 years. I know how to bring out the best in others.
And I can look at your challenges and help you solve that challenges and make your team
perform more efficiently."
I showed them why they needed me. So when you know what the hiring manager desires,
and you can look at your strengths, show how your strengths can convince the hiring manager
that they must have you on their team. When they must have you on your team, not only
will a job offer come, but a salary will be much higher because they need you. And when
you're in high demand and you're a resource, that's very valuable, you'll be paid more,
you'll be hired quicker.
These are some questions that could show up on a cloud architect technical interview or
any cloud architect interview for that matter, so now you know.
So let me tell you about some things that we do to help the technical community and
the cloud architect community. Every Monday and every Thursday, we have a free, how to
get your first cloud architect job webinar. On this webinar, we will tell you what hiring
managers desire. We'll teach you how to build the perfect resume. We will teach you what
to do to get technical competency. We'll teach you how to build your brand, so you can get
hired and get your first cloud architect job.
Because when people ask us how to get your first cloud architect job, we've been coaching
people for 20 years on how to get their first tech job. And we've got the solution and we
can happily do this, and we can tell you on Monday and Thursday, absolutely free.
Now on every Tuesday, we have a cloud architect experience webinar. And what we do on this
webinar is we talk about what it takes to get your first tech job from an experience
perspective. See, we know that when it comes to your first job, you need to have a high
level of competency. And it's very hard to get a high level of competency without working.
So we have created a set of programs, which you can do on your own or with us. They can
help you build deep cloud architect competency from the comfort and the safety in your own
home. And we talk about that every Tuesday.
Most Wednesdays we try in the morning to do a YouTube Live. We can't do it every week,
because we don't have the time, we try. And on these YouTube Lives, you can ask us any
questions related to your cloud architect career or your tech career. And it's really
about tech career development or getting your first cloud architect job. Ask us your questions,
and we will answer them in real-time. We do that on most Wednesdays.
Now we really want to be out there for you. So we have implemented this Ask Cloud Mike,
and what that program is about, again, the link is in the description below, like all
of the videos so far, you can send us any questions you have on a cloud computing career
or a tech career, and we'll do everything we can to answer them on our next YouTube
video or one of the coming up YouTube videos.
If you're working on AWS certifications, we have an absolutely free AWS Certified Solution
Architect Associate ebook, the link is in the description below. And we have a free
AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate course, a complete course, it's completely
free. I'll leave the link in the description below.
Thank you so much for watching this video. I look forward to seeing you in another video
very soon.