Cloud Solutions Architecture

Translate a business scenario into a list of functional requirements.

Translate stakeholder expectations into measurable non-functional requirements.

Create a workload inventory that identifies components, owners, dependencies, and data flows.

Classify architecture constraints as technical, financial, regulatory, or organizational.

Derive availability, latency, throughput, RTO, and RPO targets from a workload scenario.

Evaluate whether a scenario justifies single-cloud, hybrid-cloud, or multi-cloud deployment.

Draw a provider-neutral context diagram for a proposed system.

Write an architecture decision record that documents one decision, its alternatives, and trade-offs.

Map commonly used Azure services to their closest AWS equivalents and identify important differences.

Design an AWS multi-account structure using Organizations, organizational units, and service control policies.

Create a least-privilege AWS IAM policy for a specified access requirement.

Construct an IPv4 VPC design with public, private, and isolated subnets across multiple Availability Zones.

Select among EC2, Lambda, ECS, and EKS for a given compute workload.

Select among S3, EBS, and EFS for a given storage requirement.

Select among RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, and ElastiCache for a given persistence requirement.

Diagram a highly available three-tier AWS architecture using managed services.

Explain how GCP organizations, folders, projects, and billing accounts affect resource governance.

Grant a predefined or custom GCP IAM role to a principal for a specified access requirement.

Construct a GCP VPC design with regional subnets, routes, and firewall rules.

Select among Compute Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud Run functions, and GKE for a given workload.

Select among Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, Filestore, and local SSD for a given storage requirement.

Select among Cloud SQL, AlloyDB, Spanner, Bigtable, and Firestore for a given data requirement.

Map core AWS, Azure, and GCP services across compute, storage, networking, databases, and identity.

Diagram a highly available three-tier GCP architecture using managed services.

Create a non-overlapping IP address plan for cloud, on-premises, and multi-cloud networks.

Determine packet paths through route tables, gateways, firewalls, and network address translation.

Select a Layer 4 or Layer 7 load-balancing design for a given traffic pattern.

Design DNS-based traffic routing for latency, failover, or geographic requirements.

Select among public internet, site-to-site VPN, and dedicated connectivity for a hybrid link.

Compare AWS Transit Gateway, Azure Virtual WAN, and GCP Network Connectivity Center for hub-and-spoke connectivity.

Design private service access that avoids exposing managed services to the public internet.

Diagnose a cross-cloud connectivity failure using routing, DNS, firewall, and flow-log evidence.

Differentiate human, workload, and service identities in an access-control design.

Design workforce single sign-on across cloud providers using federation and short-lived credentials.

Apply least privilege by combining role-based access control, resource policies, and permission boundaries.

Produce a threat model that identifies assets, trust boundaries, threats, and mitigations for a cloud workload.

Design a secrets and encryption-key management approach for a multi-cloud workload.

Select encryption controls for data at rest, in transit, and in use.

Create a cloud guardrail policy for an example tagging, region, or public-access requirement.

Prioritize remediation actions from a cloud security posture report using risk and business impact.

Decompose a sample application into components using bounded contexts and coupling criteria.

Select synchronous or asynchronous communication for a specified service interaction.

Choose among queues, publish-subscribe topics, event streams, and event buses for an integration scenario.

Design idempotency handling for a retried distributed operation.

Apply timeout, retry, circuit-breaker, and bulkhead patterns to a service interaction.

Select containers, serverless functions, or managed application platforms for a workload component.

Design an API front door using gateway, authentication, throttling, and versioning controls.

Trace one business transaction across services to identify consistency and failure boundaries.

Classify workload data by structure, access pattern, consistency, retention, and sensitivity.

Select a relational, key-value, document, column-family, graph, or time-series database for a scenario.

Choose between strong and eventual consistency for a specified business operation.

Design partition keys that avoid hot partitions in a distributed database.

Select a replication strategy for regional or cross-cloud data access.

Design a cloud object-storage data lake with zones for raw, curated, and consumption data.

Choose a batch, streaming, or change-data-capture ingestion pattern for a data pipeline.

Evaluate cross-cloud data movement using latency, egress cost, sovereignty, and failure-mode criteria.

Calculate the composite availability of a series or parallel dependency design.

Identify single points of failure in an architecture diagram.

Select a multi-AZ or multi-region deployment pattern from stated availability requirements.

Select backup-and-restore, pilot-light, warm-standby, or active-active disaster recovery from RTO and RPO targets.

Design health checks and failover criteria that minimize false failovers.

Estimate capacity using request rate, concurrency, service time, and utilization assumptions.

Select caching layers and invalidation strategies for a given performance bottleneck.

Run a tabletop failure exercise and record architecture changes from the findings.

Create, apply, and destroy a small, cost-controlled Terraform deployment.

Refactor a Terraform configuration into a reusable child module with variables and outputs.

Configure remote Terraform state with locking and environment isolation.

Review a Terraform plan for destructive changes, drift, and policy violations.

Design a CI/CD pipeline with build, test, security, approval, deployment, and rollback stages.

Select rolling, blue-green, or canary deployment for a specified release risk.

Define service-level indicators and service-level objectives for a sample service.

Design logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts around a stated SLO.

Build a normalized cost comparison using compute, storage, requests, support, and network egress.

Identify rightsizing, scheduling, commitment, storage-tiering, and data-transfer savings in a cost report.

Design a cost-governance scheme using account boundaries, tags, budgets, anomaly alerts, and showback or chargeback rules.

Select rehost, relocate, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retain, or retire for an application.

Sequence migration waves using dependencies, risk, business value, and operational readiness.

Design a migration cutover with replication, validation, rollback, and stakeholder checkpoints.

Evaluate a modernization proposal using delivery speed, reliability, lock-in, skills, and total cost.

Create a post-migration validation checklist covering functionality, security, performance, resilience, and cost.

Evaluate whether a multi-cloud design reduces concentration risk after accounting for shared identity, DNS, networking, and software dependencies.

Select a workload placement using capability, compliance, latency, skills, resilience, and cost criteria.

Evaluate the trade-offs between portable abstractions and cloud-native managed services for a workload.

Design centralized governance with provider-specific enforcement across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Design an AWS landing zone using Organizations, Control Tower, identity federation, logging, and guardrails.

Select an AWS hybrid or cross-account networking pattern for a complex organizational scenario.

Evaluate a complex AWS design against the AWS Well-Architected Framework and prioritize improvements.

Resolve an AWS Solutions Architect Associate or Professional scenario by mapping requirements to services and eliminating options that violate stated constraints.

Write a concise architecture brief for a multi-cloud business case.

Produce system context and container diagrams mapping capstone components, user personas, and external service boundaries.

Produce deployment and data-flow diagrams detailing multi-cloud infrastructure, networks, runtime components, and data pipelines.

Produce a threat model that identifies trust boundaries, threats, and mitigations.

Produce a reliability and disaster-recovery plan tied to explicit SLO, RTO, and RPO targets.

Produce a cost estimate and identify the largest uncertainty and optimization opportunity.

Present the capstone architecture as a ten-minute stakeholder briefing with explicit trade-offs.

Answer a system-design interview prompt using a structured requirements, design, risk, and trade-off narrative.