6.13.3: Critical Thinking Questions

Critical Thinking Questions

1. Service Model Selection: A company is building a customer-facing web application. The development team wants to use PaaS for rapid deployment, but the security team prefers IaaS for more control over the network and OS. How would you reconcile these perspectives? Is it possible to use both models within the same application?
2. Serverless Trade-offs: Serverless computing (FaaS) is often presented as the future of cloud. Critically evaluate this claim. What types of workloads are ideal for serverless, and what types are poorly suited? Consider factors like cold start latency, execution time limits, state management, and cost at scale.
3. OSI in Troubleshooting: A cloud-hosted web application is unreachable. Using the OSI model as a framework, describe a systematic troubleshooting approach — starting from Layer 1 and working up to Layer 7. What cloud-specific checks would you perform at each layer?
4. BPaaS Implications: Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) represents the highest level of cloud abstraction — outsourcing entire business processes. What are the strategic risks of relying on BPaaS for critical business functions like payroll or claims processing? How does this change the relationship between IT and business units?