Cloud computing is one of the most in-demand skills today, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a major share. If you’re preparing for an AWS-related job interview, knowing the right questions and how to answer them is very important to crack your next interview.
This page covers the most commonly asked AWS interview questions for beginners to advanced-level roles. So, whether you want to be a Cloud Architect, Site Reliability Engineer, or Cloud Support Associate, this guide will be useful for you. The questions focus on helping AWS professionals prepare for interviews through brief and clear answers. By just reading the answers, you’ll learn how AWS services work and you will be able to answer without memorizing.
Review these questions thoroughly, practice your answers, and stay prepared for your AWS interview.
Answer: The AWS Snow Family is a set of services that facilitate the transfer of data in and out of the cloud using physical devices. This family of services eliminates the need for network transfers when dealing with large volumes of data. The AWS Snow Family is commonly used for cloud migration, data center relocation, disaster recovery, and remote data collection projects. It enables the use of various AWS services for data analysis, archiving, and processing.
Answer: AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is a service that minimizes application downtime in the event of an application failure. It allows for quick recovery of applications both on-premises and in the cloud. With minimal computing power and storage requirements, it achieves point-in-time recovery, restoring applications to the same state as before the failure within minutes. This service significantly reduces recovery costs compared to traditional recovery methods.
Answer: Amazon Aurora is a relational database service compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. It combines the performance and reliability of traditional databases combining the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon RDS, automating tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, backups, and patching. It also features a self-healing storage system and can scale up to 128 TB per database instance.
Answer: Amazon RDS, or Relational Database Service, is a cloud service that simplifies the setup, operation, and scaling of relational databases. It automates administrative tasks such as database setup, provisioning, and backups. Amazon RDS supports six popular database engines, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server.
Answer: Amazon Neptune is a purpose-built graph database designed for executing queries and navigating datasets with ease. It allows users to use graph query languages to perform efficient queries on connected datasets. With its graph database engine, Amazon Neptune can store billions of relationships and provide low-latency query performance. It is commonly used in applications like fraud detection, knowledge graphs, and network security.
Answer: Amazon Route 53 is a highly scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It connects users to AWS infrastructure, including Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon S3 buckets. Route 53 also supports connecting users outside of the AWS infrastructure. The service allows configuration of DNS health checks and continuous monitoring of applications for their ability to recover from failures. Additionally, Amazon Route 53 integrates with Amazon IAM to control access to DNS data.
Answer: AWS Shield is a service provided by Amazon Web Services that offers protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks targeting AWS applications. There are two versions of AWS Shield available: AWS Shield Standard and AWS Shield Advanced. AWS Shield Standard provides basic protection against common and frequently occurring DDoS attacks. On the other hand, AWS Shield Advanced offers more advanced and comprehensive protection for applications running on Amazon EC2, ELB, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, and Route 53.
Answer: Amazon Network Firewall is an AWS service designed to enhance the security of Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) by protecting them against attacks. This service automatically scales based on network traffic flow. With the flexible rules engine provided by Network Firewall, users can define their own firewall rules, allowing for granular control over network traffic. Amazon Network Firewall can be used in conjunction with AWS Firewall Manager to create and apply security policies across all VPCs and accounts.
Answer: Amazon EBS, or Amazon Elastic Block Store, is a high-performance block storage service specifically designed to support Amazon EC2 instances. It provides scalable storage that can quickly adapt to the workload demands of high-level applications including Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft products. With Amazon EBS, users can resize clusters by attaching and detaching storage volumes, making it compatible with big data analytics engines like Hadoop and Spark.
Answer: Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed AWS service that facilitates the building, training, and deployment of machine learning models. It offers the necessary infrastructure, tools, and workflow to support various use cases. With Amazon SageMaker, users can efficiently handle large volumes of structured and unstructured data, helping them to rapidly build machine learning models.
Answer: Amazon EMR, or Amazon Elastic MapReduce, is a cloud-based big data platform provided by AWS. This service allows users to run large-scale distributed data processing tasks, machine learning applications, and interactive SQL queries. Amazon EMR supports open-source frameworks such as Apache Spark, Hive, and Presto, enabling users to run and scale big data workloads. By leveraging Amazon EMR, users can uncover hidden patterns, correlations, and market trends through large-scale data processing.
Answer: Amazon EMR, or Amazon Elastic MapReduce, is a cloud-based big data platform provided by AWS. This service allows users to run large-scale distributed data processing tasks, machine learning applications, and interactive SQL queries. Amazon EMR supports open-source frameworks such as Apache Spark, Hive, and Presto, enabling users to run and scale big data workloads. By leveraging Amazon EMR, users can uncover hidden patterns, correlations, and market trends through large-scale data processing.
Answer: Amazon Kinesis is an AWS service designed for the gathering, processing, and analysis of real-time streaming data, enabling the generation of valuable insights. Real-time data sources can include video, audio, application logs, IoT telemetry data, and website clickstreams. By utilizing Amazon Kinesis, users can take timely actions based on the insights derived from processing and analyzing data as it is received, without the need to wait for the entire dataset to arrive.
Answer: The AWS Snow family consists of the following members:
- AWS Snowcone
- AWS Snowball
- AWS Snowmobile
Answer: AWS Shield is capable of protecting websites from various DDoS attacks, including:
- UDP floods
- TCP SYN floods
- HTTP GET and POST floods
Answer: AMI stands for Amazon Machine Image. It provides the necessary information required to launch an instance. A single AMI can be used to launch multiple instances with the same configuration, while different AMIs are used to launch instances with different configurations.
Answer: Amazon EC2 follows several security practices, including:
- Managing accounts with two-factor authentication based on Amazon IAM
- Requiring user requests to be signed with an access key ID and secret access key
- Ensuring data security through API and user activity logging with AWS CloudTrail
- Encouraging the use of Transport Layer
Answer: The root device volume in Amazon EC2 is the storage that contains the image used to boot an EC2 instance. When launching a new EC2 instance with an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), the root device volume is created and can be backed by either Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) or instance store. The data stored on the root device volume on Amazon EBS is independent of the instance’s lifetime.
Answer: Availability zones in Amazon EC2 are isolated locations designed to be distinct from each other, so a failure in one zone does not affect instances in other zones. Regions, on the other hand, consist of one or more availability zones. Regions help reduce latency and costs by allowing users to deploy resources closer to their target audience or to distribute resources for high availability.
Answer:
- General Purpose Instances: These instances provide a balance of computing, memory, and networking resources, suitable for a wide range of workloads.
- Compute Optimized Instances: These instances are designed for compute-intensive applications, such as high-performance web servers, batch processing, and machine learning inference.
- Memory Optimized Instances: These instances are optimized for memory-intensive workloads that require fast access to large datasets.
- Accelerated Computing Instances: These instances use hardware accelerators to deliver high performance for tasks like floating-point number calculations, data pattern matching, and graphics processing.
- Storage Optimized Instances: These instances are designed for workloads that need high, sequential read and write access to large datasets.