Master Your AWS Interview: Top 100+ Questions and Answers for 2023

AWS Basics

What is AWS?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a cloud computing platform provided by Amazon that offers a wide range of cloud services, including computing power, storage, databases, machine learning, and more.

What are the key components of AWS?

AWS consists of various services, including Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), AWS Lambda, and Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), among others.

What is the AWS Global Infrastructure?

AWS operates in multiple geographic regions, each comprising multiple Availability Zones. These regions provide redundancy, scalability, and high availability for AWS services.

Explain what Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is and its types.

ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances. Types include Application Load Balancers (ALB), Network Load Balancers (NLB), and Classic Load Balancers.

What is an AWS Region?

An AWS Region is a geographically isolated area that consists of multiple Availability Zones. Each Region is entirely independent and designed to be resilient.

AWS Compute

What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It allows you to run virtual servers known as instances.

Explain EC2 instance types.

EC2 instances come in various types optimized for different use cases, such as compute-optimized, memory-optimized, and storage-optimized, each with varying CPU, memory, and storage configurations.

What is Auto Scaling in AWS?

Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances in a group to maintain application availability and performance, based on user-defined policies.

What is AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that lets you run code in response to events without provisioning or managing servers.

What is Amazon ECS?

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a container management service that simplifies running, stopping, and managing Docker containers on AWS.

AWS Storage

What is Amazon S3?

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an object storage service that allows you to store and retrieve data, including files, images, and backups, over the internet.

Explain the types of Amazon S3 storage classes.

Amazon S3 offers storage classes like Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, One Zone-IA, Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive, each designed for specific data storage needs.

What is Amazon EBS?

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block-level storage volumes that you can attach to EC2 instances. It’s used for persistent data storage.

What is Amazon EFS?

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a scalable and fully managed file storage service that can be mounted to multiple EC2 instances.

What is AWS Storage Gateway?

AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that connects on-premises environments with cloud storage, providing a seamless bridge between the two.

AWS Databases

What is Amazon RDS?

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed database service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.

Explain the differences between RDS, DynamoDB, and Redshift.

RDS is for relational databases, DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service, and Redshift is a data warehousing solution. They serve different data storage and processing needs.

What is Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, offering high performance and availability.

What is Amazon DynamoDB?

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and flexible document and key-value data storage.

What is Amazon Redshift?

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehouse service that allows you to run complex queries on large datasets.

AWS Networking

What is Amazon VPC?

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) lets you create a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources into a virtual network.

Explain what a subnet is in Amazon VPC.

A subnet is a range of IP addresses in your VPC. It helps partition and manage your VPC’s IP address space.

What is an Internet Gateway in Amazon VPC?

An Internet Gateway is a horizontally scalable, redundant, and highly available VPC component that allows communication between your VPC and the Internet.

What is AWS Direct Connect?

AWS Direct Connect is a network service that provides dedicated network connections from your on-premises data centres to AWS.

What is AWS Route 53?

AWS Route 53 is a scalable and highly available domain name system (DNS) web service designed to route traffic to AWS resources.

Security and Identity

What is IAM in AWS?

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a service that enables you to securely manage access to AWS resources by creating and managing users, groups, and policies.

Explain what an AWS Security Group is.

A Security Group acts as a virtual firewall for your EC2 instances, controlling inbound and outbound traffic.

What is AWS Key Management Service (KMS)?

AWS KMS is a managed encryption service that helps you create and control encryption keys used to protect your data.

What is AWS Identity Federation?

AWS Identity Federation allows you to grant your existing users permissions to AWS resources without creating new AWS identities.

What is AWS Cognito?

AWS Cognito is a managed identity service that enables you to easily add user sign-up and sign-in functionality to your mobile and web apps.

AWS Monitoring and Logging

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that provides data and actionable insights for AWS resources.

Explain what CloudTrail is.

AWS CloudTrail is a service that records AWS API calls for your account and delivers log files to an Amazon S3 bucket for analysis.

What is Amazon CloudFront?

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally.

What is AWS X-Ray?

AWS X-Ray is a service that helps developers analyze and debug distributed applications, such as microservices-based applications.

What is AWS Config?

AWS Config is a service that provides an inventory of AWS resources and records changes to those resources.

AWS DevOps and Automation

What is AWS CodePipeline?

AWS CodePipeline is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service that automates the build, test, and deployment phases of your release process.

Explain what AWS CloudFormation is.

AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure as code (IAC) service that allows you to define and provision AWS infrastructure resources in a declarative template.

What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering that simplifies deploying and managing applications.

What is AWS OpsWorks?

AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that helps you automate server configuration, deployment, and scaling.

What is AWS Lambda Layers?

AWS Lambda Layers allows you to manage your in-development function code independently from the unchanging code and resources that it uses.

AWS Security and Compliance

What is AWS WAF?

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits.

What is AWS Shield?

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS.

What is AWS Inspector?

AWS Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS.

What is AWS Config Rules?

AWS Config Rules allows you to create rules that automatically check the configuration of AWS resources for compliance with predefined best practices.

What is AWS KMS Key Rotation?

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) Key Rotation is a feature that automatically rotates encryption keys to help you meet compliance requirements.

Advanced AWS Services

What is Amazon Polly?

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech using deep learning technology.

What is AWS IoT?

AWS Internet of Things (IoT) is a managed cloud platform that lets you connect IoT devices to the cloud.

What is Amazon SageMaker?

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed machine learning service that enables you to build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale.

What is Amazon Neptune?

Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service that allows you to build and run applications that work with highly connected data.

What is AWS Elastic Transcoder?

AWS Elastic Transcoder is a media transcoding service that converts media files into different formats for various devices and playback applications.

AWS Interview Tips

Before concluding, here are some essential tips to help you succeed in your AWS interview:

Review AWS Documentation: Familiarize yourself with AWS documentation and services to understand their capabilities and use cases.

Practice Hands-On: Experiment with AWS services in a sandbox environment to gain practical experience.

Understand Real-World Scenarios: Be prepared to discuss how you’ve used AWS in previous roles and how it solved real-world problems.

Learn About AWS Cost Management: Understand AWS cost optimization and how to control expenses when using AWS services.

Stay Current: Keep up with AWS updates and announcements to stay informed about the latest cloud technologies.

Remember that an AWS interview is not just about answering questions but also demonstrating your practical knowledge and problem-solving skills. With thorough preparation and practice, you can confidently approach your AWS interview in 2023 and secure the position you desire.

Good luck with your AWS interview preparation!