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Cloud architect, cloud solutions architect and enterprise architect interviews at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the companies that run FAANG-style loops are weighted unlike a software engineering loop: the design round assumes the building blocks exist and asks which you would choose and why, there is far less capacity arithmetic and far more about failure behaviour, blast radius, migration order and what a design costs to run, and the broad discussion round — security, deployment strategy, microservices, observability, cost — is usually where the outcome is decided. This plan sequences the site's cloud architecture questions, discussion-round answers, concept pages and quizzes into six weeks, easiest first, with a free week one so you can judge the format before paying for anything.
Built for someone with a few weeks before a cloud architect, cloud solutions architect or enterprise architect loop who has run production systems on at least one cloud and can talk about them. If your loop is a solutions architect loop, this is the closest plan on the site — the discussion week and the migration week apply directly. If it is a cloud engineer or platform loop, weeks two and four apply; use the cloud engineer role path for the operational round.
Six weeks, 50 steps, about 22 hours. Week one is free with no account.
Learn the shape of the loop — a decision, not a derivation — and finish two real cloud architecture designs, naming a self-managed and a managed option for every capability. Everything this week is free.
Six weeks at roughly four hours a week, or about 22 hours in total. The plan compresses to as few as two weeks by dropping the optional steps first, and stretches to twelve; the core steps stay in every version.
Week one is entirely free with no account: both cloud architecture questions, the microservices discussion question, two concept pages, the clarifying-questions post and the quiz. Weeks two to six use Pro questions for the design round; every discussion-round answer, blog post, concept page, quiz and tool stays free throughout.
Progress is derived from questions you have completed and quizzes you have taken, not from a stored position in the plan. If you finished the landing zone design last month, the plan already shows it done. Reading steps are not tracked, so the percentage counts questions and quizzes only.
Week one is free. From week 2 the plan uses 13 Pro questions and 3 Pro behavioral guides; the posts, concept pages, quizzes and tools stay free.
See Pro pricingThe round that decides this loop. Give a structured answer to each of the broad questions — security in layers, a deployment strategy chosen from the failure it guards against, infrastructure as code, observability — and design the landing zone those answers live in.
Choose a database and a caching strategy from the workload, not the brochure, and do the estimate this loop actually asks for — what the design costs to run — before drawing a single box.
The question every cloud architect loop asks in some form. Decide what moves first, what runs in both places and for how long, how the cutover is rehearsed, and how you would roll it back — then say it out loud twice.
Every cloud architect loop has a migration question and it is judged on sequencing: what moves first, what runs in both places, how the cutover is rehearsed and how it is rolled back. These are the site's migration designs, easiest first; a new one lands here on its own.
The hard cloud questions: pipelines built from managed streaming, storage and query services, judged on service choice, lag and the bill. Then the cost investigation every architect gets asked about.
The hard cloud questions are data platforms: a pipeline built from managed streaming, storage and query services, where the interview is about which service, what it costs and what happens when it lags. Two of them, hardest last.
The failure vocabulary a design is defended with, the behavioral round where architects are asked how they got a decision adopted, then one full hard design under time.
Typically a cloud architecture design round — a platform on managed services, a migration, or scaling something that already exists — a broad discussion round on security, deployment, microservices, observability and cost, a lighter coding round, and a behavioral round. The discussion round is usually where the outcome is decided, which is why it has a whole week here.
Less than a system design round, and of a different kind: interviewers expect a storage and egress estimate that turns into a monthly cost, not a QPS derivation. Week three covers exactly that, with the site's calculator; the cloud architecture guides deliberately replace the capacity table with a self-managed versus managed service comparison.
Yes — it is the closest plan on the site. Solutions architect loops weight the discussion round and the migration question the same way, and add more about presenting a design to a customer, which the influence-without-authority behavioral guide in week six covers. A cloud engineer plan, for the operational half of platform loops, is being written next.