Top 70 AWS Interview Questions (with Answers)

AWS is a shorthand for Amazon Web Services. It is a virtual platform that provides scalable and cost-effective cloud computing solutions. It allows customers to outsource their network and database requirements. 

The growing demand for AWS has pushed engineers to make a career in this growing field. The digitally leading platform has an intensive process of hiring people. In this blog, we will look into some AWS interview questions beneficial for candidates making their career in AWS.

Why AWS?

AWS is the world’s leading cloud computing provider. It is widely used for a lot of different tasks. The leading companies of today, like Netflix and Airbnb, use AWS as their cloud provider. 

In this blog, we will cover AWS interview questions and answers to help you get started. 

Basic AWS Interview Questions and Answers

Looking for some basic AWS interview questions? The following questions can be of help:

1. Define Cloud Computing.

It is a system that provides access to technological resources such as computing powers and applications. It allows the user to complete their tasks efficiently. It provides flexibility and scalability to the resources.

2. Name the features of AWS.

• Elastic Compute Cloud
• Simple Mail Service
• Route 53
• Simple Storage Device S3
• Elastic Block Storage
• Cloud Watch

3. Define Serverless Computing.

It is the ability to run codes and manage data without managing servers. It eliminates the need to carry all the capacity provisioning. It also operates at lesser costs.

4. Define Data Lake. 

It is the centralized repository that stores all the structured and unstructured data at any volume. It stores data that comes from a variety of sources, such as business and mobile applications.

5. Name the product categories of AWS.

• Computing
• Storage
• Networking
• Content Delivery 
• Analytics 
• Security
• Identity
• Machine learning
• Database

6. State the use of Buffer in AWS.

Buffer ensures that the components of AWS are all elastic to accept several loads and traffic. It equalizes the variety of components present. It also ensures rapid service despite the components receiving traffic and working unevenly.

7. What is VPC?

Virtual Private Cloud lets users create and customize several network configurations.

8. Explain Amazon EC2.

Amazon EC2 is a platform that provides a space to handle any workload with the latest processors and operating systems. It makes the computing process for developers easier and more manageable. 

9. What is ELB?

ELB, or Elastic Load Balancing, directs incoming application traffic to various destinations and appliances. There are three types of ELBs: Application Load Balancer, Gateway Load Balancer, and Network Load Balancer.

10. Define Amazon CloudWatch.

It is a monitoring service that helps professionals with actionable insights. It provides complete visibility on AWS resources and applications. It also helps track the status and execute suitable applications.

11. Explain Glacier.

Glacier is an affordable and secure web online storage service that ensures effective data backup. It is one of the most trusted resources of AWS. 

12. Explain Redshift.

It is a powerful data product used in the cloud as a data warehouse. It automatically creates and trains machine learning models to build predictive insights.

13.  Define Amazon SQS.

It is a managed message queuing server. With this, one can send, receive, and store any kind and quantity of messages between applications. It also helps reduce the complexities and makes work easier.

14. Define AWS Snowball.

AWS snowball is an edge computing and storage service. It optimizes devices and computes them. 

15. Define Amazon Lightsail.

Amazon Lightsail is a service that helps build and manage websites and makes applications faster. It enables easy-to-use virtual private server instances, storage, and databases. It also provides the ability to create and delete sandboxes. 

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AWS Interview Questions and Answers for Intermediate Candidates

Following are some frequently asked AWS interview questions and answers for intermediate candidates: 

16. Define AWS Snow Family.

AWS snow family helps transfer data in and out of the cloud with the help of physical devices. It can transfer huge amounts of data such as cloud migration, data center relocation, and disaster recovery. 

17. Define Amazon RDS.

Amazon RDS helps with the easy setup, operation, and scaling of relational databases. It offers six familiar database engines like amazon Azura, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, oracle database, and SQL server.

18. Define Amazon Neptune.

It is a graph database engine that uses billions of relationships. It queries the graph with milliseconds latency. It is mainly used for fraud detection and network security.

19. List the security measures followed by Amazon EC2.

• Manages accounts by two-factor authentication.
• Signs user requests with an access key ID for improved security.
• Sets API and user activity logging with AWS CloudTrail.
• The user transport-layer security is mandatory.
• Has cipher suites with PFS.

20. Define Key-pairs.

Amazon EC2 uses key cryptography to encrypt and decrypt the login information. The combination of public and private keys is known as key pairs. It allows the user access to instances securely.

21. Define AWS Lambda.

A computer that runs code without having to manage the servers is known as AWS lambda. The user only has to pay whenever the code is run in the lambda function. This question may be asked in the AWS lambda interview questions category.

22. Define Cross Region Replication.

It is a service that enables the data to replicate from one bucket to another bucket in AWS. 

23. Define Region and Availability Zones in AWS.

Region: It is the geographic area that consists of two or more availability zones. In simple words, it is a collection of data centers.

Availability zones: It is a data center that can be located somewhere in a country or a city. It can have multiple switches, servers, firewalls, and load balancing.

24. Define Auto Scaling.

Auto-scaling is a feature that automatically scales the capacity to maintain steady and predictable performance. The user can scale multiple sources while using auto-scaling. 

25. List the advantages of AWS.

• It is user-friendly and can be used by anyone.
• It is flexible and does not require a lot of resources. 
• The services that it provides are cost-effective.
• The system is secure.
• The performance is relatively high.
• It is reliable.
• It is flexible, as the servers are not required to run codes.
• The performance is scalable.

AWS Interview Questions and Answers for Experienced Candidates

Here are some AWS interview questions and answers frequently asked during an interview:

26. What is the latency-based routing feature of Amazon Route 53?

The feature is known to improve the application performance globally. It uses edge locations throughout the world and routes users to Amazon regions efficiently. It helps achieve effective routing even with low latency.

27. List the difference between Stateful and Stateless Firewalls.

Stateful Firewall	Stateless Firewall
Applies effective policy enforcement.	It focuses only on individual data packets.
It tracks all the aspects of traffic flow and uses complete network traffic.	It filters out the traffic according to the pre-set rules.
It allows integration encryption, packet states, and TCP stages.	It cannot identify the threats in traffic except the content in the header of packets.

28. What are RPO and RTO in AWS?

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) displays how much data is lost. It also displays the time a user can afford after a disruption in AWS elastic disaster recovery. It is generally measured in the sub-second range.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the time taken for recovery by resources to return to regular operations after a disruption in AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery. It is generally measured in minutes.

29. What is Provisioned IOPS and what are its uses?

Provisioned IOPS represents the EBS volume to deliver high performance for I/O intensive workloads. The database application may use it for consistency and fast response time.

30. What is the difference between storage in EBS and storage in an instance store?

The data stored in instances is stored temporarily. It may be lost due to a hardware failure or a termination. Hence, the data is not very safe in the instance store. 

Meanwhile, the data stored in EBS is stored for a longer period of time. Even if it gets lost due to terminations and instance stops, it can be restored using EBS snapshots. 

31. What is the meaning of changing in Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 provides an option to change the instance limits. It simplifies the limit management of the customers. It also changes the instance limit from the current count-based to the new vCPU-based limits. 

32. What is EFA in Amazon EC2?

Elastic Fabric Advisor (EFA) devices provide high-performance computing. They use a new OS bypass hardware interface with Amazon EC2 instances. It offers consistent latency and high throughput. It also improves inter-instance communication. 

33. What are Snapshots in Amazon Lightsail?

The point-in-time backups of EC2 instances are known as snapshots. They restore the resources as the original resource once the snapshot is taken. These snapshots can be created manually or automatically at any time.

34. How does Amazon Kinesis function?

Amazon Kinesis helps with the data captured from AWS services, logs, microservices, mobile apps, and sensors. It can easily stream the data of AWS lambda, data analytics, and data firehose. It is basically used to build streaming applications using AWS services.

35. What is S3 Object Lambda?

S3 Object Lambda modifies and processes data before it is returned to the applications. It processes data by filtering, masking, compressing, and redacting. 

36. Define instance stopping and instance termination.

When the user stops an instance, all the operations come under stop automatically. But the EBS volume connects to get it restarted anytime. 

The termination of an instance means that the user can no longer have access to the instance. It happens because the EBS volume is removed from the instance during termination. 

37. List the difference between Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Redshift.

Amazon Athena is a query service that allows running ad-hoc queries for the data without the support server. 

Amazon EMR is a data processing framework that helps run distributed processing frameworks like Hadoop and Spark.

Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse that provides the fastest query performance for BI workloads and enterprise reporting.

38. Explain the increased caching efficiency in Amazon ElastiCache.

Amazon ElastiCache helps reduce the latency with in-memory provision. The high workload applications often use it to improve data access efficiency and reduce latency significantly.

39. Explain how AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery and Cloud Endure Disaster Recovery are related.

Both services have similar capabilities and functions because AWS elastic disaster recovery is built on cloud endure disaster recovery. Enlisted below are the functions:

• The services ease the operations, setup, and recovery processes for the applications.
• They perform non-disruptive disaster recovery testing.
• They help in recovering from a previous point in time.
• It recovers RPOs in seconds and TROs in minutes.

40. Name some popular AWS services.

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

41. Explain why Amazon CloudFront is considered DevOps-friendly.

There are high chances for candidates to face this question in the AWS DevOps interview questions category. Amazon CloudFront is considered to be DevOps-friendly for several different reasons. Following are a few of them:

• It can integrate with other AWS services.
• It offers security.
• It can automatically scale to handle high traffic spikes.
• It offers real-time monitoring and analysis.

AWS Most Asked Interview Questions

42. State the maximum size of an S3 bucket.
43. Which AWS region is the cheapest?
44. List the advantages of the Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall over other AWS firewalls.
45. Differentiate between Amazon VPC Traffic Mirroring and Amazon VPC Flow Logs.
46. Explain how Amazon Redshift performs workload isolation and changeability.
47. Explain how Amazon VPC works with Amazon RDS.
48. How is data transferred in AWS Snowcone and AWS storage devices?
49. How are the storage contention issues managed in EBS?
50. What is AWS Lambda Runtime Interface Emulator?
51. Is region support available on Amazon services?
52. List the benefits of AWS.
53. Define Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
54. List the two types of queues in SQS.
55. When was the idea of AWS rendered?
56. Why do people prefer using AWS?
57. Define Sticky Sessions in ELB.
58. What is CloudTrail?
59. Define Amazon ECS.
60. Define Amazon EFS.
61. Write the uses of load balancers in Amazon Lightsail.
62. Define AWS Copilot CLI.
63. What is EIP?
64. List the different storage classes in S3.
65. How does the user secure the access to s3 bucket?
66. What are the policies in AWS?
67. List the different types of instances.
68. Define Load Balancer.
69. Define VPC Peering connection.
70. How does a user control the security of a VPC?

Conclusion 

Companies prefer candidates that have in-depth knowledge about the particular subject and the position that they tend to apply for. To crack an interview in this competitive field can be nerve-wracking. Hence you can find this AWS interview questions blog to help you get through the interview process.