11 most important AWS interview questions and answers

Amazon EC2 or Elastic Compute Cloud enables businesses to run their applications on the cloud. It is a Virtual Machine hosted in the cloud to which the business has an operating system-like control. It is a cloud-based server similar to an on-premises server, with all-time control so that you can access it at any time and from anywhere.

Snowball is a solution for data transfer that helps in the secure transfer of petabytes of data into and out of the AWS cloud. With the help of Snowball, the data can be transferred with security, at affordable cost, and in less time.

Cloudwatch is a monitoring service that helps to keep track of AWS services, hybrid services, and on-premises applications. It helps in collecting performance and operational data and provides actionable insights with which businesses can optimize operations and understand operational health. It keeps an eye on the complete stack and triggers alarms to automate actions and reduce the time for resolution. Thus, important business time is freed up and business can focus on growth.

The three basic cloud services are Computing, Networking, and Storage. Below are the AWS products built using these services:

• Computing: AWS products such as EC2, Lightstat, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, and Auto-scaling are built using the computing services.
• Networking: AWS products such as Amazon CloudFront, VPC, and Route 53 use Networking services.
• Storage: AWS products such as Elastic File System, Elastic Block Storage, S3, and Glacier use Storage services.

AWS auto-scaling helps in monitoring business applications and adjusting their capacity as needed to keep the performance steady and predictable. It also helps in achieving this in a cost-effective manner. Moreover, with AWS auto-scaling, businesses can scale applications across multiple resources in just a few minutes.

The main components of AWS are as follows:

• S3: S3 or Simple Storage Service is the storage service of AWS and helps in storing files. The service is object-based, thus up to 5 terabytes worth of, images, word files, pdf files, etc. can be stored using it. There is no such limitation on the amount of data you can store.
• Elastic Block Storage: Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage provides easy, scalable, and high-performance block storage designed for Amazon EC2. EBS Volumes are similar to raw and unformatted block devices. Additionally, they prevent component failure by automatic replication in the availability zone.
• Elastic Compute Cloud: EC2 or Elastic Compute Cloud gives businesses a secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It makes web-scale cloud computing possible for developers. It provides a secure Amazon environment for cloud computing and provides businesses with complete control over their cloud resources.
• Cloudwatch: CloudWatch monitors the AWS services, keeping track of their performance and operations. It provides data and insights that help in the automatic resolution of issues and reduce response time.
• Route53: Amazon Route53 is a Domain Name System (DNS) web service that has high availability and scalability. Businesses and developers can route end-users to internet applications by converting website names such as www.xyz.com into IP addresses such as 192.0.1.2. Computers use such numeric IP addresses to connect with each other. Amazon Route53 is IPv6 compliant.
• Simple Email Service: Amazon’s Simple Email Service or SES allows developers to send emails from within applications. The service cost-effectiveness, scalability, and flexibility. It saves configuration time and can be used across different operations such as transactional emails, mass emails, or marketing emails.

AWS services are connected via AWS CloudFront. This increases the speed and performance of Amazon cloud services. Geo-targeting in CloudFront is its ability to identify the origin country of a user and provide the developer or the business with the country code in the CloudFront-Viewer-Country header. Businesses can then send targeted or specific responses to users without needing country-specific URLs.

AWS Lambda is a compute service that is event-driven and does not require a server. It can run codes for almost all types of applications without managing servers. It is available for more than 200 AWS services and SaaS applications in a pay-per-use model.

AMI or Amazon Machine Image provides the information, about the operating system, applications, etc., that is needed to launch an instance. One must specify the AMI when launching an instance. For multiple instances with the same configuration, the developer can use the same AMI to launch those instances. Similarly, for multiple instances with different configurations, the developer can use different AMIs to launch different instances.

In every AWS account, one can create 100 buckets by default.

T2 instances are low-cost instance types for general use. They provide base-level CPU performance but can provide bursts above the baseline. They work best where full CPU capacity is not needed constantly and is only needed to burst higher CPU performance.