INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

AWS Interview Questions

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Showing 52 practice prompts

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AWS

What is AWS IAM and what are the differences between IAM Users, Groups, Roles, and Policies?

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls authentication and authorization across AWS resources. An IAM User represents an individual person or service with permanent credentials. An IAM Group is a collection of users inheriting shared permissions. An IAM Role has no permanent credentials and is assumed temporarily by users, services (e.g. EC2, Lambda), or cross-account identities. An IAM Policy is a JSON document explicitly defining Allow or Deny permissions on actions and resources.

CompanyAmazon◦ IAM & Security

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AWS

What are the primary Amazon S3 storage classes and when should you use each?

S3 Standard provides high throughput and low latency for frequently accessed data. S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (IA) is for data accessed less often but requiring millisecond retrieval at lower storage cost. S3 Glacier Flexible Recovery provides low-cost archiving with retrieval times from minutes to hours. S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest storage cost in the cloud designed for multi-year compliance retention with 12-hour retrieval times.

CompanyAmazon◦ Storage

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AWS

What are the primary EC2 pricing models: On-Demand, Reserved, Savings Plans, and Spot Instances?

On-Demand charges fixed hourly/second rates without commitments, ideal for unpredictable spiky workloads. Reserved Instances (RI) and Savings Plans offer up to 72% discounts in exchange for 1- or 3-year hourly spend commitments, best for steady-state production architectures. Spot Instances offer up to 90% discounts by utilizing spare AWS compute capacity, but can be reclaimed with a 2-minute notice, ideal for fault-tolerant batch processing and stateless container workers.

CompanyNetflix◦ Compute

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AWS

What is an Amazon VPC, and what distinguishes a Public Subnet from a Private Subnet?

An Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is an isolated virtual network dedicated to your AWS account. A public subnet has a route table routing default traffic (0.0.0.0/0) to an Internet Gateway (IGW), allowing instances with public IPs to communicate with the internet. A private subnet does not route directly to an IGW; instances within it access the internet exclusively outbound via a NAT Gateway located in a public subnet.

CompanyAmazon◦ Networking

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AWS

What is the difference between Security Groups and Network Access Control Lists (NACLs)?

Security Groups operate at the virtual network interface (ENI) level, are stateful (inbound return traffic is automatically allowed regardless of outbound rules), and evaluate all rules before permitting traffic. NACLs operate at the subnet boundary level, are stateless (inbound and outbound traffic must be explicitly permitted), and evaluate rules in strict numerical order (rule numbers 100, 200, etc.).

CompanyCapital One◦ Networking & Security

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