AWS EC2 Interview Questions

In the AWS cloud, Amazon EC2 offers scalable processing power. By utilizing it, businesses may create and scale-out applications more quickly without having to make an upfront hardware investment. An easy-to-use dashboard allows users to launch virtual servers, set up networking and security, and control cookies.

But in order to start your AWS EC2 career, you must plan some interviews and succeed in them. In that vein, here are some AWS EC2 interview questions and answers to aid you in the interview process.

• AWS EC2 Interview Questions and Answers for Freshers
• AWS Interview Questions and Answers For S3
• AWS Interview Questions and Answers For EC2
• AWS Interview Questions and Answers For VPC
• Frequently Asked Interviews Questions on AWS EC2

AWS EC2 Interview Questions and Answers for Freshers:

1. Name the three basic types of Cloud Services? 

Answer: Cloud Services can be mainly classified into three types, namely,

• Storage
• Networking
• Computing

2. Explain the relation between availability region and zone?

Answer: The distinct geographical areas are referred to as availability regions. 

For example - Asia South (Chennai) and US West 1 ( North Washington). 

However, the sites included under these regions are called availability zones.

Usually, only isolated regions are included, capable of replicating themselves as per requirement. 

3. Name the types of queues in SQS? 

Answer: The two known types of queues in SQS are as follows 

1. FIFO Queues
2. Standard Queues

4. Name the various product categories available under AWS?

Answer: We can categorize the following as top products under AWS: 

1. Analytics
2. Identity
3. Security
4. Compliance
5. Storage
6. Database
7. Machine learning 

5. Under AWS, mention the snow family members. 

Answer: The members of the snow family include

1. AWS Snowmobile
2. AWS Snowcone
3. AWS Snowball

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6. Name the attacks which the AWS Shield can prevent?

Answer: The AWS shield safeguards the Amazon EC2 from the common infrastructure layer and the DDoS attacks like UDP reflection attacks, such as NTP reflection, DNS reflection, SSDP reflection, etc.

7. Name the cheapest AWS region?

Answer: The US standard falls among the cheapest AWS regions in the World.

8. What can be the maximum possible size of an S3 bucket?

Answer: 5TB is the maximum possible size of an S3 bucket. 

9. Name the available regions in AWS? 

Answer: The AWS services can be availed across 18 regions across South America, North America, Asia Pacific, and the EU. 

10. Name the most popular AWS services?

Answer : 

1. Amazon Glacier
2. Amazon SNS 
3. Amazon Kinesis
4. Amazon VPC
5. Amazon CloudFront
6. Amazon S3
7. Amazon Lambda

11. Name the various Amazon EC2 instances? 

Answer: The various types of Amazon EC2 instances include 

1. Accelerated Computing
2. Compute-optimized Instances
3. Memory-optimized
4. Storage Optimized
5. General-purpose Instances.

12. List down the benefits of AWS?

Answer: The benefits of AWS include

1. Users can avail of the services of AWS at a lower cost.
2. These services are user-friendly and easy to use
3. They also contain several advantages that users can easily rely upon. 

13. Can we say that Amazon S3 is a Global service?

Answer: Amazon S3 has a global e-commerce network run on scalable storage infrastructure and a web interface for object storage. Thus one can say that Amazon S3 is a global service.

14. Are all the Amazon services region-based?

Answer: Not all the services provided are region-based, but most of them are. 

15. Mention the uses of Amazon's Lightsail's Container Services?

Answer: The uses are as follows 

1. It helps running containerized applications in the Cloud
2. The container services help run applications directly from web apps to multi-tiered microservices.
3. The Amazon Lightsail takes care of the underlying infrastructure while running applications.

16. Explain the function of Amazon EC2 in Amazon Auto Scaling fleet management.

Answer: 

1. Firstly, it has the job of balancing capacity across various availability zones.
2. Secondly, the malfunctioning EC2 instances are replaced with new ones.
3. Lastly, the health of the running EC2 instances is monitored in the cloud infrastructure. 

17. Distinguish between RPO and RTO in AWS?

Answer: 

RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective. It can be defined as the amount of time or data loss one can afford after a disaster in the service. It is generally measured in the sub-second range.

RTO can be defined as the time taken as the recovery time after a disaster to return to regular operations. Generally measured in minutes, the RTO stands for Recovery Time Objective.

18. Describe how Amazon ElastiCache functions?

Answer: The Amazon ElastiCache functions as a message, cache, queue, database, etc., which majorly serves as a fast in-memory data store. Nevertheless, it also supports session stores, gaming leaderboards, real-time transactions, and Business intelligence tools. 

19. Describe the connection between Amazon RDS and Neptune?

Answer: The connectivity of Amazon RDS with Amazon Neptune stands in the shared technologies while managing security group management, instance lifestyle management, and encryption at rest with Amazon KMS keys. 

20. How is content delivery speeded up using content delivery?

Answer: A Global network infrastructure consisting of more than 300 Points of Presence (PoPs) speeds up content delivery. The required optimization of the content delivery is achieved through Websockets and edge termination. 

21. Name the tools and techniques the user can employ to identify whether you are paying the correct amount?

Answer:  The ways by which you can check whether you are paying the correct amount are by employing the following resources

1. Cost explorer
2. AWS budget
3. Cost allocation Tags
4. By checking the top table services

22. Other than Console, what are the tools by which you can log into the cloud environment?

Answer: The tools that can help you log into cloud applications are as follows

1. AWS SDK
2. AWS CLI for Linux
3. AWS CLI for Windows
4. Eclipse
5. Putty

23. Name the services which can minimize DDoS attacks?

Answer: The services capable of reducing DDoS attacks are 

1. Amazon CloudFront
2. ALL
3. VPC
4. AWS Shield
5. AWS WAF

24. What ways to set up a system for monitoring metrics in real-time in AWS?

Answer: The application status of various custom events and AWS services can be monitored using Amazon Cloudwatch

1. AWS API calls 
2. Auto-scaling lifecycle events 
3. Scheduled events
4. State changes in Amazon EC2 

25. Name the various types of Cloud services?

Answer: The different types of cloud services are

1. Data as a service
2. Platform as a service 
3. Software as a service 
4. Infrastructure as a service

26. Name some of the AMI Designs?

Answer: The most common types of AMIs are as follows 

1. Just enough Baked AMI
2. Hybrid AMI
3. Fully Baked AMI

27. Name some of the DB Engines the user can use in AWS RDS?

Answer: DB Engines capable of being used in the AWS RDS are 

1. MariaDB
2. OracleDB
3. PostgreDB
4. MS-SQL DB
5. MYSQL DB

28. Name the different pricing models for EC2?

Answer: The different pricing models for EC2 are 

1. Scheduled
2. Reserved
3. Spot 
4. Dedicated
5. on-demand

29. Name the types of Volumes for EC2 instances?

Answer: The volume for EC2 instances is of two types 

1. EBS- Elastic Block Stores
2. Instance store volumes

Checkout AWS EC2 Instance Types and learn more about them

30. Define Cloud Watch.

Answer: A tool capable of monitoring different types of AWS services, such as application, health inspection, networking, etc., is called Cloudwatch.

31. What are the types in which Cloudwatch can be classified?

Answer: Cloudwatch can be classified into two types, namely,

1. Detailed Monitoring
2. Basic Monitoring

32. Define Glacier.

Answer: AN archiving or backup tool that helps in backing up data to S3 is referred to as Glacier.

33. Name the types of Routing policies in Route53.

Answer: The various types of Routing policies in Route53 are as follows 

1. Failover routing
2. Geolocation routing
3. Weighted routing
4. Multivalue answer 
5. Simple routing 
6. Latency routing

34. By Default, how many Elastic Ip Addresses does AWS offer?

Answer: By Default, Aws offer five elastic IP per region. 

35. Discuss the benefits of Cloud Computing?

Answer: The benefits of Cloud Computing are listed below

1. No IT maintenance 
2. Better performance
3. Device-independent
4. Lesser Computing Cost
5. Business connectivity

36. How can you access the AWS platform?

Answer: We can access the AWS platform in the following ways 

1. AWS SDK
2. AWS CLI
3. AWS Console.

AWS Interview Questions and Answers For S3

37. Name the different types of storage classes in Amazon S3?

Answer: The types of storage classes available are 

1. Amazon S3 standard-infrequent Access
2. Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage 
3. Amazon Glacier
4. Amazon S3 standard

38. How can Amazon VPC be monitored?

Answer: Amazon VPC can be monitored in the following ways

1. VPC Flow Logs 
2. Cloud watch Logs and Cloud watch

39. List the essential features of Amazon Cloud?

Answer: The features of the Amazon Cloud includes 

1. Prefix searches 
2. Range searches 
3. Entire text search
4. Boolean searches 

40. Mention the year when the company officially launched amazon company EC2?

Answer: In 2006, the company announced the official launch of EC2. 

41. Name the types of Load Balancers in AWS?

Answer: The various types of Load Balancers in AWS are 

1. Network Load Balancer 
2. Classic Load Balancer 
3. Application Load Balancer

42. What maximum number of buckets can users create in S3?

Answer: The maximum number of buckets completed in S3 is 100.

43. What are the possible storage options available for EC2 instances?

Answer: The possible storage options available for EC2 instances are 

1. Amazon S3
2. Amazon Storage 
3. Amazon EBS 
4. Amazon EC2 instance store

44. Name some of the popular DevOps tools?

Answer: The famous well known DevOps tools are listed below 

1. Git - version control system tool
2. Selenium - Continuous Testing Tool
3. Docker - Containerization Tool
4. Chef, Puppet, Ansible - Deployment and Configuration Management tool
5. Jenkins - Continuous Integration Tool
6. Nagios - Continuous Monitoring Tool

45. What are the layers of Cloud Architecture in AWS?

Answer: In AWS, the layers of Cloud Architecture are 

1. Capacity Controller 
2. Group Controller 
3. Cloud regulator 
4. Hub Controller 

46. Name the types of AMIs provided by AWS?

Answer: The AMI types provided by AW2S are as follows

1. EBS upheld
2. Example Store Upheld

47. Name the AWS service that only exists for images and rudimentary cache data?

Answer: The AWS service that exists only to rudimentary cache data and images is AWS Edge locations. 

48. What is the maximum boot time taken for a store-backed AMI?

Answer: The maximum boot time for an Amazon occasion store-backed AMI Is 5 minutes.

49. What are the processes through which Amazon Route 3 provides low latency and high availability?

Answer: The Amazon Route 3 provides both HIgh availability and low latency, which can be seen through 

1. Reliance
2. Ideal Locations 
3. Universally Distributed Servers.

50. Name the various types of policies

Answer: The different types of policies are

1. Access Control List
2. Meeting policies
3. Consent limits
4. Asset-based policies

51. What is the maximum number of Elastic IPs a user can create in AWS?

Answer: The maximum number of Elastic IPs created per AWS account per area is 5.

52. Under which Cloud service, we can categorize Load Balancer and DNS service?

Answer: IAAS-stockpiling Cloud administration includes DNS and Load Balancer administrations.

53. What are the available volumes in EBS?

Answer: The available volume types in EBS are 

1. Provisioned IOPS
2. Cold HODD
3. Throughput optimized
4. Magnetic 
5. General-purpose

AWS Interview Questions and Answers For EC2

54. List some connection issues that can be faced while connecting to an EC2 instance?

Answer: The connection issues which you might face while connecting to the EC2 instance are 

1. Host key missing
2. Connection timeout 
3. User key unrecognized
4. Server refusing key

55. What are the methods for encrypting data in S3?

Answer: The methods for encrypting data in S3 includes 

1. C(Client-side)
2. S3(AES 256 encryption)
3. KMS(Key management service).

56. Define SNS.

Answer: A web service of the AWS which notifies the user of any activity in the Cloud that requires attention as per the user's desire in the form of messages or emails is referred to as SNS or Simple Notification Service.

57. List the various types of Storage gateways.

Answer:  The types of storage gateways are as follows

1. Volume gateway
2. File gateway
3. Tape gateway

58. Suggest some types of backups in the RDS database.

Answer: The possible backups in the available database are as follows 

1. Manual
2. Automated

59. List the types of Virtualization in AWS?

Answer: Types of Virtualization in AWS are listed below as 

1. Paravirtualization
2. Hardware-assisted virtualization.

60. Explain the importance of buffers in AWS?

Answer: The role of a buffer is to synchronize and integrate various components in AWS. It links multiple apparatus delivering quick services at a uniform rate, thus maintaining equilibrium.

61. Define Snowball. 

Answer: The Snowball plays the role of transferring a large amount of data in and out of the AWS at a meager networking cost.

62. Define policies.

Answer: The permissions attached to the Created AWS users to access their accounts are referred to as policies.

63. Name the cloud watch merits available for EC2 instances?

Answer: In general, the cloud watch metrics available are 

1. CPU credit balance
2. CPU utilization
3. CPU credit balance
4. Disk writes
5. Disk reads
6. Networking 
7. Network out

Checkout: Choosing The Right EC2 Instance Type For Your Application

AWS Interview Questions and Answers For VPC

64. What are the ways of controlling the security of VPC?

Answer: The security of a Virtual Private Cloud can be regulated with the help of the Network Access Control List and Security Groups. 

65. Briefly describe the VPC peering connection?

Answer: The connection of two or more Virtual Private Clouds is achieved through VPC peering, where the connected VPCs function coherently.

66. Define Redshift.

Answer: Redshift is Amazon's data warehouse product through which we can access powerful and fast services.

69. How to upload a file of more than 100 MB in Amazon S3?

Answer: Multipart Upload Utility of the AWS helps upload large files. Here, the files are generally divided into parts and then uploaded parallel and independently to reduce the upload time. After completing the upload, the software will convert the files into a single file. 

69. How can the data in EBS be accessed?

Answer: The highly functional block-level storage provided by Elastic Block Storage can be connected to any EC2 instance and can be accessed with great ease.

70. What possible ways of speeding up data transfer in Snowball?

Answer: How Snowball can speed up data transfer is as follows 

1. By reducing encryption through the transfer of large files or batches of small files 
2. We need to prioritize activities in the snowball machine 
3. And also by performing multiple copy operations on the same Snowball device. 

71. Mention some security practices in Amazon EC2?

Answer: The best essential practices for security includes 

1. Review security infrastructure regularly
2. The access key and secure the AWS account
3. The unimportant applications and services are to be disabled.

72. Name the components of Auto-scaling?

Answer: The components of Auto-scaling include

1. Auto-scaling groups 
2. Launch configuration

73. Differentiate Stateful and Stateless Firewall.

Answer: A Stateful Firewall is a security group that helps in the regulation of traffic among various AWS resources and instances.

On the other hand, a security group that allows or denies traffic based on rules and is an Access control List at the Subnet level is called Stateless Firewall. 

74. Define Amazon DynamoDB?

Answer: Amazon's product provides a reliable and fast database with enhanced scalability for storing vast data and increased performance.

75. How can you differentiate between the Service and SAML Federated roles?

Answer: Access to AWS based on designed roles is permitted by Federated Roles.

76. Mention some of the benefits of STS (Security Token Service)?

Answer: The benefits of Security Token Service say that as the credentials are temporary, there is no necessity to rotate or revoke them.

77. Define IaaS.

Answer: The Cloud service, with the help of various services run on a pay-as-you-go basis in AWS, is called IaaS. 

78. What is ElectiCache?

Answer: The service that helps in the managing memory caching environment is denoted as Amazon ElastiCache

79. Mention the benefits of ElastiCache?

Answer: The benefits of ElastiCache are as mentioned below

1. Cost-effectiveness
2. Scalable Caching environment
3. High performance

80. Define PaaS.

Answer: The significant role of PaaS is to successfully run cloud platforms predominantly to monitor, develop and test the software that is functioning.

81. Write the archive storage capacity in Glacier?

Answer: The maximum storage capacity of Glacier is 40 TB. 

82. What is the purpose of Connection Draining?

Answer: The health check failed, and non-updated instances are rerouted with the help of Connection draining.

83. Explain Vertical and Horizontal scaling in AWS

Answer: Vertical scaling refers to adding resources to infrastructure to increase the performance and power of an existing machine.

In Horizontal scaling, the power and performance are enhanced by the augmentation of new machines.

84. What are the network parameters while launching instances in a cluster placement group?

Answer: On launching instances in Cluster placement groups, we can expect the following parameters 

1. 10 Gbps in a single row
2. 20 Gbps in multi-flow
3. However, the network traffic outside the group is restricted to 5 Gbps.

85. Suggest a possible way to reduce the Amazon EC2 instance load?

Answer: Attaching a load balancer to an autoscaling group effectively reduces the load by distributing it among various instances.

86. Discuss the purpose of lifecycle hooks is auto-scaling?

Answer: In Amazon AWS, there are situations when you need to install necessary software or extract log files. During these situations, lifecycle hooks help add wait time before an instance's termination or launch. 

87. Define Lambda.

Answer: Lambda facilitates deploying functions that are triggered by events and also help to run server-less applications 

88. Define SES.

Answer: SES is an Amazon service that helps send bulk emails to users at a low cost.

89. Explain lambda edge?

Answer: Functions such as the response to CloudFront events to execute functions in AWS without a managing server is performed by Lambda edge.

90. Explain Amazon kinesis Firehose?

Answer: Amazon Kinesis Firehose is a data Firehouse that helps stack information in devices or information stores without a continuous organization. 

Do you want to know more about AWS EC2? Take a Look at this AWS EC2 Tutorial

Frequently Asked Interviews Questions on AWS EC2

1. Define Amazon EC2 service?

Answer: Amazon EC2 is an on-demand computing resource that helps host applications. During uncertain workloads, it is amicable. This computing resource is time friendly and allows quick scaling as per the requirement.

2. Give the features of the Amazon EC2 service.

Answer: The features of the Amazon EC2 service are:

• Virtual computing environment
• Amazon EC2 provides configurations like CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity.
• It provides metadata.
• Data storage volumes that are deleted when you stop or terminate your instance

3. Discuss the security measures of Amazon EC2?

Answer: 

• Restricts access and makes it available only for trusted hosts or networks to access
• Only open up permissions according to your requirement
• Disable password-based login
• AWS identity usage and management of access to control AWS resources

4. What do you mean by Key-pairs?

Answer: Key-pairs is password or login information used to prove identity whenever connected to the Amazon EC2 instance.

5. What is the way to recover a lost EC2 instance?

• The root volume of the instance has to be detached
• By modifying the configuration file
• By restarting the original instance
• By attaching importance to a temporary instance

6. What is Amazon EC2 auto-scaling?

Answer: As per the changing demands in workloads, the Amazon EC2 service removes or adds EC2 instances. It also detects unhealthy EC2 instances.

7. What is the medium to recover EC2 instance by configuring CloudWatch

Answer: Following are the medium to retrieve EC2 samples:

• By creating an alarm using Amazon CloudWatch
• Then go to the Define alarm action tab 
• Finally, choose to recover this instance option

8. What do you know about fleet management in Amazon EC2 auto-scaling?

Answer: This efficient serving computing resource automatically replaces unhealthy EC2 instances with new instances. Therefore, we can say that it continuously surveils the health of Amazon EC2 instances.

9. Provide a brief difference between terminating and stopping an EC2 instance method.

Answer: When you stop an instance, it means that the model shuts down, and again when you start the sample, the attached volumes to the instance remain attached.

When you terminate an instance, it automatically deletes the EBS volumes attached; hence, the system can never restore it.

10. Provide a rough idea of the Amazon EC2 service structurally.

Answer: The basic structures are-

• It provides a virtual computing atmosphere.
• The storage capacity of the system is erased when you stop and or dismiss a process a process.
• Amazon EC2 delivers configurations like CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity.
• Using key pair, you can lock your data.

11. Discuss the different types of EC2 instances based on their cost.

Answer: There are three types of EC2 instances:

• Spot instance 
• Reserved Instance
• On-demand instance

12. How can S3 be discarded with EC2 instances?

Answer: The EC2 instances can be cast-off by native occurrence storage.

13. Discuss the regions and availability zones of Amazon EC2 instances.

Answer: This instance is hosted in multiple locations across the World. All the isolated places are called Availability zones.

14. How can the EBS device be rebooted? 

Answer: Rebooting an Ebs device is like rebooting your PC, which means it does not affect your hard disk. Rebooting does not have any effect as such.