Todays modern world is witnessing a significant change in how businesses and organizations work. Everything is getting digitized, and the introduction of cloud and cloud computing platforms have been a major driving force behind this growth. Today, most businesses are using or are planning to use cloud computing for many of their operations, which consequently has led to a massive surge in the need for cloud professionals.
If you are interested in a career in the cloud industry, your chance has arrived. With cloud computing platforms like AWS taking the present business scenarios by storm, getting trained and certified in that particular platform can provide you with great career prospects.
But in order to get your AWS career started, you need to set up some AWS interviews and ace them. In the spirit of doing that, here are some AWS interview questions and answers that will help you with the interview process. There are a number of different AWS-related questions covered in this article, ranging from basic to advanced, and scenario-based questions as well.
The three basic types of cloud services are:
Here are some of the AWS products that are built based on the three cloud service types:
Computing - These include EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda, Auto-Scaling, and Lightsat.
Storage - These include S3, Glacier, Elastic Block Storage, Elastic File System.
Networking - These include VPC, Amazon CloudFront, Route53
AWS regions are separate geographical areas, like the US-West 1 (North California) and Asia South (Mumbai). On the other hand, availability zones are the areas that are present inside the regions. These are generally isolated zones that can replicate themselves whenever required.
Auto-scaling is a function that allows you to provision and launch new instances whenever there is a demand. It allows you to automatically increase or decrease resource capacity in relation to the demand.
Geo-Targeting is a concept where businesses can show personalized content to their audience based on their geographic location without changing the URL. This helps you create customized content for the audience of a specific geographical area, keeping their needs in the forefront.
Here are the steps involved in a CloudFormation solution:
You can upgrade or downgrade a system with near-zero downtime using the following steps of migration:
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You can know that you are paying the correct amount for the resources that you are using by employing the following resources:
The that can help you log into the AWS resources are:
The essential services that you can use are Amazon CloudWatch Logs, store them in Amazon S3, and then use Amazon Elastic Search to visualize them. You can use Amazon Kinesis Firehose to move the data from Amazon S3 to Amazon ElasticSearch.
Most of the AWS services have their logging options. Also, some of them have an account level logging, like in AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and others. Lets take a look at two services in specific:
This is a service that provides a history of the AWS API calls for every account. It lets you perform security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing of your AWS environment as well. The best part about this service is that it enables you to configure it to send notifications via AWS SNS when new logs are delivered.
This helps you understand the configuration changes that happen in your environment. This service provides an AWS inventory that includes configuration history, configuration change notification, and relationships between AWS resources. It can also be configured to send information via AWS SNS when new logs are delivered.
DDoS is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator accesses a website and creates multiple sessions so that the other legitimate users cannot access the service. The native tools that can help you deny the DDoS attacks on your AWS services are:
Not all Amazon AWS services are available in all regions. When Amazon initially launches a new service, it doesnt get immediately published in all the regions. They start small and then slowly expand to other regions. So, if you dont see a specific service in your region, chances are the service hasnt been published in your region yet. However, if you want to get the service that is not available, you can switch to the nearest region that provides the services.
Amazon CloudWatch helps you to monitor the application status of various AWS services and custom events. It helps you to monitor:
The three major types of virtualization in AWS are:
AWS services that are not region-specific are:
While both NAT Gateways and NAT Instances serve the same function, they still have some key differences.
The Amazon CloudWatch has the following features:
To support multiple devices with various resolutions like laptops, tablets, and smartphones, we need to change the resolution and format of the video. This can be done easily by an AWS Service tool called the Elastic Transcoder, which is a media transcoding in the cloud that exactly lets us do the needful. It is easy to use, cost-effective, and highly scalable for businesses and developers.
Yes. Utilizing VPC makes it possible (Virtual Private Cloud).
Availability zones are geographically separate locations. As a result, failure in one zone has no effect on EC2 instances in other zones. When it comes to regions, they may have one or more availability zones. This configuration also helps to reduce latency and costs.
The image that will be used to boot an EC2 instance is stored on the root device drive. This occurs when an Amazon AMI runs a new EC2 instance. And this root device volume is supported by EBS or an instance store. In general, the root device data on Amazon EBS is not affected by the lifespan of an EC2 instance.
No, standby instances are launched in different availability zones than the primary, resulting in physically separate infrastructures. This is because the entire purpose of standby instances is to prevent infrastructure failure. As a result, if the primary instance fails, the backup instance will assist in recovering all of the data.
Spot instances are unused EC2 instances that users can use at a reduced cost.
When you use on-demand instances, you must pay for computing resources without making long-term obligations.
Reserved instances, on the other hand, allow you to specify attributes such as instance type, platform, tenancy, region, and availability zone. Reserved instances offer significant reductions and capacity reservations when instances in certain availability zones are used.
A larger RDS instance type is required for handling significant quantities of traffic, as well as producing manual or automated snapshots to recover data if the RDS instance fails.
To make limit administration easier for customers, Amazon EC2 now offers the option to switch from the current 'instance count-based limitations' to the new 'vCPU Based restrictions.' As a result, when launching a combination of instance types based on demand, utilization is measured in terms of the number of vCPUs.
The point-in-time backups of EC2 instances, block storage drives, and databases are known as snapshots. They can be produced manually or automatically at any moment. Your resources can always be restored using snapshots, even after they have been created. These resources will also perform the same tasks as the original ones from which the snapshots were made.
It can be accomplished by setting up an autoscaling group to deploy additional instances, when an EC2 instance's CPU use surpasses 80% and by allocating traffic across instances via the creation of an application load balancer and the designation of EC2 instances as target instances.
AWS Auto Scaling groups can create an application load balancer that spans many availability zones. Mount a target on each instance and save data on Amazon EFS.
This can be accomplished by using Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), a cloud-based email-sending service.
Amazon offers the Simple Email Service (SES) service, which allows you to send bulk emails to customers swiftly at a minimal cost.
PaaS supports the operation of multiple cloud platforms, primarily for the development, testing, and oversight of the operation of the program.
Up to 100 buckets can be created by default.
A maximum of five elastic IP addresses can be generated per location and AWS account.
EC2 is short for Elastic Compute Cloud, and it provides scalable computing capacity. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates the need to invest in hardware, leading to faster development and deployment of applications. You can useAmazon EC2to launch as many or as few virtual servers as needed, configure security and networking, and manage storage. It can scale up or down to handle changes in requirements, reducing the need to forecast traffic. EC2 provides virtual computing environments called instances.
Security best practices for Amazon EC2 include using Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access to AWS resources; restricting access by only allowing trusted hosts or networks to access ports on an instance; only opening up those permissions you require, and disabling password-based logins for instances launched from your AMI.
Amazon S3can be used for instances with root devices backed by local instance storage. That way, developers have access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of websites. To execute systems in the Amazon EC2 environment, developers load Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) into Amazon S3 and then move them between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.
Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 are two of the best-known web services that make up AWS.
While you may think that both stopping and terminating are the same, there is a difference. When you stop an EC2 instance, it performs a normal shutdown on the instance and moves to a stopped state. However, when you terminate the instance, it is transferred to a stopped state, and the EBS volumes attached to it are deleted and can never be recovered.
The three types of EC2 instances are:
Heres how you accomplish this:
Solaris is an operating system that uses SPARC processor architecture, which is not supported by the public cloud currently.
AIX is an operating system that runs only on Power CPU and not on Intel, which means that you cannot create AIX instances in EC2.
Since both the operating systems have their limitations, they are not currently available with AWS.
Heres how you can configure them:
There are many types of AMIs, but some of the common AMIs are:
The Key-Pairs are password-protected login credentials for the Virtual Machines that are used to prove our identity while connecting the Amazon EC2 instances. The Key-Pairs are made up of a Private Key and a Public Key which lets us connect to the instances.
S3 is short for Simple Storage Service, and Amazon S3 is the most supported storage platform available. S3 is object storage that can store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. Despite that versatility, it is practically unlimited as well as cost-effective because it is storage available on demand. In addition to these benefits, it offers unprecedented levels of durability and availability. Amazon S3 helps to manage data for cost optimization, access control, and compliance.
Follow the steps provided below to recover an EC2 instance if you have lost the key:
Here are some differences between AWS S3 and EBS
You need to follow the four steps provided below to allow access. They are:
Follow the flow diagram provided below to monitor S3 cross-region replication:
To transfer terabytes of data outside and inside of the AWS environment, a small application called SnowBall is used.
Data transferring using SnowBall is done in the following ways:
The Storage Classes that are available in the Amazon S3 are the following:
AVPCis the best way of connecting to your cloud resources from your own data center. Once you connect your datacenter to the VPC in which your instances are present, each instance is assigned a private IP address that can be accessed from your data center. That way, you can access your public cloud resources as if they were on your own private network.
To fix this problem, you need to enable the DNS hostname resolution, so that the problem resolves itself.
If you have multiple VPN connections, you can provide secure communication between sites using the AWS VPN CloudHub. Heres a diagram that will show you how to connect various sites to a VPC:
Here is a selection of security products and features:
You can monitor VPC by using:
We can have up to 200 Subnets per Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
You would use Provisioned IOPS when you have batch-oriented workloads. Provisioned IOPS delivers high IO rates, but it is also expensive. However, batch processing workloads do not require manual intervention.
Amazon RDS is a database management service for relational databases. It manages patching, upgrading, and data backups automatically. Its a database management service for structured data only. On the other hand, DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service for dealing with unstructured data. Redshift is a data warehouse product used in data analysis.
Businesses use cloud computing in part to enable faster disaster recovery of critical IT systems without the cost of a second physical site. The AWS cloud supports many popular disaster recovery architectures ranging from small customer workload data center failures to environments that enable rapid failover at scale. With data centers all over the world, AWS provides a set of cloud-based disaster recovery services that enable rapid recovery of your IT infrastructure and data.
Heres how you can add an existing instance to a new Auto Scaling group:
Here are the factors to consider during AWS migration:
RTO or Recovery Time Objective is the maximum time your business or organization is willing to wait for a recovery to complete in the wake of an outage. On the other hand, RPO or Recovery Point Objective is the maximum amount of data loss your company is willing to accept as measured in time.
AWS Snowball is basically a data transport solution for moving high volumes of data into and out of a specified AWS region. On the other hand, AWS Snowball Edge adds additional computing functions apart from providing a data transport solution. The snowmobile is an exabyte-scale migration service that allows you to transfer data up to 100 PB.
The T2 Instances are intended to give the ability to burst to a higher performance whenever the workload demands it and also provide a moderate baseline performance to the CPU.
The T2 instances are General Purpose instance types and are low in cost as well. They are usually used wherever workloads do not consistently or often use the CPU.
AWS IAM allows an administrator to provide multiple users and groups with granular access. Various user groups and users may require varying levels of access to the various resources that have been developed. We may assign roles to users and create roles with defined access levels using IAM.
It further gives us Federated Access, which allows us to grant applications and users access to resources without having to create IAM Roles.
Connection Draining is an AWS service that allows us to serve current requests on the servers that are either being decommissioned or updated.
By enabling this Connection Draining, we let the Load Balancer make an outgoing instance finish its existing requests for a set length of time before sending it any new requests. A departing instance will immediately go off if Connection Draining is not enabled, and all pending requests will fail.
The AWS Resources owner is identical to an Administrator User. The Administrator User can build, change, delete, and inspect resources, as well as grant permissions to other AWS users.
Here are some differences between AWS CloudFormation and AWS Elastic Beanstalk:
AWS CloudFormation templates are YAML or JSON formatted text files that are comprised of five essential elements, they are:
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Top 100+ AWS Interview Questions and Answers for 2024 - Simplilearn