50 AWS interview questions and answers

  1. What is AWS?
    AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. It is a platform that offers flexible, reliable, scalable, easy-to-use, and cost-effective cloud computing solutions.
  2. What are the key components of AWS?
    The key components of AWS are:
  • Route 53: A DNS web service
  • Simple E-mail Service: It allows sending e-mail using RESTFUL API call or via regular SMTP
  • Identity and Access Management: It provides enhanced security and identity management for your AWS account
  • Simple Storage Device or (S3): It is a storage device and the most widely used AWS service
  • Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): It provides on-demand computing resources for hosting applications. It is very useful in case of unpredictable workloads
  • Elastic Block Store (EBS): It provides persistent storage volumes that attach to EC2 to allow you to persist data past the lifespan of a single EC2
  • CloudWatch: To monitor AWS resources, It allows administrators to view and collect key Also, one can set a notification alarm in case of trouble.
  1. What is S3?
    S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. You can use S3 interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time and from anywhere on the web.
  2. What is an AMI?
    An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a template that contains a software configuration (for example, an operating system, an application server, and applications). From an AMI, you launch instances, which are copies of the AMI running as a virtual server in the cloud.
  3. What is the relation between an instance and AMI?
    From a single AMI, you can launch multiple types of instances. An instance type defines the hardware of the host computer used for the instance. Each instance type offers different compute, memory, and storage capabilities.
  4. How can you send a request to Amazon S3?
    Amazon S3 is a REST service, you can send request by using the REST API or the AWS SDK wrapper libraries that wrap the underlying Amazon S3 REST API.
  5. What is the difference between EC2 and Amazon S3?
    EC2 is a cloud service platform that provides computing capacity, while S3 is an object storage system that is designed for storing and retrieving any amount of data from anywhere.
  6. What does an AWS Region consist of?
    An AWS region is a geographical area that consists of two or more availability zones which are isolated from each other, but are within the same region.
  7. What is an EIP in AWS?
    An Elastic IP Address (EIP) is a static, public IPv4 address designed for dynamic cloud computing. EIP is associated with your AWS account, not a particular instance, and you control that address until you choose to explicitly release it.
  8. What is Auto Scaling in AWS?
    Auto Scaling in AWS allows you to automatically scale-up or scale-down the number of instances depending on the CPU utilization or the network traffic.
  9. What is a Security Group in AWS?
    A security group acts as a virtual firewall for your instance to control inbound and outbound traffic.
  10. What is VPC in AWS?
    Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) allows the users to use AWS resources in a virtual network. The users can customize their virtual networking environment as they like, such as selecting own IP address range, creating subnets, and configuring route tables and network gateways.
  11. What is the difference between a Security group and a Network Access Control List?
    Security groups are associated with EC2 instances and are stateful – if you send a request from your instance, the response traffic for that request is allowed to flow in regardless of inbound security group rules. Network Access Control Lists are associated with subnets and are stateless – if you allow an inbound rule, that does not automatically allow outbound traffic.
  12. What is CloudWatch?
    Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS resources and the applications you run on AWS. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms.
  13. What is the use of Amazon Glacier?
    Amazon Glacier is a low-cost storage service, designed for data archiving. Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable.
  14. What is AWS Lambda?
    AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda executes your code only when needed and scales automatically.
  15. What is the use of AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker.
  16. What is AWS Snowball?
    AWS Snowball is a data transport solution that accelerates moving terabytes to petabytes of data into and out of AWS using storage appliances designed to be secure for physical transport.
  17. What is DynamoDB?
    Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability.
  18. What is Redshift?
    Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. You can start with just a few hundred gigabytes of data and scale to a petabyte or more.
  19. What is the maximum size of an S3 bucket?
    The maximum size of an S3 bucket is unlimited by default. However, individual Amazon S3 objects can range in size from a minimum of 0 bytes to a maximum of 5 terabytes.
  20. What is AWS Direct Connect?
    AWS Direct Connect is a network service that provides an alternative to using the Internet to connect a customer’s on-premise sites to AWS.
  21. What is Amazon EMR?
    Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) is a web service that provides a managed framework to run data processing frameworks such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Presto.
  22. What is Amazon Kinesis?
    Amazon Kinesis is a platform to stream data on AWS, offering powerful services to make it easy to load and analyze streaming data, and also providing the ability for you to build custom streaming data applications for specialized needs.
  23. What is Amazon SQS?
    Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
  24. What is Amazon SNS?
    Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) is a web service that coordinates and manages the delivery or sending of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients.
  25. What is Amazon SWF?
    Amazon SWF (Simple Workflow Service) helps developers build, run, and scale background jobs that have parallel or sequential steps.
  26. What is Amazon SES?
    Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable email service that enables developers to send mail from within any application.
  27. What is Amazon RDS?
    Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
  28. What is Amazon ElastiCache?
    Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud.
  29. What is Amazon CloudFront?
    Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) offered by AWS. CloudFront delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to your viewers with low latency and high transfer speeds.
  30. What is Amazon Route 53?
    Amazon Route 53 is a scalable and highly available Domain Name System (DNS) web service.
  31. What is Amazon EBS?
    Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) provides raw block-level storage that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances.
  32. What is Amazon ECS?
    Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) is a highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run and scale containerized applications on AWS.
  33. What is Amazon EKS?
    Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install and operate your own Kubernetes control plane.
  34. What is Amazon Sagemaker?
    Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly.
  35. What is Amazon Quicksight?
    Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business intelligence service that makes it easy to deliver insights to everyone in your organization.
  36. What is Amazon Athena?
    Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.
  37. What is Amazon Aurora?
    Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
  38. What is Amazon Lightsail?
    Amazon Lightsail is the easiest way to get started with AWS for developers who need a simple virtual private server (VPS) solution.
  39. What is Amazon WorkSpaces?
    Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. You can use Amazon WorkSpaces to provision either Windows or Linux desktops in just a few minutes and quickly scale to provide thousands of desktops to workers across the globe.
  40. What is Amazon Lex?
    Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text.
  41. What is Amazon Polly?
    Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products.
  42. What is Amazon Rekognition?
    Amazon Rekognition makes it easy to add image and video analysis to your applications using proven, highly scalable, deep learning technology that requires no machine learning expertise to use.
  43. What is Amazon Translate?
    Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation.
  44. What is Amazon Transcribe?
    Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capability to their applications.
  45. What is AWS Step Functions?
    AWS Step Functions is a serverless workflow service that lets you coordinate processes using visual workflows.
  46. What is AWS Batch?
    AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS.
  47. What is AWS CodeStar?
    AWS CodeStar enables you to quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS by providing a unified user interface, enabling you to easily manage your software development activities in one place.
  48. What is AWS X-Ray?
    AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture.

These are some of the most common AWS interview questions and answers. Remember, the key to success in any interview is preparation. Good luck!

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