AWS Interview Questions and Answers

AWS Interview Questions and Answers

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Best AWS Interview Questions and Answers

Are you in search of the top 100+ AWS Interview Questions and Answers? Then your search ends here! Here you will find the top AWS interview Questions and Answers that are frequently asked in any of the AWS interviews. We have listed all the latest 2020 AWS interview Questions and Answers suitable for all freshers and professionals. By making use of our top 100+ AWS interview questions and Answers, you can easily crack the AWS interview and secure a perfect job of your dream.

Here is why you should learn AWS and become an AWS specialist:

  • AWS is regarded to be the leading market player among all the essential cloud providers which holds up to 47.8% market share of the IaaS public cloud services.
  • It is estimated that the average monthly salary of a professional AWS Solution Architect will be around $128,858 per annum.
  • AWS career is also defined to be one of the highly paid careers with maximum job opportunities.

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Hope, you have understood the importance of AWS. To crack any sort of AWS interview, May it be a basic level or an advanced level interview, you can go through our top 100+ AWS interview Questions and Answers. AWS is of huge demand with utmost job opportunities, so make some time to revise these top AWS interview questions and attend AWS interview with confidence. We wish you a great future with the best highly paying career.

We have categorized the Amazon AWS interview questions into the following three parts:

  1. Basic
  2. Intermediate
  3. Advanced

Basic AWS Interview Questions and Answers

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure platform designed to provide complete cloud services, wide database storage options, several features to compute power, advanced content delivery, and various other services that are intended to level up business development.

  • AWS is an Amazon Proprietary while OpenStack is an Open Source platform.
  • The operating system of AWS can be whatever provided by a cloud administrator while the operating system of OpenStack is the AMIs provided by AWS.
  • The repeatable operations are performed through templates in AWS while it is performed through text files in OpenStack.

To ensure whether the traffic received is shared equally among the AWS instances an elastic load balancer is used. The importance of buffer is that it makes the components of AWS more elastic to accept several loads and traffic. The components work unevenly in accepting and processing the received traffic. Here comes the role of the buffer, it equalizes the various components present and ensures rapid identical service.

The beneficial components involved in AWS are as follows:

  • Simple Mail Service: Through this users can share emails via SMTP or restful API call.
  • Route 53: It is declared to a DNS web service.
  • Simple Storage Device S3: This is one of the leading storage devices used in AWS Identity and Access Management.
  • Elastic Compute Cloud EC2: It is referred to be an on-demand computing resource used for hosting applications. At the time of unforeseen workloads, EC2 is mainly used.
  • Elastic Block Store EBS: Here you can store constant data volumes that are being integrated with EC2 and that allows you to persist data.
  • Cloud Watch: It paves the way to examine all the components of AWS and you can also set an instant reminder to troubleshoot critical AWS instances.

Simple Storage Service of AWS is abbreviated as S3 which is used to store and retrieve data anywhere at any time on the web. With S3, you can make online payments on the go and it is also defined to make the web-scale computing process simpler for the developers.

AMI (Amazon Machine Image) consists of various information that is required to develop an instance, also, it is a copy of an AMI that is processing in the cloud. There are several AMIs from which you can retrieve or download wide required examples.

With a single AMI present, you can retrieve or download several instances as required. The hardware of any host computer can be defined by an instance. Every instance created has several features and functionalities with which you can accomplish computational and storage facilities. An instance is also declared to be a traditional host via which we can collaborate in the same manner as we interact with a computer.

The below mentioned details are included in the AMI:

  • Launch permissions
  • Instance template
  • A block mapping which denotes the volume that has to be attached in order to launch

The Elastic IP Address (EIP) offered by AWS is a static ipv4 address which is used to manage and process dynamic cloud computing services. It is essential to connect an AWS account with the EIP because as and when you require an ipv4 static address for any of your instances, you can acquire it from the associated EIP which enables prompt communication with the active internet.

The content delivery network that is offered by AWS is known as the CloudFront. This assists the users by speeding up the processing of static and dynamic web content which includes .html, .css, .js, and other images files. CloudFront ensures high transfer speed and low latency. AWS offers a content delivery network at an affordable price which is highly used in startup companies. 

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To launch an AWS resource in the virtual network, VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is used. VPC is used by the users to create and customize several network configurations in line to their business necessities.

  • S3 in AWS is referred to a REST service; users can send requests with the help of REST API wrapper libraries or AWS SDK.

NAT is the Network Address Translation gateway which is used to connect instances with the private subnet of the internet and with several AWS services. It also prevents the internet from making an initial connection with the AWS instances.

There are several types of instances which include:

  • Storage optimized instance
  • Computer-optimized instance
  • General-purpose instance
  • Accelerated computing instance
  • Memory-optimized instance

DynamoDB is referred to as the flexible and efficient AWS web service database, it can be used to provide a flexible and speedy NoSQL database

One of the trusted services of AWS is Amazon Glacier. It is actually an affordable and secure online web storage service to ensure effective data backup and to store archival. The glacier is an essential storage service where you can store confidential data for years, months, or several decades.

Redshift is known as a reliable, fast, and more powerful big data product used in the cloud as the big data warehouse.

Below mentioned are the types of AMI provided by AWS:

  • Instance store backed AMI
  • EBS backed AMI

Amazon EC2:

  • Amazon EC2 is referred to as the cloud web service which is used to host an application.
  • It is used to process Linux or Windows and it can operate, process, and manage wide applications like PHP, Apache, Python, and several effective databases.

The content delivery network that is offered by AWS is known as the CloudFront. This assists the users by speeding up the processing of static and dynamic web content which includes .html, .css, .js, and other images files. CloudFront ensures high transfer speed and low latency. AWS offers a content delivery network at an affordable price which is highly used in startup companies. 

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There are two types of queue present in SQ3 and they are Standard Queue and FIFO Queue.

  • There are three types of load balancers present in EC2 and they are Application Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer, and Classic Load Balancer.

T2 instance is referred to be the affordable AWS instance which ensures baseline active CPU processing and performance.

A secure credential for virtual machines is defined to be the key-pairs. These key-pairs have private and public keys with which you can connect to an instance.

Amazon AWS nowadays does not support broadcast and multicast.

Each AWS account can have up to 5 VPC Elastic IP addresses.

AWS has a global infrastructure that is segmented into regions and availability zones. Every region is portioned into a geographical area and it has several isolated areas which are defined to be availability zones.

Using the balancing load algorithm, Server load balancing provides networking and content delivery services. Also, SLB is used to distribute the received traffic equally across the several groups such that the performance of application delivery is increased.

There are two approaches according to which the server load balancing works, they are:

  • Application-level load balancing
  • Transport level load balancing

The major advantages of using a server load balancer are as follows:

  • Redundancy
  • Scalability
  • Maintenance and Performance

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The area where all the contents will be cached is known as an edge location. If any user searches for particular content, then the content will be automatically searched for in the edge location.

  • Snowball is used for transport. It transfers a huge amount of data inside and outside AWS. Snowball can be used to transfer a huge volume of data from a source to several destinations. Also, snowball reduces the cost of networking.

The chunks divided from a large portion of the IP Address is known as a subnet.

A single VPC can have up to 200 subnets.

There are three types of layers present in cloud computing and they are:

  • SaaS – Software as a Service
  • PaaS – Platform as a Service
  • IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service

Both DNS and Load Balancer come under IaaS, storage cloud service.

CloudTrail is one of the specially designed AWS tools used for tracking and logging API calls. It is also used to audit several types of S3 bucket accesses.

In the year 2006, Amazon EC2 was initially launched.

Amazon ElasticCache is known as a web service used to deploy, scale, and store essential data in the cloud.

Lambda in AWS is an Amazon computing service which is highly used to run a code in AWS without managing servers.

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Amazon Web Services consists of various zones and regions in it. A region is defined as a place. A region is a physical place where the actual AWS data centers are available. Examples of AWS regions include  Asia South (Mumbai)and  US-West.  Each region consists of multiple availability zones. AWS zones are isolated in nature and replicate whenever there is a need.

AWS offers you an auto-scaling option that allows you to scale based on the requirements. The Auto-scaling function allows you to launch and run new instances automatically. It takes resource allocation and adjusts resources based on computing needs.  

Geo-targeting is an essential concept in CloudFront using which organizations can deliver personalized content to their customers based on their geolocation. You can still execute the geo-targeting function without changing the URL. Geo-targeting allows users to develop and deliver personalized content by keeping their unique needs in mind. 

Following are the sequence of steps associated with CloudFormation Solution:

  • Use an existing template or develop a new Cloudformation template using YAML or JSON format. 
  • Use S3 to store the code. 
  • To call the bucket and to build stock on your template use AWS CloudFormation.
  • CloudFormation reads all the elements on the template and notes the services that can be called in the future. It also creates a sequence for the services. 

Following are the steps to be followed in order to attain zero downtime:

  • Goto EC2 Console
  • Click on the operating system AMI
  • Choose a new instance type to launch an instance
  • Install applications 
  • Install all the updates
  • Execute the test instance to check its performance
  • If it is working properly, deploy a new instance and replace the new one.

Once the deployment process is over, you can upgrade or downgrade with the near-zero time. 

Following are the tools using which you can log into the cloud environment: 

  • AWS CLI for Linux
  • Putty
  • AWS CLI for Windows
  • AWS SDK
  • AWS CLI for Windows CMD
  • Eclipse

Following are the services which help in the creation of centralized logging solutions:

  • Amazon CloudWatch Logs
  • Amazon ElasticSearch
  • Amazon Kinesis Firehose

Almost all of the Amazon Web Services have their own logging options. But AWS cloud trial, AWS Config, etc have account-level security. Let’s understand these two services in detail: 

AWS CloudTrial: This service provides you with the history of API calls of all accounts. It also helps you perform tasks like resource change tracking,  security analysis, and compliance auditing for your account. 

AWS Config: This service gives you a clear understanding of the configuration changes in your environment. This will present you with the AWS inventory which includes configuration change notification, configuration history, and the relation among various resources.   

DDoS is a cyber-attack. In this attack, the perpetrator accesses the website and creates as many numbers of sessions as possible, which prevents the actual users from accessing the service. Following are the tools that you can use to prevent the DDoS attack.

  • AWS WAF
  • AWS Shield
  • Amazon CloudFront
  • Amazon Route53
  • VPC
  • ELB 

Amazon CloudWatch helps you to monitor the status of various applications in real-time. It also helps you to have a track of: 

  • Auto-scaling lifecycle events
  • Scheduled events
  • Auto-scaling lifecycle events
  • Console sign-in events
  • AWS API calls

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Intermediate AWS Interview Questions and Answers

Following are the three major types of Virtualizations available in AWS: 

Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM): It is a complete virtualized hardware, in which all the virtual machines act independently.

Paravirtualization (PV): It is a Boot loader and loads that boots the PV AMIs. the kernel specified in the menu loaded by PV-GRUB. 

Paravirtualization on HVM: 

PV on HVM enables the operating systems to use network I/O and storage available through the host. 

Following are the non-region specific AWS services: 

  • Route 53
  • IAM
  • CloudFront
  • Web Application Firewall 

Though the words stopping and terminating give you the same meaning there is a little difference between them. When you stop an EC2 instance, it executes a normal shutdown on the instance and goes to a stopped state. When it comes to instance termination, it moves to a stopped state and then EBS volumes attached to it are removed permanently and not possible to recover.

Following are the three types of EC2 instances based on the cost factor: 

On-demand Instance: It comes at a low cost when taken for a short time and not suitable for longer times.  

Stop Instance: The demand for this service is lower than the on-demand Instance and can be avail through bidding. 

Reserved Instance: If you are looking for an instance for a year or more then this is best suitable for you.

There are a wide range of AMI designs but the following are the commonly used ones: 

  • Hybrid AMI
  • Just Enough Baked AMI (JeOS AMI)
  • Fully Baked AMI

Here are some of the security features and products:

Security groups: This performs a firewall function at the instance level and controls inbound and outbound traffic at the entry-level.

Network access control lists: It performs a firewall function at subnets and controls incoming and outgoing traffic at the subnet level.

Flow Logs: It records the inbound as well as outbound traffic at the instance level.

Following are the factors to consider while moving to AWS:

  • Workforce Productivity 
  • Operational Costs
  • Operational resilience
  • Cost avoidance
  • Business agility

AWS Snowball is the best option to choose when moving the huge volumes of data in and out of a targeted AWS region.  Apart from the data transportation facility, the Snowball edge adds extra computational functions. Moreover, you will get a Snowmobile which is an exabyte-scale migration and allows you to migrate data up to 100 Petabytes. 

Following are some of the major difference between Cloud formation and Elastic BeanStalk: 

AWS CloudFormation enables you to describe allthe resources of infrastructure that are there in your cloud environmen.  AWS Elastic Beanstalk gives you an environment that allows you to deploy and run applications in the cloud. 

CloudFormation is highly flexible and supports all types of infrastructural needs of the application. Whereas the AWS Elastic Beanstalk offers you various types of developer tools which makes your application lifecycle management far easier.

In AWS we typically use templates such as JSON or YAML. And these comprise of following five important elements:

  • Output values
  • Template parameters
  • Resources
  • Data tables
  • File format version 

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Follow the below-mentioned steps to automate the EC2 backup process with EBS: 

  • Get the relevant instances together and use API to connect to AWS. And list the EBS volumes.
  • List all the snapshots of all the volumes, and also specify the retention period to the snapshots. After this create a snapshot of all the volumes. 
  • Make sure to erase the older snapshots if it exceeds the retention period. 

EBS acts as permanent storage and in it, the data can be stored on future dates. The data you save on the EC2 instance stays forever, even after the lifetime of. AS the instance storage is temporary hence attached to a physical host machine. Sometimes there are chances of losing data when an instance is terminated or stopped.  

Web Application Firewall (WAF) acts as a guard and secures your web applications from a wide range of exploitations. It controls and monitors the traffic flow to a website. Using WAF you can develop custom rules to block the general patterns. Moreover, you can also use it to prevent all requests,  allow all requests, and count the requests for a fresh policy. 

Below mentioned are the load balancers supported by Elastic Load balancing: 

  • Network Load Balancer
  • Application Load Balancer
  • Classic Load Balancer

It is an IAM entity that consists of a list of permissions for creating AWS service Requests. On the other hand, IAM users have permanent credentials using which one can directly interact with the AWS services. 

In AWS there are two types of policies one is managed by users and the other is managed by Amazon.  You can create, edit, manage policies from IAM user roles and user groups to which they are attached. 

If your website is hosted in various AWS regions and the performance is slower than what you expect and you have a chance to improve the performance for your users by using AWS regions that give the lowest latency. In order to build a latency based routing, you have to create latency records in various Regions. 

Domain: A domain is nothing but a collection of data. For instance, CourseJet.com. A domain is a unit and contains an administration. 

Hosted Zone: A hosted zone is nothing but a container that consists of data on how you want to flow the traffic to a domain. 

Following are the main features of Amazon cloud search: 

  • Boolean searches
  • Entire text search
  • Range searches
  • Prefix Searches
  • AutoComplete advice

Various layers of cloud architecture are as follows: 

  • Storage Controller
  • Cloud controller
  • Cluster controller
  • Node Controller

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Following are the DB engines used in AWS RDS: 

  • PostgreDB
  • OracleDB
  • MYSQL DB
  • MariaDB
  • MS-SQL DB

This is a process in which you buy the resources and you can use them whenever you need them before they expire. There are two types of subscriptions which are  1 and 3 years. As the usage increases the hourly rate goes down. Reserved instances are not only permitted to capacity but also to the capabilities of specific zones. 

Below mentioned are the various types of storage classes available in S3

  • One-zone infrequency  
  • Standard frequency
  • Standard infrequency
  • RRS – reduced redundancy 
  • Glacier

Following are the three different methods using which you can encrypt data in S3

  • Server-Side Encryption – S3 
  • Server-Side Encryption – KMS     
  • Server-Side Encryption – C 

Below mentioned are the various factors taken into consideration for developing

  • Data transfer 
  • Storage used 
  • Storage management 
  • Transfer acceleration 
  • Number of requests

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) is one of the top cloud data platforms for processing huge amounts of data. It makes use of various open-source tools such as Apache HBase, Apache Hive,  Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Presto, and Apache Hudi. 

Following are the various types of routing policies available in S3 routing: 

  • Latency-based 
  • Simple 
  • Failover 
  • Weighted 
  • Geolocation

Following are the most popular services offered by AWS: 

  • AWS Lambda
  • Amazon S3
  • Amazon EBS
  • Amazon CloudFront
  • Amazon SNS
  • Amazon EC2
  • Amazon Glacier
  • Amazon SQ 
  • Amazon VPC
  • Amazon Kinesis

Following are the typical issues that arise when you connect to your instance.

  • Frequent permission denials 
  • The server may not recognize the user key 
  • Connection timeout
  • Server unexpected closure 
  • Not possible to connect with the current browser 
  • Unable to ping the instance
  • Unprotected private key 

The server refused the host key. 

Below listed are the features of Amazon RedShift:

  • RedShift supports VPC and allows its users to launch RedShift in VPC. 
  • It allows data encryption and is easy to configure when you create tables in RedShift.
  • It helps with the SSL encryption features to create encrypted connections between RedShift and clients.
  • It comes with high-scalable features, you can simply scale the nodes as per the requirements.
  • Redshift is cost-effective and acts as an alternative option to traditional data warehousing practices. 

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Advanced AWS Interview Questions and Answers

Amazon S3 Glacier is an advanced, highly-secure, and cost-effective Amazon S3 storage class for storing data and long-term backup. Using the Amazon Glacier option customers can store their data for quite a long time, sometimes even for decades. It reduces the administrative tasks of customers by removing tasks such as hardware provisioning, capacity planning, hardware failure detection and recovery, data replication, and hardware migrations.

Amazon Relational Database Service allows the users with an option to easily configure, manage and scale relational databases in the cloud. It provides high capacity and easy to resize storage options at an affordable cost and automates multiple tasks such as database setup,  hardware provisioning, patching, and backups.

AWS Direct Connect is one of the essential services of AWS and allows you to directly make connections to the cloud from your on-premises. It also allows you to create a secure connection between your colocation environment, data center, office, and AWS.

The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) tool is used to manage and monitor all your AWS services. You can download and configure this tool and be able to manage various AWS services and you can also automate various services using scripts. 

The AWS OpsWork is a configuration management feature that comes with the managed instances of Puppet and Chef. Using Chef and Puppet you can automate multiple server configuration tasks.

Trusted Advisor is a highly flexible and customizable cloud monitoring tool that examines your AWS environment and gives you the complete details of security gaps, performance improvement, gives insights on the expense, and reliability. 

Amazon Aurora is a  PostgreSQL-compatible and MySQL relational database natively built for the cloud that improves the performance of the traditional databases by using open source databases.  It comes with modern features such as a fault-tolerant, distributed, and self-healing storage system. It can scale up to 128 Tb for an instance. 

There are chances that you may not be able to see your intended services are delivering to the right regions. This happens because not all Amazon services are delivered in all regions. Amazon initially launched its services in a few regions and slowly expanded them to all its regions. So, when you are not able to see a specific service in your region it means the service has not been published in your region yet.  If you still wish to use the service which is unavailable, then you have an option to switch to the nearest region that offers the service. 

LightSail is a cloud computing tool that automatically manages things like storage, computing, storage, and networking environment required for running applications.

Following are the tools that you can use to identify whether you are paying higher costs or lower than the actual. 

  • Analyze the top Services table: Top service table is a dashboard that is available in the cost management console and gives you the data of the top 5 used services. This will give you the figure on how much amount you are spending on the resources. 
  • Cost Explorer: The cost explorer services present you with data to view and analyze the usage costs of the past 13 months. Using this you can also forecast the cost for the forward months.
  • AWS Budgets: This will help you in preparing a budget for your services. It also helps you analyze whether the budget plan meets your services requirements or not.
  • Cost allocation tags: This will give you the information about the services that incurred more costs in a month. Cost allocation tags help you track all the services and their costs effectively.

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No, it is not possible to use Standby DB instance together with the primary DB instance because Standby DB instance can be used only if the primary DB instance loses its performance.

The data can be saved by overriding the terminate option.

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