Cloud computing is quickly becoming the norm among enterprises that want more flexibility, greater efficiencies, lower costs, and improved disaster recovery—to name only a few of the benefits. Cloud computing providers are there to make the migrations happen, leading to stiff competition in the cloud-computing space.

As typically happens in a rapidly expanding market with high demand, several leaders rose to prominence right away: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google. AWS is by far the dominant provider of these three market leaders, with 40% of the market share and $14 billion in revenue projected for 2017. That’s not only good news for Amazon’s bottom line. It’s also good news for you if you’re moving into the field as an AWS Solutions Architect Associate. According to Glassdoor, the national average salary for an AWS Solutions Architect is $121,189 in the United States.

If that’s the career move you’re making, and you’re preparing for an AWS Solution Architect job interview, the information below will help you prepare. Chances are, you’re not the only one who is after that AWS job, so make sure you’re the best prepared, both in your AWS Solution Architect Certification and in your interview. Be ready to show your understanding of the key concepts, as well as the latest trends and best practices for working with the AWS architecture with some frequently asked AWS Solutions Architect interview questions.

What Do AWS Solution Architects Do?

AWS Solutions Architects are responsible for designing and managing applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. They work with developers and system administrators to ensure that applications are built to scale and perform optimally on the AWS platform. Solutions Architects also work with customers to help them understand how to best use the AWS platform to meet their business needs. In addition to their technical expertise, Solutions Architects must also be able to effectively communicate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Basic: This level covers fundamental concepts and skills required to become an AWS-certified solution architect. This includes understanding the basics of design patterns, data storage, security, and other topics related to the cloud computing environment.

Intermediate: This level covers advanced topics in designing applications for AWS, including understanding how to scale an application across multiple regions or availability zones and how to design for fault tolerance.

Advanced: This level covers advanced topics such as designing highly available.

Scenario-Based:  AWS Solution Architects are the most sought-after professionals in the IT industry. They have to be able to solve complex problems and design scalable solutions for businesses, which is why they need to be agile, creative and have a strong understanding of how all services work together.

  1. What is Amazon EC2?
  2. What Is Identity and Access Management (IAM) and How Is It Used?
  3. Can S3 Be Used with EC2 Instances, and If Yes, How?
  4. What Is Cloudtrail and How Do Cloudtrail and Route 53 Work Together? 
  5. How Do Amazon Rds, Dynamodb, and Redshift Differ from Each Other?
  6. What is AWS Auto Scaling and Load Balancer?
  7. What is AWS CloudFormation?
  8. What are the advantages of using AWS CloudFormation?
  9. What is Redshift?
  10. How do you send requests to Amazon S3?

AWS Solutions Architect Interview Questions and Answers

1. What is Amazon EC2?

EC2 is short for Elastic Compute Cloud, and it provides scalable computing capacity. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates the need to invest in hardware, leading to faster development and deployment of applications. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as needed, configure security and networking, and manage storage. It can scale up or down to handle changes in requirements, reducing the need to forecast traffic. EC2 provides virtual computing environments called “instances.”

2. What Are Some of the Security Best Practices for Amazon EC2?

Security best practices for Amazon EC2 include using Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access to AWS resources; restricting access by only allowing trusted hosts or networks to access ports on an instance; only opening up those permissions you require, and disabling password-based logins for instances launched from your AMI.

3. What is Amazon S3? 

S3 is short for Simple Storage Service, and Amazon S3 is the most supported storage platform available. S3 is object storage that can store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. Despite that versatility, it is practically unlimited as well as cost-effective because it is storage available on demand. In addition to these benefits, it offers unprecedented levels of durability and availability. Amazon S3 helps to manage data for cost optimization, access control, and compliance. 

4. Can S3 Be Used with EC2 Instances, and If Yes, How?

Amazon S3 can be used for instances with root devices backed by local instance storage. That way, developers have access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of websites. To execute systems in the Amazon EC2 environment, developers load Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) into Amazon S3 and then move them between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.

Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 are two of the best-known web services that make up AWS.

5. What Is Identity and Access Management (IAM) and How Is It Used?

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service for securely controlling access to AWS services. IAM lets you manage users, security credentials such as access keys, and permissions that control which AWS resources users and applications can access.

6. What Is Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Why Is It Used?

A VPC is the best way of connecting to your cloud resources from your own data center. Once you connect your datacenter to the VPC in which your instances are present, each instance is assigned a private IP address that can be accessed from your data center. That way, you can access your public cloud resources as if they were on your own private network.

7. What Is Amazon Route 53?

Amazon Route 53 is a scalable and highly available Domain Name System (DNS). The name refers to TCP or UDP port 53, where DNS server requests are addressed.

8. What Is Cloudtrail and How Do Cloudtrail and Route 53 Work Together? 

CloudTrail is a service that captures information about every request sent to the Amazon Route 53 API by an AWS account, including requests that are sent by IAM users. CloudTrail saves log files of these requests to an Amazon S3 bucket. CloudTrail captures information about all requests. You can use information in the CloudTrail log files to determine which requests were sent to Amazon Route 53, the IP address that the request was sent from, who sent the request, when it was sent, and more.

9. When Would You Prefer Provisioned IOPS over Standard Rds Storage?

You would use Provisioned IOPS when you have batch-oriented workloads. Provisioned IOPS delivers high IO rates, but it is also expensive. However, batch processing workloads do not require manual intervention. 

10. How Do Amazon Rds, Dynamodb, and Redshift Differ from Each Other?

Amazon RDS is a database management service for relational databases. It manages patching, upgrading, and data backups automatically. It’s a database management service for structured data only. On the other hand, DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service for dealing with unstructured data. Redshift is a data warehouse product used in data analysis.

11. What Are the Benefits of AWS’s Disaster Recovery?

Businesses use cloud computing in part to enable faster disaster recovery of critical IT systems without the cost of a second physical site. The AWS cloud supports many popular disaster recovery architectures ranging from small customer workload data center failures to environments that enable rapid failover at scale. With data centers all over the world, AWS provides a set of cloud-based disaster recovery services that enable rapid recovery of your IT infrastructure and data.

12. How do you create an AMI?

To create an AMI, you need to have a running instance of the Amazon Linux OS and then use the operating system's tools for packaging up your example into an AMI. You can also use third-party tools like Packer or Terraform to automate this process.

13. What is AWS VPC?

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) allows users to create a private, isolated section of the AWS cloud. A VPC is logically isolated from other virtual networks in the AWS cloud. The user controls the virtual networking environment, including selecting the IP address range, creating subnets, and configuring route tables and network gateways. VPCs are hosted in a specific region and are logically isolated from other VPCs in the same area.

14. What is AWS Auto Scaling and Load Balancer?

AWS Auto Scaling and Load Balancer services are two tools that can be used together to help manage server traffic. These services can help ensure that your website or application can handle sudden increases or decreases in traffic.

15. What is AWS SQS?

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fast, reliable, scalable, fully managed message queuing service. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a quick, flexible, fully managed push notification service that lets you send individual messages or fan-out messages to large numbers of recipients. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable email service that enables developers to send mail from within any application. 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 on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.

16. What is AWS OpsWorks?

AWS OpsWorks is a cloud orchestration technology. It enables developers and system administrators to manage server deployments and applications using the DevOps methodology. OpsWorks automates operational tasks such as software updates, instance scaling, and monitoring. It also provides a flexible architecture that enables you to use Chef and Puppet for configuration management.

17. What is AWS SNS?

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fast, fully managed push notification service that makes sending messages to mobile devices and other distributed systems easy. 

18. What is CloudFront?

Ans. Amazon CloudFront has become one of the world's most popular delivery networks (content delivery network, CDN) thanks to its ability to accelerate the transmission of static and dynamic web content, like .html, .css, and .js files. 

19. What are the main differences between 'horizontal' and 'vertical' scales?

SNS can scale horizontally to support large numbers of subscribers and deliver high throughput by automatically adding new Capacity Units as needed. SNS can also scale vertically to support large messages with multiple retries.

20. Explain the advantages of AWS's Disaster Recovery (DR) solution.

This is also among the most popular AWS interview questions asked in an AWS interview. 

The following are the advantages of AWS's Disaster Recovery (DR) solution:

  • AWS offers a cost-effective backup, storage, and DR solution, helping companies to reduce their capital expenses
  • Fast setup time and more significant productivity gains
  • AWS allows companies to scale up even during seasonal fluctuations
  • It seamlessly replicates on-premises data to the cloud.
  • Ensures quick retrieval of files

21. What are the different types of load balancers in EC2?

There are three types of load balancers in EC2 – 

  • Application Load Balancer – These balancers are designed to make routing decisions at the application layer. 
  • Network Load Balancer: Network load balancer handles millions of requests per second and helps make routing decisions at the transport layer.    
  • Classic Load Balancer: Classic Load Balancer is mainly used for applications built within the EC2-Classic network. It offers essential load balancing at varying Amazon EC2 instances.

22. What is DynamoDB?

DynamoDB is a NoSQL database. It is very flexible, performs quite reliably, and can be integrated with AWS! It offers fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. With the help of DynamoDB, you do not need to worry about hardware provisioning, setup, configuration, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling.

23. What is AWS CloudFormation?

AWS CloudFormation is an Amazon service dedicated to solving the need to standardize and replicate the architectures to facilitate their execution and optimize resources and costs in the delivery of applications or compliance with the requirements of the organization. CloudFormation allows the creation of a proprietary library of instance templates or architectures capable of being delivered at any time and in an organized manner through programming.

24. What are the advantages of using AWS CloudFormation?

It is one of the most popular AWS interview questions. There are many advantages of AWS CloudFormation, including the following.

  1. Reduces infrastructure deployment time
  2. Increases confidence in deployments
  3. Replicates complex environments, for example, have complex environments for development, pre-production, and production that are the same, or almost the same, simply by scaling up resources.
  4. Reuses the definitions between different products
  5. Reduces environment repair time

25. What is Elastic Beanstalk?

Flexible Beanstalk is an arrangement administration by AWS, utilized in different AWS applications, for example, EC2, S3, and Straightforward Warning Help.

26. What is Geo Restriction in CloudFront?

Geo restriction, also known as geoblocking, prevents users in specific geographic locations from accessing content you're distributing through a CloudFront web distribution.

27. What is a T2 instance?

T2 instances are designed to provide moderate baseline performance and the capability to burst to higher performance as required by workload.

28. What is AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda is a computing service that lets you run code in the AWS Cloud without provisioning or managing servers.

29. What is a Serverless application in AWS?

The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) extends AWS CloudFormation to provide a simplified way of defining the Amazon API Gateway APIs, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon DynamoDB tables needed by your serverless application.

30. What is the use of Amazon ElastiCache?

Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory data store or cache in the cloud.

31. Explain how the buffer is used in Amazon web services.

The buffer makes the system more robust in managing traffic or load by synchronizing different components.

32. Differentiate between stopping and terminating an instance.

When an instance is stopped, the model performs a normal shutdown and then transitions to a stopped state.

33. Can the private IP addresses of an EC2 while it is running/stopped in a VPC?

The primary private IP address cannot be changed. Secondary personal addresses can be unassigned, assigned, or moved between interfaces or instances at any point.

34. Give one instance where you would prefer Provisioned IOPS over Standard RDS storage.

Provisioned IOPS can be preferred over Standard RDS storage when we have batch-oriented workloads.

35. What are the different types of cloud services?

Various kinds of cloud administrations are:

  •  Programming as a Help (SaaS)
  •  Information as a Help (DaaS)
  •   Stage as a Help (PaaS)

36. What is the boot time for an instance store-backed instance?

The boot time for an Amazon Instance Store -Backed AMI is less than 5 minutes.

37. Will you use encryption for S3?

Yes, I will, as it is a proprietary technology. It's always a good idea to consider encryption for sensitive data on S3.

38. What is Identity Access Management, and how is it used?

It is a web service used to control access to AWS services securely. Identity Access Management allows you to manage users, security credentials, and resource permissions.

39. What is Sharding?

Sharding or horizontal partitioning is a scale-out technique for relational databases.

40. How do you send requests to Amazon S3?

We can achieve this using the REST API or the AWS SDK wrapper libraries, and these elements wrap up the underlying Amazon S3 REST API.

41. What is DynamoDB?

DynamoDB is a wholly overseen restrictive NoSQL data set, supporting key-worth and report information structures.

42. What is Redshift?

Redshift is a petabyte-size data warehouse service by Amazon. It is easy, cost-effective, and scalable and can be fully configured to analyze your data using the existing business intelligence tools.

43. Which data centers are deployed for cloud P@ssw0rd7computing?

In order to provide an overview of which data centers are deployed for cloud P@ssw0rd7computing, it is essential first to understand the definition of cloud computing. 

44. Which AWS services will you use to collect and process e-commerce data for near real-time analysis?

Following are the AWS administrations that will be utilized to gather and handle web-based business information for close to ongoing investigation:

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon ElastiCache

45. What is SQS?

Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a distributed message queuing service that acts as a mediator for two controllers. It is a pay-per-use web service.

46. What are the popular DevOps tools?

DevOps is a term for a set of practices that emphasize the collaboration and communication of software developers and information technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. 

47. What is Hybrid cloud architecture?

It is a sort of design where the responsibility is partitioned into equal parts, among which one is on the open burden, and the other is on the nearby stockpiling. It is a blend of on-premises, confidential cloud, outsider, and public cloud administrations between the two stages.

48. What Is Configuration Management?

Design the board is utilized to deal with the arrangement of frameworks and the administrations they give through code. 

49. What are the features of Amazon cloud search?

Amazon cloud search highlights:

  •  AutoComplete guidance
  •  Boolean Ventures
  •  Whole text search
  •  Faceting term helping
  •  Prefix Searches

50. How do you access the data on EBS in AWS?

Data cannot be accessible on EBS directly by a graphical interface in AWS.

Conclusion

These AWS Solutions Architect interview questions have given you insights into the kind of questions that might be asked in your next AWS Solutions Architect interview. We also have an article which includes comprehensive AWS interview questions, to brush up your AWS knowledge.

AWS is a multi-faceted cloud-computing solution made up of many web services with numerous benefits. In addition, it’s a changing and evolving solution, as Amazon continually looks for ways to improve the offering, to better serve the companies that use it. Prior to your interview, you might want to brush up on the latest AWS news to show that you are keeping up with those innovations.

You also might want to ensure the training you have received has adequately prepared you for that AWS job interview.Start your career in Cloud Computing today with our Post Graduate Program In Cloud Computing!

Our Cloud Computing Courses Duration and Fees

Cloud Computing Courses typically range from a few weeks to several months, with fees varying based on program and institution.

Program NameDurationFees
Post Graduate Program in Cloud Computing

Cohort Starts: 15 May, 2024

8 Months$ 4,500
AWS Cloud Architect11 Months$ 1,299
Cloud Architect11 Months$ 1,449
Microsoft Azure Cloud Architect11 Months$ 1,499
Azure DevOps Solutions Expert6 Months$ 1,649

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