IntermediateTECHNICAL
You’ve worked hands-on with at least one major public cloud (e.g., AWS, Azure, or GCP). Walk me through a specific solution you architected end‑to‑end in that cloud—what the business requirement was, the reference architecture you chose (networking, compute, storage, security), and one architectural decision you would change if you were to redesign it today.
Cloud Architect
General

Sample Answer

On AWS, I designed an event‑driven order processing platform for an e‑commerce client that needed to handle Black Friday spikes of 10x traffic without pre‑provisioning hardware. I went with a hub‑and‑spoke VPC model: a shared services VPC with Transit Gateway, then app VPCs with private subnets, NAT gateways, and AWS WAF in front of Application Load Balancers. Compute was mostly ECS Fargate for stateless services, plus Lambda for lightweight enrichment. We used Aurora MySQL for transactional data and S3 + Glacier for long‑term order histories, with KMS‑backed encryption everywhere. Security integrated with IAM Identity Center, security groups locked to least privilege, and GuardDuty/CloudTrail for monitoring. We supported ~8x traffic growth while cutting infra costs ~35% versus their colo. If I redesigned it today, I’d use more serverless (Lambda + EventBridge + DynamoDB) for low‑churn services to reduce operational overhead and improve elasticity even further.

Keywords

End‑to‑end AWS architecture: VPC design, ECS Fargate, Aurora, S3Security by design: WAF, IAM, KMS, GuardDuty, least privilegeBusiness impact: 8x traffic scaling, ~35% cost reductionRetrospective improvement: move more workloads to serverless pattern
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