Medium Level – GK Questions

Multi-cloud architecture distributes workloads across AWS, Azure, GCP to avoid vendor lock-in, improve resilience, and leverage best-of-breed services. Critical for enterprise cloud strategy.

SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) automates playbooks: alert triage, enrichment, containment actions. Reduces analyst workload and response time. Critical for SOC efficiency.

NIST SP 800-61 and ISO 27035 provide structured incident response methodologies. Critical for consistent, effective handling of security incidents in enterprises.

Threat hunting uses hypotheses, analytics, and analyst expertise to find hidden adversaries. Complements automated detection. Critical for advanced persistent threat (APT) defense.

Threat intelligence (commercial, open-source, ISACs) provides IOCs: malicious IPs, domains, hashes, TTPs. Enables proactive blocking and hunting. Critical for mature security operations.

SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) aggregates logs, correlates events, and detects anomalies across network, endpoint, and application sources. Foundation for modern SOC operations.

MLOps platforms integrate: feature stores for consistent data, model registries for versioning, serving infrastructure for scalable inference. Critical for production ML system reliability.

Quantization (INT8, INT4) reduces model size 2-4x with minimal accuracy loss, enabling deployment on edge devices and reducing cloud inference costs. Critical for scalable LLM serving.

Function calling/tool use enables LLMs to invoke APIs, run code, query databases for tasks beyond text generation. Critical for building agentic AI systems that interact with real-world systems.

Artifact management (MLflow, DVC) tracks datasets, model versions, hyperparameters, and code commits. Enables reproducibility, auditability, and rollback in ML workflows. Critical for enterprise MLOps.

MLOps combines: CI/CD for automated deployment, drift detection for performance monitoring, A/B testing for validation. Critical for maintaining ML system reliability and business value over time.

PEFT methods (LoRA, Adapter, Prefix-tuning) update small subset of parameters or add lightweight modules, reducing compute/memory vs full fine-tuning. Critical for resource-constrained LLM adaptation.

Chain-of-Thought prompting encourages LLMs to generate reasoning steps before final answer, improving performance on complex reasoning tasks. Critical for enhancing LLM reliability in high-stakes applications.

Fine-tuning updates pre-trained model weights on task-specific data, enabling adaptation to domains like healthcare, legal, or customer service with limited labeled examples. Critical for practical LLM deployment.

Compiling source code is performed by compiler software (like GCC, javac), not the OS. OS functions include: process management, memory management, file system management, device management, security, and user interface. Compilers are application/system software that run ON the OS.

VSSC (Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre), Thiruvananthapuram, is ISRO's lead center for launch vehicle development including PSLV, GSLV, and LVM3. URSC handles satellites, LPSC develops propulsion systems, ISAC integrates satellites. ISRO has multiple specialized centers across India.

Hashing transforms input data of any size into a fixed-length hash value using algorithms like SHA-256 or MD5. It is one-way (irreversible), used for password storage, data integrity verification, and digital signatures. Unlike encryption, hashed data cannot be decrypted to original form.

Third Normal Form (3NF) requires that a table is in 2NF and has no transitive dependencies (non-key attributes depending on other non-key attributes). This reduces redundancy and update anomalies. BCNF is a stricter version of 3NF handling certain edge cases in dependency relationships.

CoWIN is built on a modular, scalable architecture that can be repurposed for other immunization and health programs. The government has indicated plans to adapt CoWIN for routine vaccination drives, demonstrating the value of building flexible digital public infrastructure for healthcare delivery.

CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) allows multiple users to transmit simultaneously on same frequency by assigning unique spreading codes. Used in 3G networks. FDMA divides frequency, TDMA divides time slots, OFDMA (used in 4G/5G) combines frequency and time division with orthogonal subcarriers.