Dense, scannable reference cards — commands, flags, patterns, and gotchas. Built for cramming before an interview and for grabbing one glance mid-task. First track: DevOps.
Images, containers, layers, volumes, networks, Compose, multi-stage builds — every command and concept you'll get grilled on, plus rapid-fire Q&A.
Architecture, Pods, Deployments, Services, probes, RBAC, scheduling, kubectl muscle memory — the K8s surface area an interviewer probes, plus a debug playbook.
HCL, providers, state, modules, plan/apply, meta-args, remote backends — IaC commands and the state model interviewers probe.
Files, permissions, processes, signals, systemd, text tools, resource diagnosis — the shell fluency every ops role expects.
OSI/TCP-IP, IP/CIDR, TCP vs UDP, DNS, HTTP/TLS, NAT, load balancing, and the tools to test each hop.
For the Associate cert — IAM, EC2, VPC (SG vs NACL), S3, RDS, Lambda, ELB/ASG, CloudWatch: services + exam concepts.
For the Associate cert — resource hierarchy, IAM, Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, VPC, Cloud SQL/Spanner/Bigtable, BigQuery.
Partitions, storage internals, producer/consumer config, rebalance protocols, ISR & leader election, exactly-once, compaction, ecosystem — senior depth.
redisSingle-threaded model, all data types, TTL/eviction, RDB vs AOF, transactions/Lua/pipelining, patterns (lock/rate-limit), Sentinel vs Cluster — senior depth.
emqxMQTT topics & wildcards, the three QoS levels, retained/will, sessions, MQTT 5, EMQX clustering, rule engine, auth/ACL, and MQTT vs Kafka — senior depth.
rabbitmqAMQP model, exchange types, ack/prefetch, durability (3 things), queue types (quorum/stream), DLX/TTL, flow-control alarms, clustering, RabbitMQ vs Kafka — senior depth.
monitoringThree pillars, Prometheus pull model + exporters, metric types, PromQL, SLI/SLO/error budgets, USE/RED, alerting that doesn't suck, Grafana/Loki/Tempo/OTel — senior depth.
Memory-bound vs compute-bound, the memory hierarchy, precision (TF32/BF16/FP8), Tensor Cores, fusion (FlashAttention/torch.compile), pipeline starvation, NCCL, nsys/ncu profiling.
inferencePrefill vs decode, TTFT/TPOT, KV cache + PagedAttention, continuous batching, quantization (AWQ/GPTQ), speculative decoding, prefix caching, TP/PP, the vLLM/TRT-LLM stack.
trainingWhere VRAM goes, parallelism (DDP/FSDP/TP/PP), ZeRO stages, checkpointing + accumulation, stability (warmup/clip/BF16), PEFT (LoRA/QLoRA), post-training (SFT/DPO/PPO).
genaiThe capability ladder, prompting, RAG (hybrid + rerank), agents + function calling + MCP, context management, evaluation (RAGAS/LLM-judge), prompt-injection safety, LLMOps.