IntermediateTECHNICAL
Describe a cloud solution you designed end-to-end. What were the main business requirements, and how did they influence your architectural decisions?
Cloud Architect
General

Sample Answer

At my last company, I led the design of a new customer analytics platform on the cloud. The business wanted to consolidate data from 8+ source systems, support near real-time dashboards for ~1,500 internal users, and cut infra spend by at least 25% compared to our aging on‑prem Hadoop cluster. Those requirements pushed me toward a cloud-native, event-driven architecture rather than a lift‑and‑shift. We used a managed Kafka service for ingest (targeting sub‑5 minute latency), object storage as the data lake, and a serverless SQL engine for ad‑hoc analytics. For frequent dashboards, we added a curated layer in a managed data warehouse to guarantee predictable performance. Non‑functional needs were just as important: data residency in two regions, RPO of 15 minutes, RTO of 1 hour. That drove multi‑AZ deployment, cross‑region replication, and infrastructure as code with automated disaster‑recovery tests. Within six months, we cut costs by ~32% and reduced new report delivery time from weeks to days.

Keywords

Tie architecture directly to explicit business requirements and metricsExplain key technology choices (event-driven, serverless, managed services)Highlight non-functional requirements (RPO/RTO, compliance, performance)Quantify impact on cost, latency, and delivery speed