AWS Basic Interview Questions

1. What is EC2?

EC2, a Virtual Machine in the cloud on which you have OS-level control. You can
run this cloud server whenever you want and can be used when you need to deploy
your own servers in the cloud, similar to your on-premises servers, and when you
want to have full control over the choice of hardware and the updates on the
machine.

2. What is SnowBall?

SnowBall is a small application that enables you to transfer terabytes of data inside
and outside of the AWS environment.

AWS Snowball

3. What is CloudWatch?

CloudWatch helps you to monitor AWS environments like EC2, RDS Instances, and
CPU utilization. It also triggers alarms depending on various metrics.
AWS Cloudwatch
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4. What is Elastic Transcoder?

Elastic Transcoder is an AWS Service Tool that helps you in changing a video’s
format and resolution to support various devices like tablets, smartphones, and
laptops of different resolutions.

5. What do you understand by VPC?

VPC stands for Virtual Private Cloud. It allows you to customize your networking
configuration. VPC is a network that is logically isolated from other networks in the
cloud. It allows you to have your private IP Address range, internet gateways,
subnets, and security groups.

6. DNS and Load Balancer Services come under which type of Cloud
Service?

DNS and Load Balancer are a part of IaaS-Storage Cloud Service.

7. What are the Storage Classes available in Amazon S3?

Storage Classes available with Amazon S3 are:

  Amazon S3 Standard
 Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access
 Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage
 Amazon Glacier

8. Explain what T2 instances are?

T2 Instances are designed to provide moderate baseline performance and the

capability to burst to higher performance as required by the workload.

9. What are Key-Pairs in AWS?

Key-Pairs are secure login information for your Virtual Machines. To connect to the
instances, you can use Key-Pairs which contain a Public Key and a Private Key.

10. How many Subnets can you have per VPC?

You can have 200 Subnets per VPC.

11. List different types of Cloud Services.

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)

Advanced AWS Questions

12. Explain what S3 is?

S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. You can use the S3 interface to store and
retrieve any amount of data, at any time and from anywhere on the web. For S3, the
payment model is “pay as you go”.

13. How does Amazon Route 53 provide high availability and low
latency?

Amazon Route 53 uses the following to provide high availability and low latency:

 Globally Distributed Servers - Amazon is a global service and consequently

has DNS Servers globally. Any customer creating a query from any part of
the world gets to reach a DNS Server local to them that provides low latency.
  Dependency - Route 53 provides a high level of dependability required by
critical applications.
 Optimal Locations - Route 53 serves the requests from the nearest data
center to the client sending the request. AWS has data-centers across the
world. The data can be cached on different data-centers located in different
regions of the world depending on the requirements and the configuration
chosen. Route 53 enables any server in any data-center which has the
required data to respond. This way, it enables the nearest server to serve the
client request, thus reducing the time taken to serve.

Amazon Route

As can be seen in the above image, the requests coming from a user in India are
served from the Singapore Server, while the requests coming from a user in the US
are routed to Oregon region.

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

Amazon S3 is a REST Service, and you can send a request by using the REST API or
the AWS SDK wrapper libraries that wrap the underlying Amazon S3 REST API.

15. What does AMI include?

An AMI includes the following things:

 A template for the root volume for the instance.

 Launch permissions to decide which AWS accounts can avail the AMI to
launch instances.
  A block device mapping that determines the volumes to attach to the
instance when it is launched.

16. What are the different types of Instances?

Following are the types of instances:

 Compute Optimized
 Memory-Optimized
 Storage Optimized
 Accelerated Computing
 General Purpose

17. What is the relation between the Availability Zone and Region?

An AWS Availability Zone is a physical location where an Amazon data center is

located. On the other hand, an AWS Region is a collection or group of Availability
Zones or Data Centers. 

This setup helps your services to be more available as you can place your VMs in
different data centers within an AWS Region. If one of the data centers fails in a
Region, the client requests still get served from the other data centers located in
the same Region. This arrangement, thus, helps your service to be available even if
a Data Center goes down.

18. How do you monitor Amazon VPC?

You can monitor Amazon VPC using:

 CloudWatch
 VPC Flow Logs

19. What are the different types of EC2 instances based on their
costs?

The three types of EC2 instances based on the costs are:

On-Demand Instance - These instances are prepared as and when needed.

Whenever you feel the need for a new EC2 instance, you can go ahead and create
an on-demand instance. It is cheap for the short-time but not when taken for the
long term.

Spot Instance - These types of instances can be bought through the bidding
model. These are comparatively cheaper than On-Demand Instances.
Reserved Instance - On AWS, you can create instances that you can reserve for a
year or so. These types of instances are especially useful when you know in advance
that you will be needing an instance for the long term. In such cases, you can create
a reserved instance and save heavily on costs.

20. What do you understand by stopping and terminating an EC2

Instance?

Stopping an EC2 instance means to shut it down as you would normally do on your
Personal Computer. This will not delete any volumes attached to the instance and
the instance can be started again when needed.

On the other hand, terminating an instance is equivalent to deleting an instance. All

the volumes attached to the instance get deleted and it is not possible to restart
the instance if needed at a later point in time.

21. What are the consistency models for modern DBs offered by
AWS?

Eventual Consistency - It means that the data will be consistent eventually, but
may not be immediate. This will serve the client requests faster, but chances are
that some of the initial read requests may read the stale data. This type of
consistency is preferred in systems where data need not be real-time. For example,
if you don’t see the recent tweets on Twitter or recent posts on Facebook for a
couple of seconds, it is acceptable.

Strong Consistency - It provides an immediate consistency where the data will be
consistent across all the DB Servers immediately. Accordingly. This model may take
some time to make the data consistent and subsequently start serving the requests
again. However, in this model, it is guaranteed that all the responses will always
have consistent data.

22. What is Geo-Targeting in CloudFront?

Geo-Targeting enables the creation of customized content based on the

geographic location of the user. This allows you to serve the content which is more
relevant to a user. For example, using Geo-Targeting, you can show the news
related to local body elections to a user sitting in India, which you may not want to
show to a user sitting in the US. Similarly, the news related to Baseball Tournament
can be more relevant to a user sitting in the US, and not so relevant for a user
sitting in India.

23. What are the advantages of AWS IAM?

AWS IAM enables an administrator to provide granular level access to different
users and groups. Different users and user groups may need different levels of
access to different resources created. With IAM, you can create roles with specific
access-levels and assign the roles to the users. 

It also allows you to provide access to the resources to users and applications
without creating the IAM Roles, which is known as Federated Access.

24. What do you understand by a Security Group?

When you create an instance in AWS, you may or may not want that instance to be
accessible from the public network. Moreover, you may want that instance to be
accessible from some networks and not from others.

Security Groups are a type of rule-based Virtual Firewall using which you can
control access to your instances. You can create rules defining the Port Numbers,
Networks, or protocols from which you want to allow access or deny access.

25. What are Spot Instances and On-Demand Instances?

When AWS creates EC2 instances, there are some blocks of computing capacity and
processing power left unused. AWS releases these blocks as Spot Instances. Spot
Instances run whenever capacity is available. These are a good option if you are
flexible about when your applications can run and if your applications can be
interrupted.

On the other hand, On-Demand Instances can be created as and when needed. The
prices of such instances are static. Such instances will always be available unless you
explicitly terminate them.

26. Explain Connection Draining.

Connection Draining is a feature provided by AWS which enables your servers

which are either going to be updated or removed, to serve the current requests. 

If Connection Draining is enabled, the Load Balancer will allow an outgoing

instance to complete the current requests for a specific period but will not send any
new request to it. Without Connection Draining, an outgoing instance will
immediately go off and the requests pending on that instance will error out.

27. What is a Stateful and a Stateless Firewall?

A Stateful Firewall is the one that maintains the state of the rules defined. It
requires you to define only inbound rules. Based on the inbound rules defined, it
automatically allows the outbound traffic to flow. 

On the other hand, a Stateless Firewall requires you to explicitly define rules for
inbound as well as outbound traffic. 

For example, if you allow inbound traffic from Port 80, a Stateful Firewall will allow
outbound traffic to Port 80, but a Stateless Firewall will not do so.

28. What is a Power User Access in AWS?

An Administrator User will be similar to the owner of the AWS Resources. He can
create, delete, modify or view the resources and also grant permissions to other
users for the AWS Resources.

A Power User Access provides Administrator Access without the capability to

manage the users and permissions. In other words, a user with Power User Access
can create, delete, modify or see the resources, but he cannot grant permissions to
other users.

29. What is an Instance Store Volume and an EBS Volume?

An Instance Store Volume is temporary storage that is used to store the temporary
data required by an instance to function. The data is available as long as the
instance is running. As soon as the instance is turned off, the Instance Store Volume
gets removed and the data gets deleted.

On the other hand, an EBS Volume represents a persistent storage disk. The data
stored in an EBS Volume will be available even after the instance is turned off.

30. What are Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective
in AWS?

Recovery Time Objective - It is the maximum acceptable delay between the
interruption of service and restoration of service. This translates to an acceptable
time window when the service can be unavailable.

Recover Point Objective - It is the maximum acceptable amount of time since the
last data restore point. It translates to the acceptable amount of data loss which lies
between the last recovery point and the interruption of service.
31. Is there a way to upload a file that is greater than 100 Megabytes
in Amazon S3?

Yes, it is possible by using the Multipart Upload Utility from AWS. With the
Multipart Upload Utility, larger files can be uploaded in multiple parts that are
uploaded independently. You can also decrease upload time by uploading these
parts in parallel. After the upload is done, the parts are merged into a single object
or file to create the original file from which the parts were created.

32. Can you change the Private IP Address of an EC2 instance while it
is running or in a stopped state?

No, a Private IP Address of an EC2 instance cannot be changed. When an EC2

instance is launched, a private IP Address is assigned to that instance at the boot
time. This private IP Address is attached to the instance for its entire lifetime and
can never be changed.

33. What is the use of lifecycle hooks is Autoscaling?

Lifecycle hooks are used for Auto-scaling to put an additional wait time to a scale-
in or a scale-out event.

34. What are the policies that you can set for your user’s passwords?

Following are the policies that can be set for user’s passwords:

 You can set a minimum length of the password.

 You can ask the users to add at least one number or special character to the
password.
 Assigning the requirements of particular character types, including
uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and non-alphanumeric
characters.
 You can enforce automatic password expiration, prevent the reuse of old
passwords, and request for a password reset upon their next AWS sign-in.
 You can have the AWS users contact an account administrator when the user
has allowed the password to expire.

Useful Resources

 https://www.interviewbit.com/terraform-interview-questions/
 https://www.interviewbit.com/technical-interview-questions/

AWS MCQ
1.

________ is a billing and account management service in AWS.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Amazon DevPay
Multi-Factor Authentication
2.

What are the advantages of Auto Scaling?

Better Availability
Fault Tolerance
Better Cost Management
All of the above
3.

Which of the following is an edge-storage or content delivery system that caches

data in different physical locations?

Amazon Relational Database Service

Amazon SimpleDB
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon Associate Web Services
4.

Which of the following is a means for accessing human researchers or consultants

to help solve problems on a contractual or temporary basis?

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon DevPay
Multi-Factor Authentication
5.

Which of the following statements is correct?

Amazon Elastic Cloud is a system for creating Virtual Disks

SimpleDB inter-operates with both Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3
EC3 is an Analytics as a Service provider
 None of the above
6.

Which of the following is a structured data store that supports indexing and data
queries to both EC2 and S3?

CloudWatch
Amazon SimpleDB
Amazon CloudFront
All of the above
7.

Which service performs the function of terminating an unhealthy instance and

replacing it with a new one?

Sticky Sessions
Fault Tolerance
Connection Draining
None of the above
8.

Suppose a subnet is created and an EC2 instance is launched in the subnet with
default settings. Which of the following options will be ready to use on the EC2
instance as soon as it is launched?

Elastic IP
Private IP
Public IP
Internet Gateway
9.

Can you change the instance type of the instances that are running in your
application tier and also using auto-scaling?

Yes, by modifying the auto-scaling launch configuration

Yes, by modifying auto-scaling tags configuration
Yes, by modifying the auto-scaling policy configuration
No, it cannot be changed
10.

Where does a user specify the maximum number of instances with the auto-scaling
commands?
Auto-Scaling Policy Configuration
Auto-Scaling Group
Auto-Scaling Tags Configuration
Auto-Scaling Launch Configuration