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AWS Interview Questions: AWS, the acronym for Amazon Web Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon, an American eCommerce giant. AWS has a total revenue of $80 billion as of 2022 and has offered employment opportunities to more than 150K people. If you look at AWS’s statistics, you will see a surge of more than 3 times between 2018 and 2022, and that is because of the number of employees AWS has hired. If you are seeking a job and want to join one of the fastest-growing web services and cloud computing services, AWS is the right place for you. However, before you look forward to joining AWS, you need to understand the hiring process and the AWS interview questions. Take a look at these 20+ AWS interview questions to get an overview of the interview process and how to confidently face them.
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What is AWS Interview?
An AWS interview is part of the Amazon Web Services hiring process. The AWS interview consists of four parts; online application, assessments, phone interview, and in-person interview. From IT & support engineering roles to program and product management, AWS offers thousands of job opportunities in more than 70 countries across the globe. A skilled, smart, and proactive individual is welcomed at AWS, and in return, you are offered a workplace where you can thrive professionally and achieve great heights.
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Popular AWS Interview Questions With Answers
Have you cleared the online application and assessment part of the AWS interview? If so, then you need to focus on the next stages; the phone interview and in-person interview. Here are some of the popular AWS interview questions with answers to help you clear these interview stages.
Q.1 What is AWS?
| Ans. AWS is an Amazon cloud services platform for individual clients, organisations, and governments on a pay-as-you-go basis. AWS is used for multiple computing in times of high application usage and scales down to reduce costs when there is less traffic. |
Q.2 What are the three basic types of cloud services and the AWS products based on them?
| Ans. The three types of cloud services are: – Computing – Storage – Networking The AWS products based on these cloud services include: – Computing: EC2, Lambda, Auto-Scaling, Elastic Beanstalk, and Lightsat. – Storage: S3, Elastic File System, Glacier, and Elastic Block Storage. – Networking: VPC, Route53, Amazon CloudFront. |
Q.3 What is EC2?
| Ans. EC2, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), is a web service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows users to rent virtual computers that can run their applications. It is an important element of cloud computing infrastructure and offers scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. EC2 allows you to quickly scale your computing resources up or down, depending on your needs. |
Q.4 What is SnowBall?
| Ans. SnowBall is a data transfer service offered by AWS. It is designed to move large amounts of data into and out of AWS. It helps address challenges related to data migration, such as high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns. |
Q.5 What is CloudWatch?
| Ans. CloudWatch is a monitoring and management service provided by Amazon Web Services. It is used for cloud resources and applications running on AWS. It allows you to collect, monitor, and analyze metrics, logs, and events, offering real-time insights into your cloud infrastructure and applications. |
Q.6 What is the difference between AWS and OpenStack?
| Ans: AWS and OpenStack are both cloud computing platforms but there’s a huge difference in their features and models. AWS is an on-demand cloud computing platform provided by Amazon. It offers a wide range of cloud services, including computing power (EC2), storage (S3), databases (RDS, DynamoDB), machine learning, analytics, etc. OpenStack, on the other hand, is an open-source software platform for creating and managing private and public clouds. It is developed and maintained by a global community of developers and organizations. It consists of several independent components for computing (Nova), storage (Swift, Cinder), networking (Neutron), identity management (Keystone), and more. |
Q.7 What is the difference between Spot Instance, On-demand Instance, and Reserved Instance?
| Ans. Spot Instance, On-demand Instance, and Reserved Instance are all pricing models offered by EC2 AWS. On-demand Instance is used to compute capacity by the hour or second with no long-term commitments or upfront payments. It is suitable for applications that start and stop frequently or have unpredictable usage patterns. Spot Instances allow you to bid on spare AWS compute capacity and offer savings of up to 90% compared to On-Demand pricing. It is suitable for scaling applications across large numbers of instances at a reduced cost. Reserved Instance is best for applications with steady-state usage that can commit to using the instances over a long period. It can offer a discount of up to 75%, depending on the payment option and term length. It offers options to reserve capacity in a specific Availability Zone. |
Q.8 What is the maximum number of S3 buckets you can create?
| Ans. A maximum of 100 S3 buckets can be created. |
Q.9 What is auto-scaling?
| Ans. Auto-scaling is a feature offered by cloud computing services that automatically adjusts the number of compute resources allocated to your application based on its current needs. Its use ensures that applications can handle spikes in traffic or workload without manual intervention. |
Q.10 What steps are involved in CloudFormation Solution?
| Ans. The steps involved in CloudFormation Solution include: – Creating or using an existing CloudFormation template. – Saving the code in an S3 bucket. – Using the AWS CloudFormation to call the bucket.CloudFormation will process the file, its services and their order, and relations between them and provisions them one after another. |
Q.11 How can you upgrade or downgrade a system with near-zero downtime?
| Ans. To upgrade or downgrade a system with net-zero downtime, the first step is the EC2 console. The other steps are as follows: – Select Operating System AMI – Launch an instance with the new instance type – Install all the updates – Install applications – Test the instance to check it. – If working, deploy the new instance and replace the older instance. – Once deployed, you can upgrade or downgrade the system with near-zero downtime. |
Q.12 What is geoTrageting in Cloudfront?
| Ans. geoTargeting in Amazon CloudFront feature allows you to serve different versions of your content based on the geographic location of your users. This is useful for delivering localized content, improving user experience, and complying with regional regulations. |
Q.13 Which alternative tools other than the console can be used to log into the cloud environment?
| Ans. The other tools used for the cloud environment are: – AWS CLI (Amazon Web Services – Azure CLI (Microsoft Azure) – Google Cloud SDK – AWS SDK (gcloud CLI) – Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates – Puppet – Visual Studio Code (VS Code) |
Q.14 What is Amazon EC2 root device volume?
| Ans. EC2 root device volume is the main storage device attached to an EC2 instance. It is the primary source for the operating system and all other system files. |
Q.15 Can we launch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances with predetermined private IP addresses? If yes, then with which Amazon service is it possible?
| Ans. Yes, we can launch Amazon EC2 instances using VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). |
Q.16 What is a DDoS attack, and how to minimize it?
| Ans. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a cyber-attack to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic. Its attack can be minimized by increasing bandwidth, using DDos Protection Services like Cloud-Based DDoS Protection and Content Delivery Network (CDN), Rate Limiting, Network and Application Redundancy, and IP Blacklisting and Whitelisting. |
Q.17 What is the importance of buffer in AWS?
| Ans. Buffer in AWS serves as an intermediate storage area or a temporary memory space that helps manage the flow of data between different components of a system. It plays a crucial role in optimizing performance, improving reliability, and facilitating smooth communication between various components. |
Q.18 Explain the different types of AWS visualizations and their differences.
| Ans. The different types of AWS visualizations are AWS Management Console, AWS Cloudwatch, AWS X-Ray, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Cost Explorer and Amazon QuickSight. – The AWS Management Console is a web-based interface that allows you to manage and interact with your AWS resources. – AWS CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that provides data and insights into AWS resources and applications. – AWS X-Ray is a distributed tracing service that helps developers analyze and debug applications running on AWS. – AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that provides recommendations for optimizing AWS resources, improving security, and reducing costs. – AWS Cost Explorer is a tool for visualizing and analyzing AWS cost and usage data. – Amazon QuickSight is a business intelligence and data visualization service that allows users to create interactive dashboards and reports. |
Q.19 How are NAT Gateways different from NAT Instances?
| Ans. NAT Gateways are fully managed AWS services and do not require any administrative overhead for managing the underlying infrastructure. NAT Instances are self-managed and the users are responsible for patching, monitoring, and scaling the instances as needed. – NAT Gateways automatically scales up to 45 Gbps of bandwidth per NAT Gateway instance. It scales horizontally based on traffic demand without manual intervention. It does not need to associate Elastic IP (EIP) addresses directly and AWS manages this internally. – NAT Instances are limited by the instance type and EBS throughput, requiring manual scaling or instance replacement to handle increased traffic. We need to monitor traffic patterns and adjust instance sizes or add more instances accordingly. |
Q.20 Why do we make subnets?
| Ans. Subnetting is a fundamental concept in networking that involves dividing a larger network into smaller, logical subnetworks. Its purposes in network design and management include IP address management, segmentation of traffic, reduced broadcast domain, smaller collision domain, and enhanced security. |
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Additional AWS Interview Questions
In this section, you will find some additional AWS interview questions. Preparing for these questions will make your interview preparation stronger as you will gain more than sufficient knowledge to crack the interview rounds.
| Explain the difference between an EC2 instance and an AMI. | What are the key components of an Amazon VPC? |
| What is an S3 bucket policy, and how is it used? | How does AWS Lambda differ from traditional server-based computing? |
| Describe the different storage classes available in Amazon S3. | What is the purpose of Amazon CloudFront, and how does it work? |
| Explain the difference between Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB. | How does AWS IAM help in managing user access to AWS resources? |
| What is an AWS Security Group, and how does it differ from a Network ACL? | What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and when would you use it? |
| What is the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, and how does it apply to security? | Describe the benefits of using AWS CloudFormation. |
| How does Amazon CloudWatch differ from AWS CloudTrail? | Explain the concept of Auto Scaling in AWS. |
| How does Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) differ from AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)? | What is the purpose of AWS Direct Connect? |
| What is AWS Glacier, and how is it used for data archiving? | Describe the differences between Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS. |
| How does AWS KMS (Key Management Service) help in securing data? | Explain the concept of Cross-Region Replication in Amazon S3. |
| Describe the use cases for Amazon Aurora. | What is AWS Redshift, and how does it differ from traditional relational databases? |
| Explain the difference between Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS. | How does AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) help protect web applications? |
| How does Amazon Cognito help in building secure user authentication and authorization systems? | What is Amazon EMR, and how is it used for big data processing? |
| What is AWS Step Functions, and how is it used for workflow automation? | Describe the difference between Amazon EKS and self-managed Kubernetes clusters on AWS. |
| Explain the benefits of using AWS Lambda Layers. | Describe the features and use cases for AWS IoT Core. |
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9 Tips to Clear AWS Interview
Every interview preparation requires dedicated and consistent practice. You need to focus on speaking professionally, accepting criticism, acknowledging your mistakes, and asking questions from the interviewer. We have drafted the 9 best tips for your next AWS interview that will be of great help to you.
- Understanding AWS Fundamentals
Make a list of fundamental AWS services, including EC2, S3, IAM, RDS, VPC, Lambda, and CloudWatch. List down their purposes, key features, use cases, and how they integrate.
- Hands-on Experience
Gain practical experience by working on AWS projects, completing labs, and experimenting with different services. Practice deploying resources, configuring settings, and troubleshooting issues in a real-world environment.
- Review Common/ Popular Interview Questions
Understand and revise the common AWS interview questions and prepare concise and clear answers. Practice discussing your experience, projects, and problem-solving skills related to AWS.
- Know Your Resume
Practice discussing your resume in detail, including your AWS-related experience, certifications, projects, and accomplishments. Highlight relevant skills, achievements, and contributions to demonstrate your expertise.
- Follow Latest Trends
Keep abreast of the latest AWS announcements, updates, best practices, and trends. Follow AWS social media handles, subscribe to AWS blogs, and participate in forums and discussion groups to stay informed.
- Practice Problem Solving
Practice solving technical problems, scenarios, and AWS-related case studies. Develop logical thinking, problem-solving skills, and the ability to analyze and propose solutions to complex challenges.
- Prepare for Behavioural Questions
Be ready to answer behavioural questions that assess your soft skills, communication, teamwork, and adaptability. Provide specific examples from your past experiences that demonstrate your abilities in these areas.
- Talk Confidently and Enthusiastically
A positive mindset and confidence will be your greatest asset. Clearly express your thoughts, ideas, and solutions, and demonstrate your passion for working with AWS technologies.
- Ask Questions
Prepare thoughtful questions to ask the interviewer about the company, team, projects, culture, or career development opportunities. This shows your interest in the role and company and can help you gather valuable insights.
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FAQs
Ans: An AWS interview requires sufficient technical knowledge, hands-on experience, and confidence to communicate during the interview process. You need to make a list of popular questions asked during the interview, prepare thoroughly, and gain practical experience so that you can explain them more understandably.
Ans: Some of the popular AWS interview questions are:
What is AWS?
What is EC2?
What is CloudWatch?
What are the three basic types of cloud services and the AWS products based on them?
What is CloudWatch?
What is SnowBall?
What is the difference between AWS and OpenStack?
What is the difference between Spot Instance, On-demand Instance, and Reserved Instance?
Ans: EC2, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), is a web service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows users to rent virtual computers that can run their applications. It is an important element of cloud computing infrastructure and offers scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. EC2 allows you to quickly scale your computing resources up or down depending on your needs.
Ans: EC2 to S3 data transfer is free only for the same region. You will have to pay $0.02/GB to download data from another AWS region.
Popular Interview Questions
This was all about the AWS interview questions and answers. We hope the above-listed questions will make your interview preparation efficient. For more information on such creative topics, visit our career counselling page and follow Leverage edu.
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