Quality Control & Assurance Flashcards
7 cards from real Cloud Engineer practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Quality Control & Assurance flashcards as text
Which practice ensures that secrets and credentials are never hardcoded in application source code, supporting cloud security QA?
Answer: Using a secrets manager such as AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault
Secrets managers store, rotate, and audit access to credentials at runtime, keeping them out of source code entirely.
A cloud QA engineer wants to validate Terraform changes without applying them. Which command provides a plan for review?
Answer: terraform plan
`terraform plan` generates an execution plan showing what changes Terraform will make without modifying any resources.
What is the purpose of 'observability' as a quality assurance principle in cloud systems?
Answer: To understand internal system state from external outputs like logs, metrics, and traces
Observability enables engineers to diagnose and understand system behavior in production using the three pillars: logs, metrics, and traces.
Which CI/CD quality practice involves running security vulnerability scans on container images before deployment?
Answer: Container image scanning with tools like Trivy or Snyk
Container image scanning tools like Trivy detect known CVEs in OS packages and application dependencies before images reach production.
A cloud team implements automated rollback when a deployment causes error rate to exceed 5%. What type of quality control does this represent?
Answer: Automated remediation based on observability signals
Automated rollback triggered by error rate thresholds is a self-healing quality control mechanism driven by real-time observability data.
What is 'test environment parity' and why is it important in cloud QA?
Answer: Keeping staging and production environments as identical as possible to reduce environment-specific bugs
Environment parity minimizes the risk of bugs that only appear in production by making staging configurations mirror production as closely as possible.
Which SRE concept defines the maximum acceptable time that a system can be unavailable per year and directly informs QA objectives?
Answer: Service Level Objective (SLO)
SLOs define specific measurable targets for reliability (e.g., 99.9% uptime) that QA processes and error budgets are designed to protect.