100+ AWS Interview Questions for Tech Interview Preparation

Cloud computing is one of the fastest-growing tech markets in the world, making cloud engineering a lucrative career option for software engineers. AWS is a widely used cloud computing platform; therefore, to land a cloud engineering job at FAANG+ companies, you must nail AWS interview questions.

Amazon Web Services or AWS is a cloud computing service by Amazon. With AWS, you can build, test, deploy, and manage apps and related services. Amazon manages an elaborate setup of data centers and hardware to make this possible. Since Amazon is such a prominent name and AWS is a popular platform for several websites and services, developers must be able to answer all kinds of AWS interview questions.

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In this article, we'll offer questions and answers to help you prepare for an AWS interview. Here’s what we’ve covered:

• Why Is AWS in Such High Demand?
• AWS Interview Question Topics
• Most Common AWS Interview Questions and Answers
• AWS Interview Questions by Topics
• More AWS Interview Questions for AWS Developers
• AWS FAQs

Why Is AWS in Such High Demand?

There is a growing demand for certified AWS developers. But more opportunities mean more candidates and more competition. So, it’s essential to be adequately prepared before your interview.  Before diving into the sample questions, let’s find out more about AWS.

AWS offers Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to its customers. AWS is used to create virtual machines with immense storage capacity and processing power. The system works on a pay-as-you-go model, which is instrumental in avoiding huge upfront costs based on monthly usage. As a global cloud platform, it is scalable, adaptable, reliable, secure, and saves businesses a lot on cost.

The adoption of cloud computing has accelerated in recent years, thus increasing the demand for cloud computing experts such as those with Amazon Web Services (AWS) certifications.

AWS Interview Question Topics

AWS interview questions will vary based on the seniority and domain of the role you are interviewing for. Based on technical specialization, the types of AWS questions are based on topics such as:

• DevOps
• Solution Architecture
• AWS EC2
• AWS S3
• VPC
• CloudFormation
• Elastic Block Storage
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Security
• Route 53

Most Common AWS Interview Questions and Answers

1. What is AWS?

AWS or Amazon web service is an online platform that offers scalable and cost-effective cloud computing solutions. It is a broadly adopted cloud platform that provides several on-demand operations like compute power, content delivery, database storage, and more to help companies scale and grow.

The system works on a pay-as-you-go model, which is instrumental in avoiding huge upfront costs based on monthly usage.

2. What are the key components of AWS?

The key components of AWS are:

• Route 53
• RESTFUL Email Service
• Identity and Access Management
• Simple Storage Device (S3)
• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Elastic Block Store (EBS)
• CloudWatch

3. What is the relationship between AMI and instance?

You can launch multiple instances for a single Amazon Machine Language or AMI. When an instance is launched, it will work like a traditional host and can be interacted with like any other computer.

4. What are the basic types of cloud services?

The basic types of cloud services are - computing, storage, and networking.

5. What is geo-targeting in CloudFront?

In geo-targeting, businesses can exhibit personalized content to audiences based on geographic locations without having to change the URL. This is especially advantageous in creating customized content for audiences in a specific geographical region and tending to their specific needs.

AWS Interview Questions by Topics

In this section, we’ve listed popular AWS interview questions, categorized by topics.

AWS DevOps Interview Questions

1. What are the benefits of DevOps?
2. List the prerequisites for the implementation of DevOps.
3. Name the core operations of DevOps application development and infrastructure.
4. What is Scrum?
5. Explain the concept of Vagrant.
6. How do open-source tools boost DevOps?
7. Explain two-factor authentication.
8. What increases AWS DevOps accessibility?
9. What are some important DevOps KPIs according to you?
10. How is infrastructure code executed in AWS?

For more information on the roles and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer, check out this article.

AWS Architect Interview Questions

1. What is CDN?
2. Explain the concept of WAF.
3. Do all CDNs provide WAF?
4. What is CI/CD?
5. Explain the concept of SPark.
6. Describe cluster computing.
7. Differentiate between block storage and object storage.
8. Describe asynchronous encryption type.
9. Differentiate between Amazon Rds, Redshift, and Dynamodb.
10. Describe IAM and talk about its usage.
11. What is the difference between scalability and elasticity?
12. Describe Amazon VPC and talk about the reasons to use it.
13. What is the difference between TCP and UDP?
14. Describe Amazon Route 53 and CloudTrail.
15. Draw a comparison between two popular cloud service providers.
16. Explain the concept of Shards.
17. Differentiate between scripting languages and programming languages.
18. What is the difference between stateful and stateless architecture?
19. Differentiate between virtual machines and containers.
20. What is the difference between SQL and no SQL?

Looking for more questions? Here are more than 50 Solution Architect interview questions for practice.

AWS EC2 Interview Questions

1. How is stopping an EC2 instance different from terminating it?
2. Explain the different types of cost-based EC2 instances.
3. How will you set up an SSH agent forwarding?
4. List types of AMI designs.
5. List some security best practices for Amazon EC2.

AWS S3 Interview Questions

1. How is a request sent to Amazon S3?
2. What is the elemental difference between Amazon S3 and EC2?
3. If you lose a key, how will you recover an EC2 instance?
4. What is the elemental difference between EBS and Amazon S3?
5. How will you give a user access to a specific bucket?
6. How will you monitor the replication of the S3 cross-region to make sure of consistency without checking buckets?

AWS VPC Interview Questions

1. How will you fix a VPC server that refuses to get resolved through DNS?
2. How can you connect multiple sites to a VPC?
3. What security features does VPC offer?
4. How is Amazon VPC monitored?
5. Does Amazon VPC support broadcast or multicast?
6. Can you build a Peering connection to a VPC located in a different region?

AWS CloudFormation Interview Questions

1. What is the difference between AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS CloudFormation?
2. Name some AWS CloudFormation template elements.
3. What happens in case of an unsuccessful creation of a resource in a stack?
4. Lay out the process of configuring CloudWatch to recover an EC2 instance.
5. How many Elastic IPs can you create by AWS?

AWS Elastic Block Storage Interview Questions

1. How will you use EBS to automate EC2 backup?
2. Differentiate between Instance Store and EBS.
3. Is it possible to make a backup of EFS like EBS?
4. Can you auto-delete old snapshots?

AWS Elastic Load Balancing Interview Questions

1. Describe the types of load balancers in AWS.
2. Describe the various load balancers in AWS Elastic Load Balancing.

AWS Security Interview Questions

1. How will you use AWS WAF to monitor AWS applications?
2. Explain the different AWS IAM categories.
3. Describe some user password policies.
4. What are managed policies in AWS IAM?
5. Differentiate between an IAM user and an IAM role.
6. Give examples of an IAM policy and a policy summary.
7. How can AWS IAM help businesses?

Check out these Amazon interview questions for valuable insights into the Amazon interview process.

AWS Route 53 Interview Questions

1. Differentiate between Geo DNS and Latency Based Routing?
2. Differentiate between a Hosted Zone and a Domain.
3. How is Amazon Route 53 able to provide low latency and high availability?

AWS Config Interview Questions

1. How do AWS config and AWS CloudTrail work?
2. Can you aggregate data using AWS Config across different AWS accounts?

AWS Database Interview Questions

1. Differentiate between reserved instances and on-demand DB instances.
2. Which scaling type is recommended for RDS?
3. Explain the concept of a maintenance window in Amazon RDS.
4. Is a DB instance available during maintenance events?
5. Describe the consistency models in DynamoDB.
6. Which query functionality is supported by DynamoDB?

More AWS Interview Questions for AWS Developers

Here are some more sample interview questions for AWS developers:

1. What is an AMI made up of?
2. How are Region and Availability Zone related?
3. Explain auto-scaling.
4. Explain the steps involved in CloudFormation Solution.
5. How will you upgrade a system that has near-zero downtime?
6. How will you downgrade a system that has near-zero downtime?
7. Which tools in AWS help in evaluating if a client is paying extra?
8. Besides Console, how can you log into the cloud environment?
9. Which services will you use to create a centralized logging solution?
10. How can you minimize a DDoS attack?
11. What will you do if AWS is not available in a specific region?
12. Name some AWS services that are not location-specific.
13. Explain native AWS Security logging capabilities.
14. Explain the process of setting up a system to monitor real-time website metrics.
15. Explain the difference between the types of virtualization in AWS.
16. Explain the difference between NAT Instances and NAT Gateways.
17. How will you add an existing instance to a newly created Auto Scaling group?
18. If a client wants to migrate to AWS, what factors should they consider?
19. What are RPO and RTO in AWS?
20. Which among Snowball, Snowball Edge, and Snowmobile would you pick to transfer a huge volume of data?
21. Explain the concept of key pairs in AWS.
22. Explain redshift.

This comprehensive list of AWS developer interview questions will definitely help you crack the interview!

AWS FAQs

Q. What is the salary of an AWS Developer?
A. According to Glassdoor, the average salary of an AWS Developer is $103,656 per year in the United States.

Q. Are AWS jobs in demand?
A. Yes! AWS is the most commonly-used public cloud platform, and it leads the list in public cloud computing. As an IaaS, it dominates the market with a 33% market share, almost equaling the market share of the next two contenders (Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure) combined. For this reason, there is an excess in demand for AWS jobs. Around 60% of the public cloud job postings are about AWS.

Q. Which companies use AWS?
A. According to Intricately, here are the top ten AWS users based on EC2 monthly spend: Netflix, Twitch, LinkedIn, Facebook, Turner Broadcasting. BBC, Baidu, ESPN, Adobe, and Twitter.

Q. What are the top skills an AWS Developer should have?
A. The top skills in demand these days in an AWS Developer are:

• Knowledge of programming languages such as C#, PHP, Java, ASP.Net, and Python
• Knowing which storage to choose
• Internet and networking protocols
• Security perimeters
• DevOps
• Choosing the right cloud service provider
• Understanding containers
• Running application software on virtual machines
• APIs and web services
• AWS SDK

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