Top AWS Interview Questions with Answers [2024 Updated]

The time has come for you to pursue a career in the cloud computing sector. Obtaining training and certification in a specific cloud computing platform, such as AWS, may open up many amazing employment opportunities as cloud computing platforms like these take the current corporate landscape by storm.

You must schedule some AWS interviews, however, and ace them if you want to launch an AWS career. Here are some AWS interview questions and responses to aid you in the interview process. This page addresses a variety of AWS-related queries, from basic to advanced, as well as scenario-based ones.

Basic AWS Interview Questions

What is EC2?

EC2 is a cloud-based virtual machine over which you have OS-level management. This cloud server can be utilized anytime you need it when you require to put your own servers in the cloud in a manner similar to how your on-premises servers are, and when you require complete control over the equipment selection and software upgrades for the device.

What is Auto-scaling?

When there is a need, you may provision and start additional instances using the auto-scaling capability. You may automatically raise or lower resource capacity in response to demand.

What is SnowBall?

With the help of the little program SnowBall, you can move terabytes of data both within and outside the AWS environment.

What is an elastic transcoder?

AWS Service Tool Elastic Transcoder assists you in modifying a video’s format and resolution to accommodate a variety of devices, including tablet computers, cellphones, and desktops with varied specifications.

What is geo-targeting in CloudFront?

Businesses may display customized information to their audience depending on their geographical area using the geo-targeting idea without modifying the URL. This makes it easier for you to generate content that is specifically tailored to the demands of a local audience.

What does VPC mean to you?

Virtual Private Cloud is referred to as VPC. You may personalize your networking setup with it. A logical barrier separates a virtual private cloud (VPC) network from other cloud networks. It enables you to have your own subnet, security group, and IP address range.

What are T2 instances?

T2 Instances are created with the capacity to burst to higher performance levels when needed by the workload and modest baseline performance.

What are Key-Pairs in AWS?

Secure login credentials for your virtual servers are key-pairs. You may utilize Key-Pairs, which include a Public Key and a Private Key, to access the installations.

Advanced AWS Interview Questions

How may a request be sent to Amazon S3?

As a REST service, Amazon S3 allows you to submit requests using either the REST API directly or the AWS SDK wrapper libraries.

What is the relation between the Availability Zone and Region?

A physical area where an Amazon system is situated is known as an AWS Availability Zone. An AWS Region, on the other hand, is a collection of Availability Zones or Data Centers.

Because you may locate your VMs in several data centers inside an AWS Region, this configuration increases the availability of your services. Client requests are still fulfilled by the other data centers in a Region even if one of them is a failure. Because of this structure, your service will continue to function even if a Data Center is unavailable.

What are the various EC2 instance kinds depending on their prices?

Based on the pricing, there are three different EC2 instance types:

• On-Demand Instance – These instances are set up as and when they are required. You may go ahead and start a new on-demand EC2 instance anytime you feel the urge to do so. Short-term use is affordable, but long-term use is not.
• Spot Instance – The bidding approach may be used to purchase these kinds of instances. When compared to On-Demand Instances, they are less expensive.

AWS allows you to set up instances that you can hold for up to a year. These kinds of situations are particularly helpful when you are aware in advance that you will want one for a considerable amount of time. You may establish a reserved instance in these circumstances and significantly reduce your expenditures.

What to do when you halt and terminate an EC2 instance?

Shutting down an EC2 instance is the same as you would do with your own computer. The instance may be restarted as required and no associated volumes will be deleted as a result.

On the other hand, ending a running instance is the same as removing it. The instance cannot be restarted if necessary in the future since all the volumes associated with it are erased.

What consistency models for contemporary DBs does AWS offer?

• Eventual Consistency – Data will ultimately be consistent, but it could not happen right away, according to the concept of eventual consistency. The client requests will be fulfilled more quickly as a result, although some of the first read requests could end up reading outdated material. It is preferable to have this kind of consistency in systems when real-time data is not required. For instance, it is fine if you don’t immediately see new tweets on Twitter or recent updates on Facebook.
• Strong Consistency – It offers instant consistency, ensuring that the data is the same across all DB Servers. Accordingly. It can take some time for this model to make the data consistent and then resume serving requests. However, this architecture ensures that all answers will always include data that is consistent.

What benefits does AWS IAM offer?

An administrator may provide granular-level access to various users and groups using AWS IAM. Different user groups and users may need varying degrees of access to various produced resources. You may provide users with certain access levels by creating roles and assigning them to them using IAM. Federated Access, as it is often called, enables you to provide users and programs access to the resources without first establishing IAM Roles.

What is a Security Group?

You may choose whether or not to make an AWS instance available over a public network when you build it. Additionally, you may choose that instance to only be reachable from certain networks.

A sort of rule-based virtual firewall that you may use to restrict access to your instances is called a security group. You may define rules that specify which protocols, networks, or port numbers you wish to allow access to or ban access from.

What are On-Demand Instances and Spot Instances?

Some blocks of processing power and computing capability remain underutilized when AWS launches EC2 instances. As Spot Instances, AWS makes these blocks available. Spot Instances are active anytime there is capacity. These are good choices if you can be flexible with the timing and interruption of your applications.

On-Demand Instances, however, may be built as and when they are required. Such cases have fixed pricing. Such instances won’t be terminated until you tell them to, so they’ll always remain accessible.

What is Connection Draining?

AWS offers a function called “Connection Draining” that lets your servers, which are either being upgraded or withdrawn, continue handling existing requests.

If connection draining is activated, the balancer will transmit no additional requests to an outbound instance for a certain amount of time, allowing it to finish the present requests. A departing instance will instantly terminate without connection draining, and all outstanding queries on that instance will fail.

What is a Stateful and a Stateless Firewall?

A stateful firewall keeps the set of rules in the current state. You must only set rules for incoming traffic. The outgoing traffic is immediately allowed to flow according to the established incoming criteria.

A Stateless Firewall, on the other hand, requires that you explicitly set rules for both incoming and outgoing traffic. A Stateless Firewall will not let outgoing traffic to Port 80 when you permit incoming traffic from Port 80, but a Stateful Firewall can.

What is Power User Access in AWS?

The owner of the AWS Resources will be comparable to an Administrator User. He may provide access to other users for the AWS Resources as well as add, remove, change, or inspect the resources.

Administrator access is provided with Power User access, but without the capability to manage users and privileges. In other words, a person who has Power User Access may create, remove, change, or view the materials but cannot allow other users access.

Final Words

Scalable, dependable, highly secure, and affordable computing and storage options are provided by Amazon web services. Data management, computation, connectivity, storage, management, visualizations, and cybersecurity are the core uses of AWS. We have made an effort to address the majority of the AWS interview questions, which will help you respond to questions about AWS in the interview in a way that is satisfactory.

On this website, we offer thousands of free AWS cloud practitioner practice test to help you thoroughly prepare for this exam!