Here's how you can ace discussing cloud computing technologies in a technical interview.

It is really important to understand all concepts when you are talking about cloud, the main features, the characteristics, differences, use cases, advantages and the main concerns that the customers usually have; with all this understanding you can act as a trusted advisor and give good recommendations and advise to your customers and let them make the better decisions.

Equally important is to understand - Pricing Models Understanding the pricing models given by various public cloud providers and using the pricing calculator would understand the best provider and consumption model to choose. - Free tier Cloud providers can provide certain free credits to consume which can be used to build certain POCs and do test labs free of cost. - Premium Partnership options and benefits offered There could be premium partnership options with cloud providers that can be valuable in long run. - Well Architected Framework pillars Understanding the well architecture framework pillars gives a better understanding of how each provider is meeting them.

These are the key checkpoints to be reviewed - What is the nature of data being handled whether it is personal (PII), Health (PHI), Finance, Payment - What is the jurisdiction where your organization or customer operates - Understanding above two will give an indication of the compliance standards to be planned and implemented. - Data Classification Certain proprietary customer data cannot be on public cloud. Hence it is important to classify the data and understand the sensitivity to provision the appropriate storage destination.

In addition to Scalability below Well Architected Framework pillars should be reviewed for any cloud provider 1. Resilience which covers scalability, availability, reliability and fault tolerance 2. Operational excellence: Automate possibly everything including infrastructure and code deployment and continuous monitoring 3. Performance Efficiency: Usage of caching and edge computing to lower latencies and improve access speeds. Content delivery networks 4. Cost Optimization: Optimize costs wherever possible, existence of reserved and spot pricing. 5. Security: Having a strong IAM with MFA at core. Implementation of all technical controls for networking, asset storage, encryption. Employing RBAC, least previlege and need to know.

Planning for DR. Some of the important points. Understanding the business sensitivity and criticality of the systems and data and their outage tolerance RTO and RPO objectives as defined in contract SLA and plan the below. - Classify the assets and data - Multi Zone , Multi region deployments as needed - Having appropriate backups to restore critical data during a disaster - Have regular mock drills for DR and Business continuity plan and regularly review and update the same - Seeking Senior Management intervention and guidance/help as needed.

You can use Generative AI extensively for the below - Code template generation for cloud infrastructure provisioning - Code generation for cloud functions in the required language. - Cognitive cloud services available as pretrained models to achieve a functionality (Text analytics, image and face analysis,vision, video, language understanding and translation, conversational AI, search, speech and other generative AI models). These are available as REST APIs which can be easily consumed or Integrated to your existing codebase using the provided SDKs.

Knowing at a reasonable depth and breadth about the three major cloud providers, Amazon, Azure and Google. These public cloud providers are majorly adopted in the industry at varied proportion. Pick up the important category of compute, storage, Database services provided by each. As there 200+ services available for each provider mastering all may not be an option but understand the major services and try to map among the three providers. Have a cheat sheet to update this and review periodically.