IntermediateSITUATIONAL
Recall a situation where you had to design or update a cloud architecture to meet stricter security or compliance requirements (e.g., network segmentation, encryption standards, IAM hardening). How did you balance those requirements with developer productivity and time-to-market, and what concrete architectural patterns did you apply?
Cloud Architect
General

Sample Answer

At my last company, we were preparing for a major enterprise deal that required us to align more closely with SOC 2 and some internal bank-level standards. Our existing setup was a flat VPC with fairly permissive security groups and ad-hoc IAM. Rather than lock everything down overnight and break workflows, I proposed a phased redesign. We moved to a hub-and-spoke VPC model with private subnets for app and data tiers, plus a dedicated shared-services VPC for CI/CD and observability. I introduced security groups based on service roles, not individual instances, and tightened IAM using least-privilege roles and permission boundaries. To keep developers productive, we baked all of this into Terraform modules and a golden EKS cluster pattern so teams could provision compliant stacks with a couple of variables. Within two quarters, we closed the audit gaps, cut the number of IAM admin-like roles by 70%, and developers reported no increase in deployment lead time; our average feature rollout stayed around 2–3 days.

Keywords

Redesigned network with hub-and-spoke VPC, private subnets, and role-based security groupsHardened IAM with least-privilege roles and permission boundaries while reducing admin rolesEmbedded security into Terraform modules and golden patterns to preserve developer velocityDemonstrated compliance improvements without increasing deployment lead time
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