Cloud Engineer Technology & Digital Applications 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A development team uses feature flags to enable new functionality for a subset of users before a full rollout. What deployment pattern does this represent?
- Blue/Green deployment
- Canary release (Correct answer)
- Rolling update
- Immutable deployment
Correct answer: Canary release
A canary release gradually exposes new features to a small percentage of users to detect issues before full rollout.
Question 2: Which protocol does gRPC use as its transport layer, enabling multiplexed streams over a single connection?
- HTTP/1.1
- WebSocket
- HTTP/2 (Correct answer)
- MQTT
Correct answer: HTTP/2
gRPC is built on HTTP/2, which supports multiplexing, header compression, and bidirectional streaming over a single connection.
Question 3: A cloud engineer must ensure that a critical production database is protected against accidental deletion. Which AWS feature directly prevents this?
- Enabling Multi-AZ
- Enabling Deletion Protection on the RDS instance (Correct answer)
- Creating a read replica
- Enabling Enhanced Monitoring
Correct answer: Enabling Deletion Protection on the RDS instance
RDS Deletion Protection is a flag that prevents the instance from being deleted via API or console until the flag is explicitly disabled.
Question 4: In a CI/CD pipeline, what is the purpose of a 'smoke test' stage immediately after deployment?
- Run all unit tests against the source code
- Perform a quick sanity check that the deployed application is alive and basic paths work (Correct answer)
- Load test the application under production traffic
- Scan container images for CVEs
Correct answer: Perform a quick sanity check that the deployed application is alive and basic paths work
Smoke tests verify that core functionality is operational post-deployment before investing in deeper test suites.
Question 5: Which Kubernetes resource is used to store non-sensitive configuration data as key-value pairs and inject it into pods?
- Secret
- ConfigMap (Correct answer)
- PersistentVolumeClaim
- Ingress
Correct answer: ConfigMap
ConfigMaps store non-sensitive configuration data and can be mounted as volumes or exposed as environment variables in pods.
Question 6: A cloud engineer wants to reduce egress costs by serving static website assets closer to end users. Which technology should they use?
- Load Balancer
- Content Delivery Network (CDN) (Correct answer)
- API Gateway
- VPN Gateway
Correct answer: Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN caches static assets at edge locations worldwide, reducing origin egress costs and improving latency for end users.
Question 7: When designing a cloud architecture, the concept of 'loose coupling' means that components should:
- Share a single database schema for consistency
- Communicate via direct in-process function calls
- Interact through well-defined APIs or messaging queues so each can change independently (Correct answer)
- Be deployed on the same virtual machine
Correct answer: Interact through well-defined APIs or messaging queues so each can change independently
Loose coupling isolates components so that changes or failures in one do not cascade, typically achieved via APIs or async messaging.
Cloud Engineer Technology & Digital Applications 3
A development team uses feature flags to enable new functionality for a subset of users before a full rollout.
What deployment pattern does this represent?