Many tech companies rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for their infrastructure requirements. AWS is a collection of cloud computing services that make up an on-demand compute environment, which includes storage and other features. It’s no surprise then that AWS interview questions come up in interviews with tech companies looking to hire skilled engineers who can keep their business running smoothly.

In this definitive list, we provide you the most common AWS interview questions so you can ask an AWS engineer and qualify them.

AWS Interview Questions – Most Commonly Ask

Here are the most commonly asked AWS interview questions, along with some additional information to help guide you through the interview process with a potential AWS cloud engineer.

What does AWS stand for? What do they offer?

Amazon Web Services stands for “a collection of products that together provide on-demand IT infrastructure.” These services include computing power, storage, databases, analytics tools among others – all managed over the internet by Amazon using their own hardware or virtual servers. All these features are offered at different price points and configurations. For example: if your -company is looking for a scalable database service, then you can use Amazon’s AWS RDS (Relational Database Service).

In short: AWS offers products that are meant to make IT infrastructure as simple and cost-effective as possible. You don’t have to worry about the underlying hardware or software operations – just pay them their fee and they’ll take care of everything!

1. What does a cloud engineer do?

The engineer builds, configures, and maintains the AWS cloud.

2. What are some common tools a cloud engineer uses?

They’ll use many of Amazon’s own services like SNS notifications, SQS queues, DynamoDB database, and Simple Storage Service (SST). They may also need to install additional software on their computer such as Git or Subversion for coding purposes.

3. How many AWS certifications are there? Which one do you have?

There are four types of AWS certifications: SysOps Administrator, Developer Associate, Web Services Associate, and Business Professional.

4. What is a typical day like for an AWS cloud engineer?

A typical workday starts by reading through the company’s systems and checking to see if any problems need fixing or issues that require attention come up, then they would investigate the issue and either resolve it themselves – troubleshooting as necessary – or inform their manager about what needs to be done.

5. What Amazon products have you used?

Some popular products include Elastic Compute Cloud (ECC), Simple Storage Service (SST), DynamoDB database, Relational Database Server (RDS), and Amazon Machine Images (AMI). They may also be familiar with other services such as Alexa or Prime Video. This is not an exhaustive list but will give you a good idea of the engineer’s experience level.

The cloud consists entirely of servers located in different geographic regions to ensure that websites remain up even if there is a failure in one region or another. Each server has its own IP address so data can flow between them.

6. In brief, what is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a suite of cloud computing services that make up an on-demand compute environment, which includes storage and other features. AWS offers reliable access to scalable, low-cost infrastructure with pay-as-you-go pricing in both time and money—providing developers and startups access to resources without requiring them to invest large sums upfront. It’s no surprise then that many tech companies rely heavily on this service for their infrastructure requirements.

7. Can you explain the 3 basic types of Cloud Services?

The 3 core cloud service types are computing, storage, and network.

1. Computing services include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
2. Storage includes Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S) and Amazon Elastic Block Store, or EBS.
3. Networking options are AWS Direct Connect, Virtual Private Cloud, and AWS Virtual Private Gateways.

8. What are the different types of Cloud Services?

Cloud services come in a number of different flavors, including:

• Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Software as a service (Saas)
• Data as a Service (DaaS)

9. What is an AWS Account?

Before you can use any of these types of service on AWS, you need to sign up for a free account with them first. This gives you access to all the other features that come with it like IAM administration tools so you’re ready to do anything from creating your own VPCs to managing permissions between accounts that share resources together in one environment.”

10. What is the difference between private and public clouds?

A private cloud is typically installed in a single data center whereas a public cloud can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. Private clouds are more expensive to maintain but offer more control over security settings. With AWS being both public and private, your organization may have the best of both worlds: access to services outside of your firewall while still maintaining strict security measures within it.

11. What does DDoS stand for?

A DistributedDenialofService attack is when one or more systems on a computer network are unintentionally flooded with information from multiple sources. This type of flood can cause a denial of service for the system that it targets, which disrupts connectivity to other servers/systems.

12. What are the key components of AWS? Please explain a couple.

Here are some of the AWS components and what they do.

AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)

S3 is a storage service that stores objects (files) in buckets. Buckets are containers that hold all of the files or some subset of them. Files can be anything: pictures, videos, blog posts, and more.

AWS Elastic Compute Cloud

ECS is a web service for running applications on Amazon’s compute infrastructure as part of their cloud services from within an existing application rather than by starting up a bunch of individual servers.

Elastic Block Store

EBS is block storage that can be attached to instances in the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud. It provides persistent storage and, unlike Amazon S-ATA hard drives, it’s not prone to accidental deletion or data loss due to hardware failure.

CloudWatch

CloudWatch is a service which used to monitor all of AWS resources and provides metrics and alerts for the health of your AWS environment.

Identity Access Management (IAM)

The IAM service used to manage users and their level of access to AWS resources. It sets the users, permissions, and roles.

Simple Email Service

SES is a low-cost email deliverability service that provides reliable transactional and marketing emails.

Route53

Route53 is a domain name system (DNS) and web traffic routing service. It provides a reliable and cost-effective way to route end users.

In-Depth Technical Questions

13. What are AWS security best practices?

Keep your account information safe by changing passwords frequently and using strong passwords with numbers, symbols, or both. The stronger you make your password the longer it will take someone else access to your account if they get hold of them; however, this makes logging in more difficult too! Use multi-factor authentication (for example Google Authenticator) when possible so that even if someone does get into one account they can’t access other accounts.

Keep your AWS keys safe! If you lose them, Amazon won’t be able to help and it could cost a lot of money or time to recover them if someone doesn’t have malicious intent. You should only give the AWS key out when necessary for development purposes and delete it as soon as possible afterward so that third parties don’t get hold of your account information; this is also useful in case you need to replace the lost key. Remember not to store any sensitive data on ECs such: passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, bank account numbers, etc., because anyone with physical access will be able to read what’s there.

14. What are some of the security features in AWS?

Some of them are IAM roles with access policies, sign up for multi-factor authentication at any time during the setup process, configure MFA for root account credentials so each time they’re used it will require an additional step like entering code

15. What is an IAM Policy?

A set of permissions that can be assigned to a user or group for specific AWS resources in the account, such as Amazon S-ATA hard drives and CloudWatch Monitoring.

16. What is JAMF?

JAMF stands for “Just a Minute For” and it’s enterprise software that provides the ability to manage Apple products. It includes all of their productivity tools, such as OS X Server, Mobile Device Management (MDM), and File Sharing Services.

17. What is a Simple Notification Service do?

SNS helps you to build targeted, on-demand messaging applications by sending notifications from your server or web application (AWS Lambda) directly to mobile devices; Amazon Echo/Alexa enabled products; Amazon Connect bridges and other AWS services such as SQs, SQs Message Queues, etc.

18. What are Key-pairs?

A key-pair is a set of two keys, one public and the other private. The public key can be shared with others while the private one should not be revealed to any person as it would allow them access to all your resources in AWS

19. What are EC-CUBE’s benefits?

EC-CUBE provides low-cost elastic block storage for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC). It has high performance due to its use of solid-state drive devices. It also offers features such as snapshot and replication.

20. What is an SNS topic?

An SNS Topic routes messages to subscribers based on how they have been subscribed or defined by topics – which you define when you create a new message subscription You could subscribe someone to a particular topic, and all messages with the same topic would go to that individual

How do you create an SNS Subscription Rule? Just select “New” from the menu in the top right-hand corner of any screen on which you are viewing or editing a subscription rule. Fill out as desired: topics or tags; destination email addresses; send frequency options; etc. Once created, these rules will be available when adding subscribers through either IAM policies or console subscription screens.

How do you create an SNS Topic? Select “New” from the menu in the top right-hand corner of any screen on which you are viewing or editing a topic. Fill out as desired: name; slug (optional); description. Once created, these topics will be available when adding subscribers through either IAM policies or console subscriptions screens

21. What is AWS CloudTrail?

AWS provides a service called Amazon CloudWatch Logs that manages log files for your account and delivers them to various destinations including Amazon Simple Storage Service (SSA) buckets, Elasticsearch clusters, Kibana instances running on our cloud infrastructure, and third party services like Splunk. This same service also monitors the activity across all accounts with similar monitoring needs based on your AWS CloudTrail configuration.

22. How many Regions exist within AWS?

There are twelve geographic regions: three in North America (US West Coast, US East Coast, Canada), two in Asia Pacific (Japan and Singapore), four across Europe (Netherlands so far), and three in South America (Brazil). Each region has multiple availability zones to provide better data protection and higher levels of performance.

23. What is Amazon Elasticsearch?

Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch clusters in the AWS Cloud. It’s built on Amazon’s own technology stack for computing, storage, and analytics services with features like autoscaling and multi-AZ deployment so you can focus on application development instead of operations tasks.

24. What is Kinesis?

Kinesis Streams are real-time streams of data designed to process enormous amounts of information from many different sources simultaneously because they’re able to handle an unlimited number of records per second. The service manages all aspects of the stream—sharding (splitting) the work across multiple shards or servers based on input size; replication; the logic apps that define how data is transformed from raw to real-time; and, finally, delivery.

25. What does AWS Lambda do?

AWS Lambda allows developers who are building applications with event-driven architectures (e.g., real-time web apps) a way of offloading the coding required for handling events so they concentrate on application development instead of having two sets of code: one set which handles requests and another set which response to them by sending back responses asynchronously when something happens elsewhere.

26. What are the pricing models for AWS EC2 instances?

There are four pricing models for EC2 instance types: On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Spot, and Shared Capacity Reservation.

27. What’s the AWS On-Demand instance?

The AWS On-Demand instance is a usage-based pricing model where the underlying compute capacity of an EC12 instance (e.g., CPU, memory, and storage) is billed hourly according to how much of that capacity you use in increments of one hour.

28. What’s the AWS Reserved instance?

The AWS Reserved Instances pricing model enables you to purchase up front, a specific number of EC12 instances for one or three years. With this option, your hourly usage is billed at the discounted rates that were calculated when the reservation was made so long as those reserved instances are still available in AWS’s inventory.

29. What’s the AWS Spot instance?

The Spot instance is a usage-based pricing model where the underlying compute capacity of an EC12 instance (e.g., CPU, memory, and storage) is billed hourly according to how much of that capacity you use in increments of one hour.

30. What are the AWS Dedicated Hosts?

Amazon Dedicated Hosts is a web hosting service that offers dedicated EC12 instance capacity and bandwidth with full root access on demand.

31. What’s the difference between Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon SimpleDB?

Amazon RDS provides database management capabilities for relational databases such as MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL while Amazon SimpleDB stores data items as key/value pairs that can be accessed without any predefined schema constraints but with limited query capability on their structure.

32. What is the maximum size of an S3 bucket?

The maximum size of an SSE bucket is 100 TB.

33. Is there a way to upload a file that is greater than 100 megabytes in Amazon S3?

Yes, it is possible by using multipart upload utility from AWS CLI.

34. What are the different storage classes in S3?

The different storage classes in SSE are Standard, Archive, and One Zone-Infrequent Access.

35. How can you secure access to your S3 bucket?

The Amazon S3 bucket can be secured in two ways by either creating Access Control List (ACL) or Bucket Policies.

36. What are some of the elements of Bucket Policy?

Some of the Bucket Policies are Sid, Effect, Principal, Action, and Resource.

37. What is the difference between SES and AWS Accounts?

The Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) provides a cost-effective way to send professional-looking emails from your own domain. If you have an AWS Account that needs emails being sent then it can be done with this service. It only requires one API call as opposed to multiple calls for each email message when using other methods of sending emails like SMTP or SendGrid.

38. What is Amazon SimpleDB?

Amazon SimpleDB is designed to store data items as key/value pairs that can be accessed without any predefined schema constraints but with limited query capability on their structure.

39. What are the Amazon EBS Volumes?

The Amazon Elastic Block Store is a service that provides a persistent block storage volume that can be attached to one or more EC instances. Amazon EBS volumes are persistent, meaning that they survive the termination of an EC instance.

40. What is Cross-Region Replication?

Cross Region Replication is a service available in AWS that replicates Amazon EC instances across regions so that customers can run applications in a data center close to their end users.

41. What is CloudFront in AWS?

Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that speeds up the distribution of Amazon.com content on the internet.

42. Why should customers use AWS Lightsail?

AWS LightSail offers an easy-to-use website hosting platform with automated backups, snapshots, and one-click installs for WordPress and Joomla along with MongoDB databases and PHP version management without reliance on third-party providers such as cPanel or Plesk.

43. What is Auto Scaling? And, what are its’ benefits?

Auto Scaling automatically creates or terminates Amazon EC instances in response to traffic volume so that customers never have to worry about whether they will be able to handle sudden surges of traffic.

44. What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides a quick and easy way for developers to deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud without worrying about all of the manual details of operating their own servers. With just one click, you can upload your application’s codebase and let us take care of everything required to run it – including capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, rolling updates with zero downtime deployments (using blue/green deployment), security audits, monitoring & performance optimization plus much more!

45. How many Elastic IPs can you create?

There are 5 elastic IP addresses that you can create per AWS account.

46. What is AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)?

AWS IAM provides a way to manage the identity of AWS accounts so that users can access only what they’re authorized for with the least privilege.

47. Can an AMI be shared?

Yes. You can share your AMIs with other AWS accounts or outside of AWS to allow anyone you want to use the image in their account.

48. What are the different types of instances?

AWS provides a variety of ECs for different use cases, with the most popular ones being t-series and c-series.

49. What is an AWS CodeCommit repository?

A code repository where you can store your source code in Git format on Amazon’s scalable infrastructure to provide version control & collaboration tools.

50. What is Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)?

AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is an isolated area of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud where users can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define.

51. What is VPC peering connection?

VPC peering connections allow two VPCs to exchange traffic without requiring a VPN connection.

52. Explain AWS Certificate Manager?

AWS Certificate Manager is an administration that allows you to easily arrange, supervise and send open SSL/TLS certificates for your AWS applications and services.

53. What are the Types of Routing Policies in Route53?

The following are the types of routing policies in Route53:

1. Simple routing: Uses a simple routing table to determine the best way for traffic to reach an application.
2. Weighted routing: Assigns weights, called metrics, based on the relative costs of each potential route and then determines which is cheapest or least expensive.
3. Geolocation routing: Automatically routes requests from end-users in different regions around the world using DNS records with Amazon Route 53 geolocation data maps.
4. Multivalue answer: Uses a routing table with multiple answers to provide proper service in the event of an outage.
5. Latency routing: Assigns weights, called latency metrics, based on the relative costs of each potential route and then uses those cost-based values to determine which is cheapest or least expensive.
6. Connection failover: Provides backup connections if other connection attempts are unsuccessful, with configurable retry policies that provide up to six automatic connection attempts over 60 minutes before terminating one route and switching over to another one in case there’s an outage.

54. Which one of the following is a type of structured data store for AWS that supports querying to both EC2 and S3?

• DynamoDB
• MySQL
• Aurora
• SimpleDB (answer)

55. Which Amazon service would an e-commerce site use to collect and process data from customers in near real-time?

• DynamoDB (answer)
• MySQL
• Aurora
• SimpleDB

Are AWS interviews hard?

AWS interviews are not always the same for every job position, but in general expect telephone interviews, coding tests, and onsite interviews. AWS technical interview questions can be very difficult because they ask specific Amazon-related questions with many different solutions that you need to know about.

• AWS interview questions are often designed to detect how well a candidate understands the fundamentals of cloud computing and Amazon Web Services.
• The best way to prepare for an AWS interview is with hands-on experience in the field, as this will make you more confident when answering any related question. There’s no substitute for real-world knowledge!

How To Prepare For AWS Interview

There are many ways to get yourself ready for the Amazon AWS interview. Here are some of the most effective ways for getting ready for the interview:

• Take the AWS Fundamentals Course. AWS Fundamentals Course is designed to teach you the core concepts you need to work effectively within AWS. The AWS Fundamentals Course is a set of five video lessons designed to teach you the basics of how AWS works. The course is not focused on any one service and includes segments about cost, integrations with more traditional infrastructure-based solutions, security policies, implementation methods, and key concepts.
• Scan through AWS Documentation where you can read up on user guides, developer guides, API references, tutorials, and more.
• AWS Knowledge Center contains – Expand your knowledge of the cloud with AWS technical content authored by AWS and the AWS community, including technical whitepapers, technical guides, reference material, and reference architecture diagrams.
• Amazon AWS FAQs – Browse through hundreds of FAQs to find answers to commonly raised questions. AWS has done an excellent job dividing up their product categories: Compute, Storage, Database, Migration, Networking, Developer Tools, Management Tools, Media Services, and AI.
• Visit the AWS News Blog for details of all the major announcements on events, products, and more.
• AWS Hands-on Tutorials – Get started with step-by-step tutorials to launch your first application,
• One final option is to take online courses such as Udemy, Coursera, and other similar platforms.

These are just some of the most common AWS interview questions that you may ask the candidate. Please note that there are many more questions we have not covered that are also very common.

Based on what level of experience you are looking for in an AWS candidate, the AWS interview question that you may be asked will differ. For example:

• If a candidate has less than a year of experience in cloud computing or as an AWS user, you may be asked questions about EC (Elastic Compute) instances and what they do for instance compute power.
• A candidate with more than five years’ worth of experience on Amazon Web Services services would most likely be asked to walk through a data migration from one service to another such as migrating from SimpleDB over to DynamoDB.

So, do your research before the interview and prepare for all AWS interview questions in advance!