TOP 30 AWS Interview Questions And Answers

1) What is the Amazon Web Service?

Answer: Amazon Web Service (AWS) is a public cloud or a server farm managed and maintained by Amazon. The storage and computing power of these servers are offered on a lease as a managed service for pay per use basis.

Q #2) What is cloud computing?

Answer: Cloud computing is IT resources such as infrastructure, platform, or software as their services are used over the Internet with a pay-per-use basis. Cloud service providers are the companies that have public cloud or data centers who offer services like compute, storage, database, operations, migration, messaging, and analytics services.

The leading cloud service providers are AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Rackspace, Verizon Cloud.

Q #3) What are the different types of cloud computing?

Answer: There are three main types of cloud computing offered as services by the service providers.

These are as follows:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides basic building blocks such as virtual or dedicated hardware in the form of computers, data storage space as well as networking access in the form of IT infrastructure on a pay as per use basis to customers eliminating initial and ongoing expenses after purchasing infrastructure, space, and maintenance, but only to focus on business improvement and improving applications built by these companies.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) offers managing hardware and operating systems for the customers and focusing on deploying their products, eliminating initial and ongoing expenses after purchasing infrastructure, space, and maintenance.
• Software as a Service (SaaS) offers complete management of end-user applications along with management of infrastructure supporting these applications, for the companies as their service offerings.

Q #4) What benefits organizations will have in moving to cloud computing?

Answer: Organizations moving their infrastructure and applications to the public cloud will have the following benefits:

• Scalability: Cloud allows scale up or down based on usage, you only need to pay per use for the computing and storage perspective.
• Reliability: Cloud providers offer the reliability of their infrastructure up to 99.999999%, with provision for multiple levels of redundancy and backups in case it is needed.
• Security: Most cloud providers are compliant with industry-level security protocols like HIPAA, PCI, offer access restrictions to applications and systems at multiple levels and monitoring services at a very granular level to trigger alarms.
• Cost Efficiency: Moving to the cloud for startup companies offers benefits of cost savings by differing from investing in expensive servers, managing, and maintaining them. Every month, companies have to pay only for the computing power and storage that are utilized by them during the month.

Q #5) What are the main features of Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

Answer: Main features of AWS are listed below:

• Data Management and Data Transfer
• Compute & Networking
• Storage
• Automation and Orchestration
• Operations and Management
• Visualization
• Security and Compliance

Q #6) Explain the main components of Amazon Web Services.

Answer: Main components of AWS are described below:

• Route 53: It is a highly scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It helps to route end users to Internet applications by masking names like www.portalname.com to its numeric IP address like 192.168.0.1.
• Simple Storage Service (S3): It is a highly scalable, fast, inexpensive, and reliable data storage interface from Amazon web services used by many large organizations.
• Simple E-mail Service (SES): This is a hosted email service that uses Restful API call or via SMTP, for sending the notification, marketing, and transaction-related messages.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM): It is Identity and security management services for AWS account holders. It allows us to create and manage users, user groups thereby allow or deny access to AWS resources.
• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): It is the central ecosystem of AWS, responsible for on-demand and flexible computing resources. EC2 will help to configure security, networking, and storage and launch virtual servers as per need.
• Elastic Block Store (EBS): It offers a continuous storage system, which can be viewed in the instance as a hard drive. EBS helps create storage volumes and attach to Amazon EC2 instances.
• CloudWatch: It gathers key metrics and sets a series of alarms to inform users, in case there is trouble. Using CloudWatch, administrators can monitor multiple resources and instances from a single console such as virtual instances in EC2, Databases in RDS, Data stored in S3, Elastic Load Balancer, and Auto Scaling groups.

Q #7) What are the differences between Amazon S3 and EC2?

Answer: Differences between Amazon S3 and EC2 are described in the below table:

Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)	Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3)
EC2 is a cloud hosting tool	S3 is a cloud storage tool
EC2 is pay per use web service that deploys applications on Amazon public cloud servers for their compute power.	S3 is a storage with massive capacity to store anything from documents, movies, applications, images, objects (BLOB)
Amazon EC2 allow selection of multiple instances, operating system, software, configuration of memory, CPU, storage and boot partition as well as commissioning of thousands of server instances within minutes if required to scale up or scale down the application load.	Amazon S3 allows storage of objects. Objects are stored in a bucket that can be retrieved by developer-assigned key; This bucket can be stored in one of several regions across the globe.

Q #8) What are the main features of the Amazon EC2 instance?

Answer: Various Amazon EC2 features are described below:

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides virtual computing environments in the form of a virtual server known as instances, requested in the form of a web server for computing in AWS public cloud.
• EC2 allows pre-configured templates, Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for instances, that allow package information needed like operating system and additional software for configuring your cloud server.
• Various instance types like CPU, memory, storage, and networking capabilities can be configured with EC2.
• EC2 offers secured login information in key pair form, where AWS stores public key as an identity for customers, whereas customers will save the private key for securely logging in the AWS cloud server.
• Instance store volumes for temporary data, which gets deleted when an instance is stopped or terminated.
• Persistent storage volume for our data for storage and computing purpose using Elastic Block Store by Amazon known as Amazon EBS volume.
• Regions and Availability zones give multiple physical locations for resources such as instances and Amazon EBS volumes.
• Protocols, ports, and source IP ranges to reach the instances can be configured in the form of a firewall.
• Elastic IP addresses are static IPv4 addresses for dynamic cloud computing.
• Metadata can be created and assigned to Amazon EC2 resources.
• Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) are virtual networks isolated from the rest of the AWS cloud and can be connected to our private network if needed.

Q #9) List possible storage options for Amazon EC2 instance.

Answer: Storage options for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are listed below:

• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
• Amazon EC2 Instance Store
• Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Amazon Glacier

Q #10) What security practices should be followed for Amazon EC2 instance?

Answer: Following security practices are followed for Amazon EC2 instance:

• Least Access: Managing access to AWS resources and APIs using identity federation, IAM users, and IAM roles.
• Least Privilege: Implementation of least permissive rules for security groups.
• Configuration Management: Patch, update, and secure the operating system and applications on an instance regularly.

Q #11) What are the components of AWS Databases?

Answer: AWS Database is mainly composed of the following components:

• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed service to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud server. Relation database services have Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and MariaDB as database engines for cloud customers to select as their database. RDS also provides AWS database migration services to migrate and replicate the existing database to Amazon RDS.
• Amazon Aurora is a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system managed by Amazon RDS.
• Amazon ElasticCache allows seamless setup, run, and scale open source in-memory data stores in the cloud. The features offered by ElasticCache are Caching, Session Stores, Gaming, Geospatial Services, Real-Time Analytic, and Queuing.
• Amazon DocumentDB: With Amazon DocumentDB it becomes easy to store, query, and index data in JSON format.
• Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value document database, selected for mobile, web, gaming, ad tech, IoT, and low-latency data access at any scale, for mission-critical workloads.
• Amazon Keyspaces is database services compatible with Apache Cassandra, scalable, highly available, and serverless.
• Redshift: It is a cloud data warehouse.
• Neptune: It is fully managed, highly available, point-in-time recovery graph database services with continuous backup with Amazon S3.
• Quantum Ledger Database: It is a fully managed ledger database SQL-like API, flexible document data model, with full support for transactions. It is serverless similar to a keyspace.

Q #12) Explain AWS DevOps tools to build and deploy software in the cloud.

Answer: To build and deploy software in the AWS cloud DevOps team uses the following tools:

• AWS Cloud Development Kit: It is an open-source software development framework for modeling and provisioning cloud application resources with popular programming languages.
• AWS CodeBuild: It is a continuous integration service that processes multiple builds and tests code with continuous scaling.
• AWS CodeDeploy: It helps to automate software deployments to any of the on-premises servers to choose from such as Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, etc.
• AWS CodePipeline: It automates code received through continuous delivery for rapid and accurate updates.
• AWS CodeStar: It is a user interface that helps the DevOps team to develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS.
• AWS Device Farm: It works as a testing platform to test applications on different mobile devices and browsers.

Q #13) What is Amazon CloudFront and what does it offer?

Answer: Amazon CloudFront is a highly scaled and globally distributed Content Delivery Network service (CDN), which securely delivers APIs, applications, data, and videos to customers globally. To utilize CDN, various AWS tools such as APIs, AWS management console, AWS CloudFormation, CLIs, and SDKs are used.

Q #14) What do you mean by AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure?

Answer: AWS offers cloud infrastructure to customers across the globe. It is popularly called IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) which offers the customer to use services such as compute, networking, storage, and virtualization services over Amazon’s servers on pay per use basis.

The terms used in global cloud infrastructure are Region, Availability zones, and Edge location. These are explained below:

• Region: It is geographical subcontinent or region where Amazon has two or more than two availability zones that offer its resources to customers. Customers located across that particular region can avail of Amazon’s cloud services.
• Availability Zones: These are the city or locations in the region where Amazon has their fully operational, data center(s) that offer all offerings and cloud services to its customers in these zones.
• Edge Location: This is the location where networking and content delivery resources are available along with other services to the Amazon cloud services such as compute, storage, database, and other services to the customers.

Q #15) What are Amazon’s offerings under AWS Network and Content Delivery Services?

Answer: Under AWS networking and content delivery, it helps connect privately AWS global network by isolating resources and encrypting data thereby delivers customer’s contents with high throughput, lowest latency, or delays.

Amazon offerings in networking and content delivery are listed below:

• VPC or Virtual Private Cloud is a logically isolated section of Amazon web service, allowing clients to launch AWS resources in a virtual network, select their IP address range, configure subnet with access to Amazon EC2 instances in each subnet, route table, and network gateways.
• Direct connect helps establish a private connection between the client’s data center and AWS, thereby providing the best bandwidth throughput, better network at reduced charges.
• Route 53 is a highly scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It helps the developer to set route end users to Internet applications by switching website names to corresponding IP addresses.

Q #16) What Amazon offers under its Compute services?

Answer: AWS compute is a feature of utilizing resources of computing power offered by Amazon in terms of a physical server within their data center by installing and running customer’s applications on a pay per use basis by accessing these resources over the Internet. There are various compute services offered by Amazon based on performance and benefits along with the consumption of these resources over a period.

These offerings are listed below:

• Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) allows deploying virtual server instances within the AWS environment. EC2 services can be further categorized based on Amazon Machine Images (AMI), User data, storage options, and security, Instance types, Instance purchasing options, and Tenancy.
• EC2 Container Service (ECS) are the services that allow running applications that are packaged in the container by Docker (a tool that creates, deploy and run applications by using Linux containers) across a group of EC2 instances, with the help of AWS Fargate – the engine that enables ECS to run applications packed in containers.
• AWS elastic beanstalk is a managed service that automatically deploys the required resources within AWS once web application code has been uploaded, making web application operational. It includes resources such as EC2, Autoscaling, elastic load balancing, and application’s health monitoring.
• AWS Lambda is serverless compute service that runs the application without managing EC2 instances.
• Amazon Lightsail is a web hosting service for simple and small applications or blogs. It can also be connected to other AWS resources as well as existing Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Q #17) Please elaborate on Analytics services offered by Amazon.

Answer: Amazon Analytics provides insights and analytical solutions from different data types that traditional data warehouses cannot provide.

Various analytics solutions offered by Amazon are listed as below:

• Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that is serverless with no infrastructure to manage for analyzing data present in Amazon S3.
• Amazon EMR is managed Hadoop framework for big data across Amazon EC2 instances along with other frameworks like Spark, HBase, Presto to interact with data stores such as S3 and DynamoDB.
• Amazon data pipeline is web services for moving and processing data between computing and storage services of AWS.
• Amazon Cloud Search is managed service for search, manage and scale searching feature such as highlighting, auto-complete and geospatial search for the web applications,
• Amazon Elasticsearch services search, analyze, and visualize data in real-time by deploying elastic search API and analytics and integration with open source tools Kibana and Logstash for data ingestion and visualization for Amazon Elastic Search services.
• Amazon kinesis collection, processing, and analyzing of streaming data such as video and audio, application logs, IoT telemetry data, etc. is done with Amazon Kinesis.
• Amazon QuickSight is business intelligence services to publish interactive dashboards via browsers or mobile devices giving insights across the organization.

Q #18) What is offered under Migration services by Amazon?

Answer: Amazon migration services customers can make an exact copy of their data from their database system to Amazon’s databases by streaming data to Amazon S3, Aurora, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, or Redshift.

• Amazon Database Migration Service (DMS) is a tool for migrating data extremely fast from an on-premise database to Amazon Web Services cloud. DMS supports RDBMS systems like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL in on-premises and the cloud.
• Amazon Server Migration Services (SMS) helps in migrating on-premises workloads to Amazon web services cloud. SMS migrates client’s server VMware to cloud-based Amazon Machine Images (AMIs),
• Amazon Snowball is a data transport solution for data collection, machine learning, and processing, and storage in low connectivity environments.

Q #19) What are the different service offerings provided by Amazon under Security Identity and compliance services?

Answer: Amazon Security Identity and compliance services help DevOps team members to have a single point of checkpoint for configuring and prioritizing security alerts, findings.

With Identity and Access Management, Amazon grants or restricts user permission, assign security credentials to individuals.

• Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) help to create and manage secured access to AWS services and resources, granting or restricting user permission to AWS cloud services.
• Amazon inspector improves security and compliance of applications deployed on Amazon web services on their cloud environment, provide automated security assessment services of any vulnerabilities.
• AWS WAF is a firewall that allows monitoring (Allow, Block as well verify) HTTP and HTTPS requests sent to Amazon API Gateway API, CloudFront, or Application Load Balancer.
• AWS certificate manager manages, deploys and provides public and private Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates for use with AWS and internal connected resources.

Q #20) List AWS management tools used while using Amazon cloud services?

Answer: There are mainly four categories of management tools available to AWS cloud consumers.

These are:

• Provisioning tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, RightScale.
• Operations Management tools like Juju, Ansible, Rex.
• Monitoring and Logging tools like CFEngine, Sumo Logic, CloudWatch.
• Managed Services and Configuration tools like Chef, Puppet, NixOS.

Q #21) What is offered under Messaging services by Amazon?

Answer: Amazon messaging services allow cloud customers to communicate between their teams regarding notification, marketing messaging via the SMTP interface of Amazon messaging services.

Different offerings from Amazon include the following:

• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is fully managed, secured, available messaging services by AWS that help decouple serverless applications, micro-services, and distributed systems. SNS can be started within minutes from either AWS management console, command-line interface, or software development kit.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queues for serverless applications, micro-services, and distributed systems. The advantage of SQS FIFO guarantees single time processing and exact order sent by this kind of messaging service.
• Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) offers sending and receiving email services for informal, notify, and marketing correspondence via email for their cloud customers through SMTP interface.

Q #22) What facilities are provided under the AWS customer enablement program?

Answer: Various offerings from Amazon are provided under the customer enablement program.

These are explained below:

• AWS Support offers technical help, guidance on configuration, and assist during installation and implementation thereby improve their performance, save time installing their applications on the cloud.
• AWS Professional Services assist customers and discuss plans with them to fulfill their business outcomes with the AWS cloud move.
• AWS IQ is a platform to build technical support from Amazon certified third-party experts for on-demand consultation during their project work.
• AWS Training and Certification provide training on AWS and cloud-related skills as well as provide a learning platform to achieve the AWS certification program.
• AWS Managed services operate customer’s cloud infrastructure on behalf of their enterprise customers and partners.

Q #23) What are Amazon Cloud solutions?

Answer: Amazon Cloud solutions are guidance or help to resolve common installation and commissioning difficulties or roadblocks that are encountered using the AWS platform by DevOps teams from Client. AWS team of experts provide deployment guide and instructions on manual as well as the automated deployment of their applications on Amazon’s cloud services.

Q #24) Startup company wishes to move to AWS cloud, has confidential and sensitive client data, for investigation in the application, what do you suggest to manage cloud architecture?

Answer: The company can go for hybrid cloud architecture, which is a combination of public cloud for shared resources and private cloud/server for confidential workloads.

Q #25) You are running on very low project budgets, what would you select as AWS storage solutions?

Answer: Amazon Glacier is of extremely low-cost storage and data archiving and backup services. So, it can be selected.

Q #26) A web application has been created with auto-scaling, the web traffic is highest on Wednesdays and Fridays between 9 AM and 7 PM, as there is the best deal offered on the portal. How would you handle the scaling?

Answer: The Auto-scaling policy can be configured to scale as per the predictable traffic patterns. Further AWS will scale in response to the traffic.

Q #27) Web application to assist the designer of clothing and apparel line is hosted on AWS, which allows users to render images and process computing to predict the number of clothes required. To route incoming user traffic, which one of the following services should you use?

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

Answer: The best choice to route incoming user traffic would be Application Load Balancer, as it supports

• Path-based routing, thereby enhancing the performance of an application.
• Requests made for rendering images can be directed to the servers whereas requests made for computing to the servers that are deployed for general computing such as EC2.

Q #28) What management tool you would use if you wish to access Amazon Simple storage buckets and utilize the information for access audits?

Answer: AWS Cloud Trail, designed for logging and tracking API calls can be used for such cases.

Q #29) What is the purpose of making subnets?

Answer: Subnets are designed to divide a large network into smaller networks. It will help reduce congestion by routing traffic which increases substantially.

Q #30) Subnet is created and an EC2 instance launched in the subnet with default settings, Explain, which options would be ready to use on EC2 instance as soon as it is launched?

• Elastic IP
• Private IP
• Public IP OR
• Internet Gateway

Answer: The best option would be Private IP which gets assigned as soon as it is launched.