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Cloud Computing & Infrastructure Flashcards

7 cards from real TOC practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.

Read the first 7 Cloud Computing & Infrastructure flashcards as text

  1. What is the key difference between vertical scaling (scale up) and horizontal scaling (scale out) in cloud infrastructure?

    Answer: Vertical scaling increases a single instance's resources; horizontal scaling adds more instances

    Vertical scaling upgrades CPU/RAM on an existing instance, while horizontal scaling adds additional instances to distribute the workload.

  2. Which cloud security service continuously monitors API activity and detects unusual behavior such as unauthorized access attempts or data exfiltration?

    Answer: Threat detection / GuardDuty-style service

    Threat detection services (e.g., AWS GuardDuty, Azure Defender) use ML and threat intelligence to analyze logs and alert on anomalous or malicious activity.

  3. In container orchestration with Kubernetes, what is the smallest deployable unit called?

    Answer: Pod

    A Pod is the atomic unit of Kubernetes scheduling and can host one or more tightly coupled containers that share network and storage resources.

  4. Which cloud practice involves storing infrastructure configuration in version control and reviewing changes via pull requests before applying them?

    Answer: GitOps

    GitOps uses Git as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure; changes are applied automatically or after PR approval, providing auditability and rollback.

  5. A multi-tenant SaaS application must isolate each customer's data at the database level. Which approach best achieves this in a cloud environment?

    Answer: Separate database instances per tenant

    Separate database instances provide the strongest isolation, eliminating cross-tenant data leakage risks and simplifying compliance audits per customer.

  6. Which metric is most critical when evaluating the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for a cloud-hosted mission-critical application?

    Answer: The maximum acceptable time to restore service after an outage

    RTO defines the maximum downtime a business can tolerate; it drives decisions about failover automation, replica placement, and DR runbook speed.

  7. What is the purpose of a cloud service mesh (e.g., Istio) in a microservices architecture?

    Answer: To manage inter-service communication, observability, and security policies at the network layer

    A service mesh handles service-to-service traffic management, mutual TLS, load balancing, and distributed tracing without requiring changes to application code.