Breaking into the tech industry has been everyone’s dream. With 90% of business organizations shifting to cloud computing, the demand for cloud engineers has been higher than ever. 

You don’t have to worry if you are preparing to become an AWS Certified Cloud Solution Architect; we've got you. In this blog, we have collected easy to advanced-level interview questions and answers.

This will help you not only ace your interview but also brush up on your cloud computing concepts. AWS certification is provided by Amazon itself. With AWS, you can build, test, deploy, and manage apps and services. 

You can create virtual machines (VMs) with the help of AWS. it provides a combination of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Given below are the most-asked AWS Interview questions and answers. Let’s begin!

Beginner-Level AWS Interview Questions

1. What is AWS?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a platform that provides secure cloud services, database storage, services to compute power, and content delivery. It is one of the most used cloud platforms. AWS is made to be the most secure and easy-to-work-with cloud computing environment available. Provided by Amazon, it is a mixture of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) services.

2. What are the three basic types of cloud services and the AWD products that are built based on them?

The three basic cloud services are as follows:

• Computing

• Storage

• Networking

The list given below consists of some of the AWS products that are built based on the three cloud service types:

• Computing – It consists of EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda, Auto-Scaling, and Lightsail.

• Storage – It consists of S3, Glacier, Elastic Block Storage, and Elastic File System.

• Networking – It consists of VPC, Amazon CloudFront, and Route53.

3. What is EC2?

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a virtual machine in the cloud. 

• It is the central ecosystem of AWS, providing on-demand and flexible computing services.

• It provides you with OS-level control. 

• You can run the EC2 cloud server whenever you want.

• It can be used to deploy your servers in the cloud, the same as on-premises servers.

• You can have full control over the choice of hardware, updates on the machine, and much more.

• You can configure security, networking, and storage, and launch virtual services as needed.

4. What are the main features of AWS?

The following are the main features of AWS:

• Data Management and Data Transfer

• Computer and networking

• Storage

• Automation and orchestration

• Operations and management

• Security and Compliance

• Visualization

5. What is S3?

S3 stands for Simple Storage Service (S3).

• It is a highly scalable, fast, cost-effective, and reliable data storage interface used by large organizations.

• You can use S3 to retrieve and store any type of data anywhere and anytime on the web.

• The payment model is ‘pay-as-you-go”.

6. What is SnowBall?

SnowBall is an AWS service that provides secure and rugged devices.

• You can bring AWS computing and storage capabilities to your edge environments.

• You can also transfer data in and out of AWS.

• SnowBall Edge can do local processing and edge-computing workloads.

• It is a small application that can let you transfer terabytes of data.

7. What is VPC?

VPC stands for Virtual Private Cloud.

• You can customize the networking configuration with VPC.

• It is a network that is logically separated from other networks in the cloud in order to provide a virtual private environment.

• It allows you to launch AWS resources into your defined virtual network.

• Interestingly, VPC is the networking layer of EC2.

• You can have a private IP Address range, internet gateways, security groups, and subnets..

8. What is CloudWatch?

CloudWatch is an AWS service similar to EC2.

• It puts the metrics into the repository to extract statistics based on those metrics.

• You can also customize those metrics.

• In other words, Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and management service that provides data and actionable insight for AWS.

• You can monitor AWS environments such as EC2, RDS Instances, and CPU utilization.

• It also stimulates alarms on the basis of various metrics.

9. What is CloudFront?

CloudFront is a web service that speeds up the distribution of static and dynamic web content, such as .css, .html, .js, and image files.

• It does so by routing each user request through the AWS backbone network to the edge location.

• It is a computer delivery network that contains servers.

• These servers deliver web pages and web content to a user based on the basis of geographic location of the user.

10. What are the storage classes available in Amazon S3?

Storage classes available in Amazon S3 are as follows:

• Amazon S3 Standard

• Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access

• Amazon S3 Reduces Redundancy Storage

• Amazon Glacier

11. What are the different types of Cloud Services?

The different types of cloud services are as follows:

• Software as a Service (SaaS)

• Data as a Service (DaaS)

• Platform as a Service (PaaS)

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

12. What is Elastic Transcoder?

Elastic Transcoder is an AWS Service Tool. 

• You can use it to convert video and audio files into supported output formats.

• These formats are optimized for playback on mobile devices, desktops, tablets, and televisions etc.

• It is designed to be a scalable, easy-to-use, and reasonable method for developers and businesses to convert media files.

Scenario-Based AWS Architect Interview Questions

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

Amazon S3 is a Representational State Transfer (REST) service, meaning that if it is applied to a web service, it produces required properties such as scalability, performance, and flexibility.

You can send a request to S3 by using the REST API or the AWS SDK wrapper libraries. These libraries wrap the underlying Amazon S3 REST API

14. Suppose you created a key in the Northern Virginia region to encrypt your data in the Oregon region. You also added three users to the key and an external AWS account. Then, to encrypt an object in S3, when you tried to use the same key, it was not listed. Why so?

The data and the key should be in the same region. This means that the data that has to be encrypted should be in the same region as that in which the key was created. In our case, the data is in Oregon, but the key is created in the Northern Virginia region. That is why the key was not listed.

15. What is Connection Draining?

Connection Draining is a feature of AWS that enables your server, which is either going to be updated or removed, to complete the current requests.

• When Connection Draining is enabled, the Load Balancer will allow an outgoing instance to fulfill the current requests for a specific period.

• During this period, it will not send any new requests to it.

• If Connection Draining is absent, an outgoing instance will immediately go off , and the pending requests on that instance will stop (error out).

16. 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 converts to an acceptable time window when the service can be unavailable.

Recover Point Objective:

• It is the maximum acceptable time of time since the last restore point.

• It converts to the acceptable amount of data loss present between the last recovery point and the interruption of service.

17. What policies can you set for your users’ passwords?

The policies that can be set for users’ passwords are as follows:

• You can set a minimum length for the password.

• Your users can add at least one number or special character to the password.

• You can assign particular character types such as uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and non-alphanumeric characters.

• You can use automatic password expiration to prevent the reuse of old passwords.

• You can also request a password reset upon your users’ next AWS sign-in.

• You can let AWS users contact an account administrator when the user has allowed the password to expire.

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

When EC2 instances are created by AWS, there are some blocks of computing capacity and processing power that are left unused. AWS lets go of these blocks as Spot Instances.

Spot Instances run whenever capacity is available. These are a great option if you are flexible with when your application can run and if your application can be interrupted.

On the other side, On-Demand Instances can be created according to the needs. The price of such instances is fixed. Such instances will always be available unless you terminate them.

19. How is a buffer used in Amazon Web Services?

The buffer in AWS is used to make the system faster to manage traffic or load by synchronizing different components. 

• Most commonly, components receive and process the requests in an unbalanced way.

• With the use of a buffer, the components will be balanced and will work at the same speed to provide robust services.

20. What storage classes are 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

21. Which DB engines can be used in AWS RDS?

Some of the DB engines that can be used in AWS RDS are as follows:

• MS-SQL DB

• Maria DB

• MySQL DB

• Oracle DB

• PostgreSQL DB

22. What are the components of AWS Databases?

AWS Database is made up of the following components:

1. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS):

• Amazon RDS is a managed service to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. 

• Relational database services have Aurora, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and MariaDB as database engines for cloud customers to select as their database.

• RDS also provides AWS database migration services to migrate and copy the existing database to Amazon RDS.

2. Amazon Aurora:

• It is a distributed, fault-tolerant storage system that heals on its own.

• It is managed by Amazon RDS.

3. Amazon ElasticCache:

• It allows smooth setup, run, and scale of open source in-memory data stores in the cloud.

• It provides caching, session stores, gaming, geospatial services, real-time analytics, and queuing.

4. Amazon DocumentDB:

• You can easily store, query, and index data in JSON format.

5. Amazon DynamoDB:

• It is a key-value document database.

• It is selected for mobile, web, ad tech, gaming, IoT, and low-latency data access at any scale.

• It is commonly used for mission-critical workloads.

6. Amazon Keyspaces:

• It is a database service that works well with Apache Cassandra, scalable, highly available, and serverless.

7. Redshift:

• It is a cloud data warehouse.

8. Neptune:

• It is a fully managed, highly available, point-in-time recovery graph database service with updated backup to Amazon S3.

9. Quantum Ledger Database:

• It is a completely managed ledger database with SQL-like API, a flexible document data model with complete support for transactions.

• It is serverless as a keyspace.

23. How do you monitor Amazon VPC?

You can monitor Amazon VPC using:

• CloudWatch

• VPC Flow Logs

What is AWS?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a platform that provides secure cloud services, database storage, services to compute power, and content delivery. It provides a combination of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) services.

What are the 4 foundational services in AWS?

The AWS business solutions can be divided into 4 foundational services in AWS at a higher level:

• Savings

• Security

• Compliance 

• DRaaS Development Operations

What are AWS best practices?

• Create a strong password for your AWS resources.

• Use a group email alias with your AWS account.

• Allow multi-factor authentication.

• Set up AWS IAM users, groups, and roles for daily account access.

• Delete your account’s access keys.

• Enable CloudTrail in all AWS regions.

What is VPC in AWS?

• VPC stands for Virtual Private Cloud.

• You can customize the networking configuration with VPC.

• It allows you to launch AWS resources into your defined virtual network.

• VPC is the networking layer of EC2.

• You can have a private IP Address range, internet gateways, security groups, and subnets.

How many AWS accounts can you have?

You can have 50 AWS accounts in an AWS organization.

What are key pairs in AWS?

• A key pair has a public key and a private key.

• It is a set of security information that you use to prove your identity when connecting to an Amazon EC2 instance.

What is the EC2?

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a virtual machine in the cloud. 

• It is the central ecosystem of AWS, providing on-demand and flexible computing services.

• It provides you with OS-level control. 

• You can run the EC2 cloud server whenever you want.

Is EC2 a VM?

EC2 is a web service you can use to create and run virtual machines in the cloud.