*Describe a time when you had to transition a project you own to a new owner? * (can I mention here delivering for instance a web app to the client and providing training documentation to help?) –
Yes, but include the reason for transferring the project to the new owner. The owner can be external or internal. How did you help the new owner to prepare to undertake the project? How did you know the new owner was ready to undertake the project?
Let us say you are done with a project and ready to transition to a new owner, but upon evaluation, you may realize the new owner needs more training. In that case, prepare detailed training materials and guidelines and leave your door open in case the new owner needs any further clarification down the line.
*Tell me about a time you sacrificed short term gain for something that would create long term value for the business? * (Can I mention here a choice in the storage for the client?)
It can be as simple as your team abandoning the provisioning of AWS infrastructure from a local CLI and preferring to make a drastic change in favor of a long-term solution that favored moving to the terraform cloud and which required some of your team members to be retrained.
Moving to the terraform cloud provided long-term values and solutions, such as collaboration, protection of the quality code base in the main branch and ensuring that only quality code was merged. This was not an easy choice, but in the long run, it helped the team to increase the deployment rates and reduce the troubleshooting incidents.
*Tell me about a time you saw a peer struggling and you decided to step in to help? *
You helped a client struggling to create EC2 autoscaling solutions. That could dynamically enhance cost-effectiveness and eliminate the need for human intervention in adjusting the resources required for the supreme performances of the applications and instances in our AWS infrastructure.
*Describe a time when someone in your time challenged you to think differently about a problem? *
We had a cost-oriented client who wanted to reduce the cost of running physical infrastructure on premises by migrating to the AWS cloud. During the planning stage, we started by visiting the previous retrospective notes to make sure we improved in areas we struggled with in previous projects. One of my colleagues challenged me to think of ways to create better infrastructure in terms of cost-effectiveness than the previous projects.
I mentioned a few ways we could achieve this: creating an autoscaling group, managing the s3 bucket objects and storage classes effectively, and using the EC2 lifecycle manager to manage the snapshots and volumes related to the instances running in the infrastructure.
My colleague was not fully satisfied with my response, and he challenged me to think of a solution that could mix reserved, spot, and on-demand instances to enhance a cost-effective infrastructure. He further challenged me to consider using a saving plan that fits the customer’s budget compared to reserved instances.
During my free time that evening, I took a few hours to research and understand the benefit of a solution that entailed what my colleague challenged me to think about. Indeed, it was a great solution that I did not think about during the planning meeting.
*Tell me about a time when you used external trends to improve your own company’s product or service?*
Security is always a big issue for all the companies that have web servers and web applications in the cloud.
https://www2.deloitte.com/ch/en/pages/risk/articles/impact-covid-cybersecurity.html
I remember reading an article established by Deloitte last year stating that cybersecurity incidents increased by 35% during the pandemic. I shared the article with my team, and during our team decision meeting, we suggested the need to move from AWS Shield Standard to AWS Shield Advanced to enhance increased levels of protection against attacks targeting our clients’ applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, and Amazon Route 53 resources.]
*Give me an example of a time when you were not able to meet your commitment*
We had a client that wanted us to create an S3 bucket and simultaneously create groups and users, and at the same time add users into three groups: the Developer, System Admin, and Managers. In the SOW, the customer wanted the developer group and all users to have the ability to access the s3 bucket and simultaneously be able to List, Read and Write the objects in the S3 bucket.
The SOW also stated the need to manage the objects and access permission using policy to reduce the complexity of ACLs. Unfortunately, the access policy I created blocked all the users in the developer group from Listing, Reading, and Writing the objects in the bucket.
I did not know about this issue until my manager explained that the client was unsatisfied with the project. It was not my happiest day, considering our company is obsessed with customer satisfaction.
Indeed, I should have done better. The policy I created had an error that was blocking all the users. The action I took was to organize a feedback session with the customer quickly. During the session, I thoroughly explained what happened and the steps I would take to fix the issue. I committed my 100 percent focus and concentration. Within 30 minutes, I solved the issue, and the users in the developer group could now List, Write and Read the objects in the S3 bucket without restriction.
*Give me an example of a tough or critical piece of feedback you receive*
A mistake of mixing the CIDR_Block IP address for public and private subnets.
Public subnet = 10.0.0.5/20
private = 10.0.1.0/20
Forgetting to include the AWS WAF in the infrastructure meant the webservers and APIs running in the infrastructure were not protected from common web exploits and bots that could affect availability, compromise Security, or consume excessive resources.
My manager was dissatisfied with my solutions. It was a simple case of forgetting to include the WAF terraform code in the resource.tf configuration file. I explained the mistake I made to my manager; even though he understood, he was very critical of my error.
He requested that next time be vigilant and double-check the resources in my configuration files against the client’s SOW to ensure the inclusion of resources as requested by the customer.
You can also make a simple mistake in which you forget to open one of the security group ports indicated in the SOW, which makes the client dissatisfied with your work. The feedback you received in such a situation from both your manager and the customers could be critical and helped you understand the importance of double-checking your SOW against the resources in the configuration files all the time, including everything requested by the customer.
*Walk me through a big problem or issue in your organization that you help to solve*
Implementing Network firewalls at all layers using solutions such as security groups, NACLS, AWS WAF, Advanced Shield, AWS Certificate Manager, and Firewall Manager. Ensuring all the NACLs levels, such as (100 – HTTP, 105, 110, 115, and 120) are included to filter traffic reaching the subnets from VPC. Also, ensuring the security groups solutions and ports, such as (TCP and UDP, 80, 22, 443, and 8080) were included to filter the traffic reaching the instances.
*Tell me about a specific metric you have used to identify a need for change in your department* (can I refer to some with Cloudwatch?)
CPU utilization spiked due to a change in the marketing department’s goals. This change affected the Jenkins server’s ability to carry out its routine tasks, such as scheduling activities for the agents, installing plugins required to build the jobs, and displaying the job logs in its GUI. Yes, metrics are parameters such as CPU, network, disk, and memory that CloudWatch can monitor.
*Tell me about a time you did not completely manage your project or something that didn’t get completed on time? *
Talk about the VPC network, its components, and the fact that the project was not completed as required by the customer. My team delivered an infrastructure code with fewer private subnets as opposed to the number stated in the SOW. Indicate how you fixed this issue and whether the customer was satisfied with your corrections. How did you know the customer was satisfied with your corrected infrastructure code?
*Describe a difficult interaction you had with a customer*
The customer was not satisfied with the quality of the infrastructure delivered. As a team, we omitted the versioning of the S3, as indicated in the client’s SOW. Omitting the versioning of the s3 bucket places the objects in the bucket at risk because they are not protected against overwrites and deletes and cannot be restored or retrieved.
Include detailed information on how you rectified this issue.