The Top 25 Amazon Web Services Interview Questions You Need to Know in 2023

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become the undisputed leader in cloud computing As more companies adopt AWS for its scalability, cost-effectiveness, and pace of innovation, proficiency in AWS is becoming highly sought after This means being ready to answer common AWS interview questions is key for getting hired.

In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the 25 most important AWS interview questions and sample answers to help you prepare. Whether you’re a beginner looking to break into cloud computing or an experienced IT professional aiming for your next big role, mastering these questions will boost your confidence for acing any AWS job interview.

What is AWS and why is it so popular?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud platform that provides over 200 services to enable innovators and builders to quickly and easily build virtually anything, from mobile apps to enterprise applications. AWS allows companies to avoid investing in expensive on-site servers and hardware. Instead, they can access AWS’s vast network of data centers on-demand to deploy the resources they need.

Some key reasons for AWS’s popularity are:

• Flexibility and scalability AWS makes it easy to scale up or down based on your needs No more guessing capacity or overpaying for unused resources

• Cost savings: The pay-as-you-go model means you only pay for what you use. This eliminates large upfront investments and helps optimize spending.

• Global reach AWS data centers around the world provide low latency access for customers globally.

• Broad and deep services: AWS offers the most comprehensive portfolio of cloud application services to enable virtually any workload.

• Innovation and pace of releases: AWS relentlessly innovates and releases new services and features at an unmatched pace. This puts new capabilities in customers’ hands faster.

Basic AWS Interview Questions

Here are some common basic questions to expect:

Q1. What is the difference between on-premise, hybrid, and cloud computing?

• On-premise: Resources like servers and storage are hosted at a company’s physical location. All hardware must be purchased and maintained in-house.

• Hybrid: Combines on-premise infrastructure with public cloud. Sensitive assets remain on-premise while other resources are provisioned in the cloud.

• Cloud Computing: Resources are hosted and managed by a cloud provider like AWS. Companies access these resources flexibly over the internet.

Q2. What are the benefits of cloud computing over on-premise deployments?

• No need to purchase and maintain physical infrastructure.
• Flexible, pay-as-you-go model saves money.
• Easy and fast to scale resources up or down based on demand.
• Access to most up-to-date technology since hardware maintained by provider.
• Global reach and faster deployment of resources.

Q3. What are the different cloud computing models?

The 3 main models of cloud computing are:

• IaaS: Provides building blocks for cloud IT like compute, storage, and networking. AWS EC2 is an example.

• PaaS: Managed platform for developing, deploying, and managing cloud applications without maintaining infrastructure. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an example.

• SaaS: Completed cloud-based application that end users can access over the internet. Examples are email services like Gmail or collaboration tools like Slack.

Q4. What are some key benefits of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?

• No need to invest in physical infrastructure and you only pay for what you use.
• Infrastructure is managed by the provider enabling focus on the applications.
• Flexible and scalable resources that can be quickly provisioned.
• Access to latest hardware and data center technology managed by the provider.

Q5. What is Amazon EC2 and what are its use cases?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides scalable compute capacity using virtual servers called instances. It allows running applications in the AWS cloud flexibly. Use cases include:

• Hosting websites and web applications
• Running applications and workloads in the cloud
• Achieving rapid scaling and high availability for apps
• Developing, testing and deploying software faster
• Reducing time to market for new initiatives

Intermediate AWS Interview Questions

Let’s look at some more advanced questions:

Q6. Explain these core AWS services:

• Amazon S3: Object storage service used for securely storing and retrieving any amount of data. Used for data lakes, backups, archives, hybrid cloud storage.

• Amazon VPC: Lets you provision logically isolated section of AWS cloud to launch resources in a virtual network. Gives more control like firewalls, IP addresses.

• AWS Lambda: Serverless compute that runs code without managing servers. Event-driven, scales automatically, pay per execution. Used for SRE, processing data streams, etc.

• Amazon CloudFront: Content delivery network (CDN) for distributing content to users globally. Improves performance and optimizes delivery of websites and applications.

Q7. What is IAM in AWS and why is it important?

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) allows managing access to AWS services and resources securely. With IAM you can:

• Control who can access which services and resources
• Assign users individual security credentials
• Grant only the minimum permissions needed to perform tasks
• Monitor activity to detect potential security issues

This enhances security and compliance for workloads on AWS.

Q8. How do you achieve high availability in AWS?

High availability in AWS can be achieved by:

• Deploying resources across multiple Availability Zones to avoid a single point of failure.
• Using auto-scaling and load balancing to distribute traffic and scale resources automatically.
• Implementing automatic monitoring and failover between AZs or regions in case of downtime.
• Leveraging AWS’s underlying infrastructure which is designed for high availability.
• Following AWS well-architected framework best practices.

Q9. What are some AWS storage options besides S3? When would you use them?

• EBS: Provides block storage volumes to attach to EC2 instances for applications needing low latency access like databases.

• EFS: Managed file storage that can be accessed via NFS by multiple EC2 instances simultaneously. Used for lifting and shifting existing workloads.

• Glacier: Archive storage for long term backups and digital preservation at very low costs, but requires retrieval time.

• Storage Gateway: Seamlessly enables hybrid storage between on-premise environments and AWS cloud storage.

Advanced AWS Interview Questions

Now let’s dive deeper into some more challenging questions:

Q10. How does AWS Lambda work and what are some use cases?

AWS Lambda provides serverless computing that runs code in response to events and automatically manages underlying resources. Use cases include:

• Automating SRE tasks like monitoring, logs analysis, optimizations
• Processing data streams and IoT data
• Running backend processes in response to events like image uploads or database changes
• Building microservices architectures

Key benefits are no server management, flexible scalability, and pay per execution pricing.

Q11. Explain these AWS services:

• Amazon API Gateway: Fully managed service for creating, documenting, maintaining and securing APIs at scale. Useful for building RESTful APIs that connect backend services and applications.

• AWS CloudFormation: Provides a templating language for modeling and provisioning cloud infrastructure in a safe, repeatable manner. Allows infrastructure to be described and provisioned as code.

• Amazon Kinesis: Provides capability to capture, process and analyze real-time data streams at massive scale and low latency. Used for rapid data collection and processing from thousands of sources.

Q12. How does AWS support big data and analytics workloads?

AWS provides a broad platform for big data analytics including:

• S3 and Glacier for affordable storage at scale.
• Kinesis and Kafka for ingesting and processing data streams.
• EMR to run big data frameworks like Hadoop, Spark, and Presto on elastic clusters.
• Redshift for cloud data warehousing with petabyte-scale data volumes.
• Quicksight for business intelligence and dashboarding.

This enables securely storing, processing, and analyzing any volume, velocity, and variety of data.

Q13. What are some benefits of infrastructure as code on AWS?

Infrastructure as code allows managing and provisioning AWS resources through code instead of manual processes. Benefits include:

• Consistency: Define resources and configurations as code to get consistent, repeatable environments.

• Efficiency: Automate provisioning processes instead of manual setup.

• Version Control: Code can be tracked, reviewed, and reverted like any other software artifact.

• Documentation: Code serves as documentation of your infrastructure versus tribal knowledge.

• Validation: Codified infrastructure can be validated through testing frameworks.

Q14. How does AWS integrate with on-premise environments?

AWS provides multiple capabilities for hybrid cloud and integrating with on-premise:

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