Interview Transcript Notes

Participants

• Sahil: Lead Cloud Engineer at Siana with 12 years of experience.
• Muhammad Ashik: Candidate from Kerala with 3.1 years of experience, 1.5 years in DevOps.

Introduction

• Sahil introduces himself and describes his role in the global Cloud team at Siana.
• Sahil mentions that Siana is a product company supporting internal teams with cloud technology, primarily using AWS and some GCP, along with CI/CD solutions.

Candidate Background

• Muhammad Ashik details his experience in AWS services:
  • IAM, S3, VPC, EC2, CloudFront, Route 53, ELB, Security Groups, WAF, and Azure services.
  • Experience in CI/CD tools: Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible.

Key Technical Discussion

AWS and Azure Experience

• Ashik has hands-on experience with AWS services and Azure, including:
  • IAM policies, VPC setup, and security configurations.
  • Experience with Azure Active Directory and its integration with AWS.

Connectivity and Security

• Discussion on connecting to private EC2 instances:
  • Mentioned the use of VPN client endpoints and Transit Gateway for private connectivity.
  • Discussed security layers in AWS and how to secure connections between on-premise and cloud environments.

DevOps and CI/CD Practices

• Ashik explains his role in deployment and monitoring:
  • Mentions using Jenkins for CI/CD with a pull-based strategy from GitHub.
  • Discussed various methods to handle security policies in IAM and user management.

Python and Scripting

• Basic knowledge of Python and its modules.
• Experience writing scripts for tasks such as finding unused EBS volumes and system patching.

Terraform and Infrastructure as Code

• Hands-on experience with Terraform:
  • Managing state files in S3.
  • Understanding of file locking using DynamoDB.
  • Ability to import existing resources into Terraform state.

Security Measures in AWS

• Discussed various security features in AWS:
  • Using AWS Secrets Manager, ACM, and WAF.
  • Knowledge of GuardDuty and Service Control Policies (SCP) for organizational security.

Final Remarks

• Ashik prepares for the next interview round scheduled for 6:00 PM.