Technology – Medium Level – GK Questions

IaC (Terraform), Configuration Management (Ansible), GitOps all use version-controlled code to define infrastructure state. Enables repeatability, auditability, peer review, automated testing.

Data lakes (S3, ADLS) store raw structured/unstructured data for flexible analysis; data warehouses (Snowflake, Redshift) store curated, schema-on-write data for BI. Modern: lakehouse pattern combines both.

Managed Kubernetes: EKS (AWS), AKS (Azure), GKE (GCP) handle control plane, updates, scaling. Abstracts infrastructure while retaining container flexibility. Critical for cloud-native development.

Parquet is columnar storage format optimized for analytics: efficient compression, predicate pushdown, schema evolution. Reduces I/O by reading only required columns. Used in Spark, Hive, Presto.

Serverless (Lambda, Cloud Functions) auto-scales based on demand, charges per execution. Trade-offs: cold starts, vendor lock-in, execution limits. Critical for cost-optimized cloud design.

Resilience patterns: self-healing replaces failed instances, circuit breaker prevents cascading failures, retry logic handles transient errors. Combined for fault-tolerant cloud applications.

OECD AI Principles (2019) provide values-based guidelines: inclusive growth, human-centered values, transparency, robustness, accountability. India endorses for domestic policy alignment.

National Cyber Security Strategy (draft) addresses: critical infrastructure protection, cyber diplomacy, capacity building, public-private partnerships. Foundation for India's cyber defense posture.

Data Protection Board of India (under DPDP Act 2023) adjudicates disputes, imposes penalties, enforces compliance. Distinct from CERT-In (cyber incidents) and MeitY (policy).

MeitY's FOSS policy encourages government adoption of open-source for cost-effectiveness, security, and vendor independence. Critical for sustainable digital governance.

Feature scaling (standardization, normalization) prevents features with large ranges from dominating model learning. Critical for distance-based algorithms and gradient descent optimization.

Time series visualization: line charts show trends clearly, area charts emphasize volume. Both effective for temporal data analysis and forecasting communication.

Managed API gateways (AWS API Gateway, GCP Endpoints) handle routing, auth, throttling, monitoring. Critical for secure, scalable microservices exposure.

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

SIEM platforms aggregate logs from network, endpoint, application sources, enabling correlation, alerting, and investigation. Foundation for modern security operations.

Continuous training pipelines monitor data drift, performance metrics, and trigger retraining with validation. Critical for maintaining ML system relevance in dynamic environments.

Fairness testing: bias audits detect disparate impact, fairness metrics (demographic parity, equalized odds) quantify equity. Critical for ethical AI deployment in regulated sectors.

Instruction tuning fine-tunes LLMs on datasets of instructions and desired responses, improving task completion and helpfulness. Foundation for chat-optimized models.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) combines LLMs with vector search over document collections, grounding responses in verified sources. Reduces hallucinations and enables knowledge updates.

ICANN coordinates domain names, IP addresses, protocol parameters. Multi-stakeholder model ensures open, interoperable internet. India participates through government and civil society.