Top AWS Interview Questions and Answers for 2023

Ace your AWS interview with our comprehensive collection of AWS Interview Questions and Answers. Dive into topics like cloud computing, architecture, services, and industry best practices. Stay ahead of the competition and showcase your expertise in cloud computing with our interview Q&A guide.

Cloud computing has become the major driving force for businesses of all sizes’ growth. Gartner forecasts Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will grow 20.7% to $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022. AWS has emerged as the most popular cloud service in such a scenario. Given the huge skill gaps in the industry, there has been a huge demand for AWS-certified cloud architects and professionals. If you are willing to start a cloud computing career, you have landed on the right page. We have curated some of the most popular AWS Interview questions and answers to help you crack your AWS interview.

You must explore: 15 Cloud Computing Applications

Top AWS Interview Questions & Answers

AWS has risen as one of the best careers in recent years. This is primarily due to abilities like processing power, storage capacity, analytics, networking, and device management. Learning AWS is also easy as they have a pay-as-you-use model that saves costs upfront and allows learners to learn at their own pace. We have listed all the AWS interview questions and answers below to make the AWS interview process easier. Read on.

Q1. What is AWS?

Ans. It is among the most commonly asked AWS interview questions. There is little room to be creative – you either know or don’t know the answer.

Amazon Web Services or AWS, is a set of cloud computing services and tools from Amazon. It offers over 200 comprehensive data center services globally. AWS is a cross-functional platform that offers various services ranging from data warehousing to content delivery.

Q2. What is Amazon S3?

Ans. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is object storage with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web.

Learn how to become an AWS Solutions Architect.

Q3. What is AWS SNS?

Ans. Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a push notification service that sends individual messages to many mobile or email subscriber systems, including Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions, and HTTPS endpoints. It is both application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communication.

Q4. What is CloudFront?

Ans. Amazon CloudFront has become one of the world’s most popular delivery networks (content delivery network, CDN) thanks to its ability to accelerate the transmission of static and dynamic web content, like .html, .css, and .js files. CloudFront works efficiently with services like AWS Shield and helps curb DDoS attacks. It utilizes Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, or Amazon EC2 as sources for your applications and uses Lambda @ Edge to run custom code closer to and personalize customer users.  

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Q5. What are the main differences between ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ scales?

Ans. The main differences between ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ scales are –

Horizontal Scale	Vertical Scale
Provides new resources along with new hardware devices to support the infrastructure	Increase power resources by upgrading the current machine.
Used in distributed systems	Used in virtualization
Resilient to system failure	Single point of failure
Utilizes network calls	Interprocess communication
Increases the capacity of existing hardware or software by adding additional resources	Connects multiple system entities, both hardware and software, such that they work as a single logical unit
Difficult to implement	Easy to implement

Explore AWS Certification Online Courses & Certifications

Q6. Explain the advantages of AWS’s Disaster Recovery (DR) solution.

Ans. This is also among the most popular AWS interview questions asked in an AWS interview.

The following are the advantages of AWS’s Disaster Recovery (DR) solution:

• AWS offers a cost-effective backup, storage, and DR solution, helping companies to reduce their capital expenses
• Fast setup time and greater productivity gains
• AWS helps companies to scale up even during seasonal fluctuations
• It seamlessly replicates on-premises data to the cloud
• Ensures fast retrieval of files

Q7. What are the different types of load balancers in EC2?

Ans: There are three types of load balancers in EC2 – 

• Application Load Balancer – These balancers are designed to make routing decisions at the application layer. 
• Network Load Balancer – The network load balancer handles millions of requests per second and helps make routing decisions at the transport layer.    
• Classic Load Balancer – Classic Load Balancer is mainly used for applications built within the EC2-Classic network. It offers basic load balancing at varying Amazon EC2 instances.

You should explore: Load balancing in cloud computing

 Q8. What is DynamoDB?

Ans. DynamoDB is a NoSQL database. It is flexible, performs reliably, and can be integrated with AWS! It offers fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. With the help of DynamoDB, you do not need to worry about hardware provisioning, setup, configuration, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling.

Explore AWS Certification Online Courses & Certifications

Q9. What is AWS CloudFormation?

Ans. AWS CloudFormation is an Amazon service dedicated to solving the need to standardize and replicate the architectures to facilitate their execution and optimize resources and costs in the delivery of applications or compliance with the organisation’s requirements. CloudFormation allows the creation of a proprietary library of instance templates or architectures capable of being delivered at any time and in an organized manner through programming.

Q10. What are the advantages of using AWS CloudFormation?

Ans. It is one of the most popular AWS interview questions. There are many advantages of  AWS CloudFormation, including the following.

1. Reduces infrastructure deployment time
2. Increases confidence in deployments
3. Replicates complex environments, for example, have complex environments for development, pre-production, and production that are the same, or almost the same, simply by scaling up resources
4. Reuses the definitions between different products
   
5. Reduces environment repair time

Q11. What is Elastic Beanstalk?

Ans. Elastic Beanstalk is an orchestration service by AWS, used in various AWS applications such as EC2, S3, Simple Notification Service, CloudWatch, autoscaling, and Elastic Load Balancers. It is the fastest and simplest way to deploy your application on AWS using either AWS Management Console, a Git repository, or an integrated development environment (IDE).

Q12. What is Geo Restriction in CloudFront?

Ans. Geo restriction, also known as geoblocking, prevents users in specific geographic locations from accessing content you’re distributing through a CloudFront web distribution.

Q13. What is a T2 instance?

Ans. T2 instances are designed to provide moderate baseline performance and the capability to burst to higher performance as required by workload.

Q14. What is AWS Lambda?

Ans. AWS Lambda is a computing service that lets you run code in the AWS Cloud without provisioning or managing servers.

Q15. What is a Serverless application in AWS?

Ans. The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) extends AWS CloudFormation to provide a simplified way of defining the Amazon API Gateway APIs, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon DynamoDB tables needed by your serverless application.

Q16. What is the use of Amazon ElastiCache?

Ans. Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory data store or cache in the cloud.

Q17. Explain how the buffer is used in Amazon web services.

Ans. The buffer makes the system more robust in managing traffic or load by synchronizing different components.

Q18. Differentiate between stopping and terminating an instance.

Ans. When an instance is stopped, the instance performs a normal shutdown and then transitions to a stopped state.

When an instance is terminated, the instance performs a normal shutdown. Then the attached Amazon EBS volumes are deleted unless the volume’s deleteOnTermination attribute is set to false.

Also, Read>> Top 10 Reasons to learn AWS

Q19. Is it possible to change the private IP addresses of an EC2 while it is running/stopped in a VPC?

Ans. The primary private IP address cannot be changed. Secondary private addresses can be unassigned, assigned, or moved between interfaces or instances at any point.

You must explore: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Q20. Give one instance where you would prefer Provisioned IOPS over Standard RDS storage.

Ans. Provisioned IOPS can be preferred over Standard RDS storage when we have batch-oriented workloads.

You can also explore: Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

Q21. What are the different types of cloud services?

Ans. Different types of cloud services are:

• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Data as a Service (DaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Q22. What is the boot time for an instance store-backed instance?

Ans. The boot time for an Amazon Instance Store -Backed AMI is less than 5 minutes.

Q23. Will you use encryption for S3?

Ans. Yes, I will, as it is a proprietary technology. It’s always a good idea to consider encryption for sensitive data on S3.

Q24. What is Identity Access Management, and how is it used?

Ans. It is a web service used to control access to AWS services securely. Identity Access Management allows you to manage users, security credentials, and resource permissions.

Q25. What is Sharding?

Ans. Sharding or horizontal partitioning is a scale-out technique for relational databases. This technique puts that data into smaller subsets and distributes them across physically separated database servers, where every server is called a database shard. These database shards have the same hardware, database engine, and data structure so that a similar level of performance is generated. 

Must Read – Different Levels of AWS Certifications Explained

Q26. How do you send requests to Amazon S3?

Ans. We can achieve this using the REST API or the AWS SDK wrapper libraries. These elements wrap up the underlying Amazon S3 REST API.

Q27. What is DynamoDB?

Ans. DynamoDB is a fully managed proprietary NoSQL database service, supporting key-value and document data structures. It can be used when a fast and flexible NoSQL database with a flexible data model and reliable performance is required.

Q28. What is Redshift?

Ans. Redshift is a petabyte-size data warehouse service by Amazon. It is easy, cost-effective, and scalable and can be fully configured to analyze your data with the existing business intelligence tools.

Q29. Which data centers are deployed for cloud P@ssw0rd7computing?

Ans. There are two data centers in cloud computing, one is Containerized Data centers, and the other is Low-Density Data Centers.

Q30. Which AWS services will you use to collect and process e-commerce data for near real-time analysis?

Ans. Following are the AWS services that will be used to collect and process e-commerce data for near real-time analysis:

• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon ElastiCache
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce
• Amazon Redshift

Q31. What is SQS?

Ans. Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a distributed message queuing service that acts as a mediator for two controllers. It is a pay-per-use web service.

Read More – AWS Solutions Architect – Associate level examination 

Q32. What are the popular DevOps tools?

Ans. The popular DevOps tools are:

• Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and SaltStack – Deployment and Configuration Management Tools
• Docker – Containerization Tool
• Git – Version Control System Tool
• Jenkins – Continuous Integration Tool
• Nagios – Continuous Monitoring Tool
• Selenium – Continuous Testing Tool

Q33. What is Hybrid cloud architecture?

Ans. It is a type of architecture where the workload is divided into two halves: one is on public load, and the other is on local storage. It is a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, and public cloud services between two platforms.

Q34. What is Configuration Management?

Ans. Configuration management is used to manage systems’ configuration and the services they provide entirely through code. This is a repetitive and consistent process that is achieved through –

• Intuitive command-line interface
• A lightweight and easily readable domain-specific language (DSL)
• Comprehensive REST-based API

Q35. What are the features of Amazon Cloud search?

Ans. Amazon cloud search features:

• AutoComplete advice
• Boolean Searches
• Entire text search
• Faceting term boosting
• Highlighting
• Prefix Searches
• Range searches

Q36.  How do you access the data on EBS in AWS?

Ans. Data cannot be accessible on EBS directly by a graphical interface in AWS. This process includes assigning the EBS volume to an EC2 instance. Here, when the volume is connected to any of the instances, either Windows or Unix, you can write or read on it. First, you can take a screenshot from the volumes with data and build unique volumes with the help of screenshots. Here, each EBS volume can be attached to only a single instance.

Also Read – AWS Certification Courses, Exams, Cost and Eligibility

Q37. What is the difference between Amazon RDS, Redshift, and Dynamo DB?

Ans. Differentiate between Amazon RDS, Redshift, and Dynamo DB:

Features	Amazon RDS	Redshift	Dynamo DB
Primary Usage	Conventional Databases	Data warehouse	Database for dynamically modified data
Database Engine	MySQL, Oracle DB, SQL Server, Amazon Aurora, Postgre SQL	Redshift	NoSQL
Computing Resources	Instances with 64 vCPU and 244 GB RAM	Nodes with vCPU and 244 GB RAM	Not specified, SaaS-Software as a Service.
Multi A-Z Replication	Additional Service	Manual	In-built
Maintenance Window	30 minutes every week.	30 minutes every week.	No impact

Q38. If you hold half of the workload on the public cloud while the different half is on local storage, what type of architecture can be used in this case?

Ans. In such cases, the hybrid cloud architecture can be used.

Read More >> AWS vs Google Cloud

Q39. Mention the possible connection issues you encounter when connecting to an EC2 instance.

Ans. Following are the possible connection issues you encounter when connecting to an EC2 instance:

• Server refused key
• Connection timed out
• Host key not found, permission denied.
• Unprotected private key file
• No supported authentication method is available

Q40. What are lifecycle hooks in AWS autoscaling?

Ans. Lifecycle hooks can be added to the autoscaling group. It enables you to perform custom actions by pausing instances where the autoscaling group terminates and launches them. Every auto-scaling group consists of multiple lifecycle hooks.

Q41. What is a Hypervisor?

Ans. A Hypervisor is software used to create and run virtual machines. It integrates physical hardware resources into a platform distributed virtually to each user. Hypervisor includes Oracle Virtual Box, Oracle VM for x86, VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation, and Solaris Zones.

Q42. Explain the use of the Route Table.

Ans. Route Table is used to control the network traffic where each subnetwork of VPC is associated with a routing table. Route table consists of huge amounts of information, whereas connecting multiple subnetworks to a routing table is also feasible.

Q43. What is the use of Connection Draining?

Ans. Connection Draining is a process used to support load balancers. It keeps tracking all instances if any instance fails, connection draining, drag all the traffic from that specific failed instance and re-routes the traffic to the active instances.

Q44. Explain the role of AWS CloudTrail.

Ans. AWS CloudTrail is a service designed for monitoring and auditing actions of API calls. With AWS CloudTrail, the user can monitor and retain account activity connected with actions covering the AWS infrastructure. 

For more information on AWS CloudTrail, you can refer to: Introduction to AWS CloudTrail Service

Q45. Explain the use of Amazon Transfer Acceleration Service.

Ans. Amazon Transfer Acceleration Service is used to boost your data transfer with the help of advanced network paths. It also transfers files fast and secures between your client and an S3 bucket.

Q46. How to update AMI tools at the Boot-Time on Linux?

Ans. To update AMI tools at the Boot-Time on Linux, you will have to do the following:

• # Update to Amazon EC2 AMI tools
• echo ” + Updating EC2 AMI tools”
• yum update -y aws-amitools-ec2
• echo ” + Updated EC2 AMI tools”

Q47. How does Encryption is done in S3?

Ans. Encryption is done in S3 by using:

• In Transit: SSL/TLS
• At Rest
• Server-Side in Encryption
• S3 Managed Keys – SSE-S3
• AWS Key Management Service, Managed of Keys – SSE-KMS
•  6. Server-Side Encryption with Customer Provided Keys – SSE-C
• Client-Side Encryptions

Q48. Explain Amazon Route 53.

Ans. Amazon Route 53 is defined as a scalable and highly available Domain Name System (DNS). It is created for the benefit of developers and companies to route end users to internet applications by translating names which is the most reliable and cost-effective process.

Q49. What are the pricing models for EC2 instances?

Ans. Following are the different pricing models for EC2 instances:

• Dedicated
• Reserved
• On-demand
• Scheduled
• Spot

You can also explore: Introduction to Cloud Cost Models

Q50. What are the parameters for S3 pricing?

Ans. The following are the parameters for S3 pricing:

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

Top 10 Reasons to learn AWS – Services and Benefits

Q51. What are the best security practices for Amazon EC2?

Ans. Below are the steps to follow to secure Amazon EC2 best practices:

• Using AWS identity and access management to manage access to the AWS resource.
• Exclude access by initializing trusted hosts or networks to access ports on our instance.
• Evaluate the rules in your security groups.
• Stop passport login, for instance, opened from your AMI

Q52. How do you add a current instance to a new Autoscaling group?

Ans. Follow the steps to know how you can add an existing instance to a new auto-scaling group:

• Launch EC2 console
• Under instances, select your instance
• Choose the action and instance setting and attach it to the auto-scaling group
• Select a new auto-scaling group
• Comply with this group to the instance
• If needed, edit the instance
• Ultimately, you can successfully add the instance to a new auto-scaling group.

Q53. Name the different types of instances.

Ans. Following are the different types of instances:

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

Q54. Mention the different layers of cloud architecture.

Ans. Following are the different types of layers in cloud architecture:

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

Q55. What are the edge locations?

Ans. An edge location is defined as the place where the content is used to be cached. If a user finds access to some content, the given content will be searched in the edge location. If it is unavailable, the content will be accessible from the origin location, and a copy will be stored.

Q56. What are NAT gateways?

Ans. NAT(Network Address Translation) enables instances in a private subnet that helps connect to the Internet but prevents the Internet from starting a connection with those instances.

Q57. Name the database types in RDS.

Ans. The following are the types of databases in RDS:

• MYSQL server
• Postgresql
• SQL Server
• Aurora
• Oracle
• MariaDB

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Q58. What are EBS Volumes?

Ans. Elastic Block Store(EBS) is a block-level storage device wherein each block acts as a separate hard drive. These volumes are used with EC2 instances, and each EBS volume can be attached to only one EC2 instance.

Q59. Name the types of backups in the RDS database.

Ans. The following are two types of backups in the RDS database:

• Automated backups
• Manual backups 

Q60. Mention the benefits of auto-scaling.

Ans. Following are some of the benefits of auto-scaling:

• Better availability
• Enhanced fault tolerance
• Better cost management

Q61. How can Amazon SQS be used?

Ans. Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) is a message-passing mechanism used to make a connection between different connectors that are connected with each other. It is also used as an interlink between multiple components of Amazon.

Q62. Name some examples of the DB engine that is used in AWS RDS.

Ans. Below are a few examples of DB engine that is used in AWS RDS:

• MS-SQL DB
• MYSQL DB
• Maria DB
• Oracle DB
• Postgre DB

Q63. Is it possible to minimize an EBS volume?

Ans. No, minimising volume is impossible; we can only increase it.

Q64. Is there any possible way to restore the deleted S3 bucket?

Ans. We can only restore it when versioning is enabled.

Q65. Name the types of AMI provided by AWS.

Ans. The following are two types of AMI provided by AWS:

• Instance Store backed
• EBS Backed

Q66. What is auto-scaling?

Ans. Auto-scaling is a feature of AWS that allows you to configure and automatically provision and spin-up new instances without your intervention.

Q67. What is SimpleDB?

Ans. SimpleDB is a structured data store that supports indexing and data queries to both EC2 and S3.

Q68. What is an AMI? 

Ans. AMI (Amazon Machine Image) is a snapshot of the root filesystem.

Q69. What is the type of architecture where half of the workload is on the public load while at the same time half of it is on the local storage?

Ans. Hybrid cloud architecture.

Q70. Can I vertically scale an Amazon instance? How do you do it?

Ans. Yes. Spinup a new larger instance than the one you are running, then pause that instance to detach the root EBS volume from this server and discard. After that, stop the live instance and detach its root volume. Note the unique device ID, attach that root volume to the new server and start again. This way, you will have scaled vertically.

Q71. How can you send a request to Amazon S3?

Ans. You can send requests using the REST API or the AWS SDK wrapper libraries that wrap the underlying Amazon S3 REST API.

Q72. How many buckets can be created in AWS by default?

Ans. By default, 100 buckets can be created in AWS.

Q73. Should encryption be used for S3?

Ans. Encryption should be considered for sensitive data as S3 is a proprietary technology.

Q74. What are the various AMI design options?

Ans. Fully Baked AMI, JeOS (just enough operating system) AMI, and Hybrid AMI.

Q75. What is SnowBall?

Ans. Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport application that enables you to transfer terabytes of data inside and outside of the AWS environment.

Q76. Which query functionality is supported by DynamoDB?

Ans. DynamoDB supports GET/PUT operations. It uses a user-defined primary key and offers flexible querying using global and local secondary indexes.

Q77. What are the different storage classes in Amazon S3?

Ans. Amazon S3 has the following four storage classes with different levels of availability, durability and performance requirements.
1. Amazon S3 Standard
2. Amazon S3 Standard Infrequent Access(IA)
3. Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access
4. Amazon Glacier

Q78. Define Amazon S3 Glacier?

Ans. Amazon S3 Glacier is a web service for online file storage, including data archiving and backup. It is meant for long-term data storage, infrequently accessed with acceptable latency times of 3-5 hours. Its underlying technology is unknown.

Must Read – How Amazon Is Using the Internet of Things? – Smart Speakers, AWS IoT and More

Q79. Define Amazon Elastic File System.

Ans. Amazon Elastic File System is a cloud storage service offered by AWS to provide elastic, scalable, and encrypted file storage. It can grow or shrink based on adding and removing Amazon EFS.

Q80. Define logging in CloudFront.

Ans. CloudFront allows users the ability to either enable or disable logging. These logs contain information including date, time, edge location and used protocols. If logging is enabled, these logs are stored on Amazon S3 buckets, which can be analyzed. Logs can also be analyzed using third-party tools such as Cloudlytics, Qloudstat, AWStats, and S3Stat.

Q81. What is CloudWatch?

Ans. Amazon CloudWatch is a metrics repository. It allows you to monitor the complete stack, including applications, infrastructure, and services. You can also use alarms, logs, and events data to take automated actions and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).

For more information on Amazon cloudwatch, you can explore: Introduction to Amazon CloudWatch

Q82. What are Key-Pairs in AWS?

Ans. A key pair consists of a public key and a private key and is the secure login information for your virtual machines. Amazon EC2 stores the public key, and you can have the private key.

Q83. How many Subnets can you have per VPC?

Ans. There are 200 Subnets per VPC.

These are some of the popular AWS interview questions. If you are someone who has recently started your career in cloud computing, you can always get certified in one of the technical courses like AWS Architect to get the requisite knowledge and skills.

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