Top 50 AWS Soluction Architect Interview Questions For Experienced Pdf

1. What is the AWS Storage Gateway?
AnswerThe AWS Storage Gateway is a service connecting an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage, to provide seamless and secure integration between an organization’s on-premises IT environment and AWS storage infrastructure.
Notice when to use it, and how to use it for recovery or backup storage option.

2. How do I transfer my existing domain name registration to Amazon Route 53 without disrupting my existing web traffic?
Answer: You will need to get a list of the DNS record data for your domain name first, it is generally available in the form of a “zone file” that you can get from your existing DNS provider. Once you receive the DNS record data, you can use Route 53’s Management Console or simple web-services interface to create a hosted zone that will store your DNS records for your domain name and follow its transfer process. It also includes steps such as updating the nameservers for your domain name to the ones associated with your hosted zone. For completing the process you have to contact the registrar with whom you registered your domain name and follow the transfer process. As soon as your registrar propagates the new name server delegations, your DNS queries will start to get answered.

3. What are key considerations/guidelines when you’re going to make some AWS Architecture recommendations?
Answer:
Demonstrate with some examples, how you make decisions and recommendations about AWS Architecture topics.

4. If my AWS Direct Connect fails, will I lose my connectivity?
Answer: If a backup AWS Direct connects has been configured, in the event of a failure it will switch over to the second one. It is recommended to enable Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) when configuring your connections to ensure faster detection and failover. On the other hand, if you have configured a backup IPsec VPN connection instead, all VPC traffic will failover to the backup VPN connection automatically. Traffic to/from public resources such as Amazon S3 will be routed over the Internet. If you do not have a backup AWS Direct Connect link or an IPsec VPN link, then Amazon VPC traffic will be dropped in the event of a failure.

5. What are key considerations/guidelines when you’re going to make some AWS Architecture recommendations?
Answer:
Demonstrate with some examples, how you make decisions and recommendations about AWS Architecture topics.

6. What are the security laws which are implemented to secure data in a Cloud?
Answer:
The security laws which are implemented to secure data in the cloud are:

  • Processing
  • File
  • Output reconciliation
  • Input Validation
  • Security and Backup

7. What is auto-scaling? How does it work?
Answer: Autoscaling is a feature of AWS which allows you to configure and automatically provision and spin up new instances without the need for your intervention. You can do this by setting thresholds and metrics to monitor. When those thresholds are crossed, a new instance of your choosing will be spun up, configured, and rolled into the load balancer pool.

8. Can I retrieve only a specific element of the data, if I have a nested JSON data in DynamoDB?
Answer: Yes. When using the GetItem, BatchGetItem, Query or Scan APIs, you can define a Projection Expression to determine which attributes should be retrieved from the table. Those attributes can include scalars, sets, or elements of a JSON document.

9. List out different layers which define cloud architecture?
Answer:

  • There are five layers:
  • Cloud Controller (CLC)
    Walrus
  • Cluster Controller
  • Storage Controller (SC)
  • Node Controller (NC)

10. Differentiate between stopping and terminating an instance?
Answer: When an instance is stopped, the instance performs a normal shutdown and then transitions to a stopped state.
When an instance is terminated, the instance performs a normal shutdown, then the attached Amazon EBS volumes are deleted unless the volume’s delete on termination attribute is set to false.

11. How to control the access to your resources located at AWS?
Answer: There is a service called AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) that enables you to securely control access to AWS services and resources for your users. Using IAM, you can create and manage AWS users and groups and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources.
For protecting your data, there is AWS Key Management Service (KMS), it is a managed service that helps make it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data.

12. How to increase the availability of your applications?
Answer: How to avoid bottlenecks in the performance of your applications? Describe AWS load balancing solutions. Remember that services like Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances in the cloud. It enables you to achieve greater levels of fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the required amount of load balancing capacity required to distribute application traffic.
Describe ELB services, the difference between application and classic load balancing service.

13. What are the Security Best Practices for Amazon EC2?
Answer:
There are several best practices for secure Amazon EC2. A few of them are given below:
Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access to your AWS resources.
Restrict access by only allowing trusted hosts or networks to access ports on your instance.
Review the rules in your security groups regularly, and ensure that you apply the principle of least
Privilege – only open up permissions that you require.
Disable password-based logins for instances launched from your AMI. Passwords can be found or cracked, and are a security risk.

14. Can I run more than one DB instance for Amazon RDS for free?
Answer: Yes. You can run more than one Single-AZ Micro database instance, that too for free! However, any use exceeding 750 instance hours, across all Amazon RDS Single-AZ Micro DB instances, across all eligible database engines and regions, will be billed at standard Amazon RDS prices. For example: if you run two Single-AZ Micro DB instances for 400 hours each in a single month, you will accumulate 800 instance hours of usage, of which 750 hours will be free. You will be billed for the remaining 50 hours at the standard Amazon RDS price.

15. Can S3 be used with EC2 instances, if yes, how?
Answer: Yes, it can be used for instances with root devices backed by local instance storage. By using Amazon S3, developers have access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. In order to execute systems in the Amazon EC2 environment, developers use the tools provided to load their Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) into Amazon S3 and to move them between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.
Another use case could be for websites hosted on EC2 to load their static content from S3.

16. If I’m using Amazon CloudFront, can I use Direct Connect to transfer objects from my own data center?
Answer: Yes. Amazon CloudFront supports custom origins including origins from outside of AWS. With AWS Direct Connect, you will be charged with the respective data transfer rates.

17. Can I connect my corporate data center to the Amazon Cloud?
Answer: Yes, you can do this by establishing a VPN(Virtual Private Network) connection between your company’s network and your VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), this will allow you to interact with your EC2 instances as if they were within your existing network.

18. What are the different components used in AWS?
Answer:
The components that are used in AWS are:
Amazon S3: it is used to retrieve input data sets that are involved in making a cloud architecture and also used to store the output data sets that are the result of the input.
Amazon SQS: it is used for buffering requests that are received by the controller of the Amazon. It is the component that is used for communication between different controllers.
Amazon SimpleDB: it is used to store intermediate status log and the tasks that are performed by the user/
Amazon EC2: it is used to run a large distributed processing on the Hadoop cluster. It provides automatic parallelization and job scheduling.

19. How many buckets can be created in AWS by default?
Answer:
By default, 100 buckets can be created.

20. What challenges are you looking for the position as an AWS Solution Architect?
Answer: Discover and explain what is the candidate/job purpose and objective into the company on this role.
How do you share (describe) your ideas and knowledge about AWS services/products to customers or other people of your team? Please describe…

21. Is one Elastic IP address enough for every instance that I have running?
Answer: Depends! Every instance comes with its own private and public address. The private address is associated exclusively with the instance and is returned to Amazon EC2 only when it is stopped or terminated. Similarly, the public address is associated exclusively with the instance until it is stopped or terminated. However, this can be replaced by the Elastic IP address, which stays with the instance as long as the user doesn’t manually detach it. But what if you are hosting multiple websites on your EC2 server, in that case, you may require more than one Elastic IP address.

22. What kind of network performance parameters can you expect when you launch instances in a cluster placement group?
Answer:
The network performance depends on the instance type and network performance specification, if launched in a placement group you can expect up to
10 Gbps in a single-flow,
20 Gbps in multi-flow i.e full duplex
Network traffic outside the placement group will be limited to 5 Gbps(full-duplex).

23. Explain what is T2 instances?
Answer: T2 instances are designed to provide moderate baseline performance and the capability to burst to higher performance as required by workload.

24. What is the AWS free tier?
Answer: Explain how the AWS Free Tier is designed to enable you to get hands-on experience with AWS cloud services; and what AWS services are freely available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date, as well as additional service offers that do not automatically expire at the end of your 12-month AWS Free Tier term. AWS Training Online

25. What is AWS?
Answer: Highlight AWS leadership in the cloud. Describe briefly some of the AWS services with which you feel at ease, for example, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, Cloudformation etc…
Note that AWS has comprehensive security capabilities that support virtually any cloud workload. 

26. Could you please show us?
Answer: This will reveal if the candidate has excellent communication and presentation skills and really enjoy sharing his/her expertise and knowledge as an advocate.

Could you please describe a situation, where you interacted with CxOs people or other business leaders? Understand if the candidate has had communication and relationship with C-level people, and how has managed those relationships.  (Interview Questions and Answers)

27. How is Amazon RDS, DynamoDB and Redshift different?
Answer: Amazon RDS is a database management service for relational databases, it manages patching, upgrading, backing up of data, etc. of databases for you without your intervention. RDS is a Db management service for structured data only.
DynamoDB, on the other hand, is a NoSQL database service, NoSQL deals with unstructured data.
Redshift is an entirely different service, it is a data warehouse product and is used in data analysis.

28. What is Amazon S3?
Answer: Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is object storage with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web.

29. What are the different types of cloud services?
Answer: Software as a Service (SaaS), Data as a Service (DaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

30. What is auto-scaling?
Answer: Auto-scaling is a feature of AWS which allows you to configure and automatically provision and spin-up new instances without the need for your intervention.

 

aws-training-svr-technologies-01-min

31. Explain can you vertically scale an Amazon instance? How?
Answer:
Yes, you can vertically scale on Amazon instance. For that
=> Spin up a new larger instance than the one you are currently running
=> Pause that instance and detach the root webs volume from the server and discard
=> Then stop your live instance and detach its root volume
=> Note the unique device ID and attach that root volume to your new server
=> And start it again

32. How can you send a request to Amazon S3?
Answer: Amazon S3 is a REST service, you can send a request by using the REST API or the AWS SDK wrapper libraries that wrap the underlying Amazon S3 REST API.

33. How do you approach a pre-sales engagement as an AWS Solution Architect?
Answer: Please describe It makes interviewers understand how the candidate creates a relationship and collaborate with other AWS work teams.

34. How many data centers are deployed for cloud computing? What are they?
Answer: There are two data centers in cloud computing:
Containerized Datacenters
Low-Density Datacenters

35. What happens to my backups and DB Snapshots if I delete my DB Instance?
Answer: When you delete a DB instance, you have an option of creating a final DB snapshot, if you do that you can restore your database from that snapshot. RDS retains this user-created DB snapshot along with all other manually created DB snapshots after the instance is deleted, also automated backups are deleted and only manually created DB Snapshots are retained.

36. What happens when one of the resources in a stack cannot be created successfully in AWS OpsWorks?
Answer: When an event like this occurs, the “automatic rollback on error” feature is enabled, which causes all the AWS resources which were created successfully till the point where the error occurred to be deleted. This is helpful since it does not leave behind any erroneous data, it ensures the fact that stacks are either created fully or not created at all. It is useful in events where you may accidentally exceed your limit of the no. of Elastic IP addresses or maybe you may not have access to an EC2 AMI that you are trying to run etc.

37. How is stopping and terminating an instance different from each other?
Answer: Starting, stopping and terminating are the three states in an EC2 instance, let’s discuss them in detail:
Stopping and Starting an instance: When an instance is stopped, the instance performs a normal shutdown and then transitions to a stopped state. All of its Amazon EBS volumes remain attached, and you can start the instance again at a later time. You are not charged for additional instance hours while the instance is in a stopped state.
Terminating an instance: When an instance is terminated, the instance performs a normal shutdown, then the attached Amazon EBS volumes are deleted unless the volume’s delete on termination attribute is set to false. The instance itself is also deleted, and you can’t start the instance again at a later time.

38. How cloud you implement a DNS service in AWS?
Answer: How could you register a new domain name? How could you implement a low-latency, fault-tolerant architectures managing Web application traffic? Explain services like Amazon Route 53, a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. You can use Amazon Route 53 to configure DNS health checks to route traffic to healthy endpoints or to independently monitor the health of your application and its endpoints. Amazon Route 53 makes it possible for you to manage traffic globally through a variety of routing types, including Latency Based Routing, Geo DNS, and Weighted Round Robin—all of which can be combined with DNS Failover to enable a variety of low-latency, fault-tolerant architectures. Don’t forget that Amazon Route 53 also offers Domain Name Registration – you can purchase and manage domain names such as example.com and Amazon Route 53 will automatically configure DNS settings for your domains. (Amazon Web Services Online Training)

39. What other AWS services do you use at the application level?
Answer: Describe in detail all the application services provided by AWS like SNS, SES, SQS, and Workflow.
Remember that Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective email-sending service for businesses and developers. On the other hand, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud. It provides developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective capability to publish messages from an application and immediately deliver them to subscribers or other applications. Finally, Amazon Simple Queue Service offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed application components performing different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. Amazon SQS makes it easy to build an automated workflow.

Don’t forget that Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF) is a web service that makes it easy to coordinate work across distributed application components. Amazon SWF enables applications for a range of use cases, including media processing, web application back-ends, business process workflows, and analytics pipelines, to be designed as coordination of tasks.

40. As an AWS Solution Architect, how could you implement Disaster recovery on AWS?
Answer: If you want to enable faster disaster recovery of their critical IT systems without incurring the infrastructure expense of a second physical site, you should use AWS services. Remember, that the AWS platform supports many popular disaster recovery (DR) architectures, from “pilot light” environments that are ready to scale up at a moment’s notice, to “hot standby” environments that enable rapid failover and enable rapid recovery of your IT infrastructure and data.

41. Explain Stopping, Starting, and Terminating an Amazon EC2 instance?
Answer: Stopping and Starting an instance: When an instance is stopped, the instance performs a normal shutdown and then transitions to a stopped state. All of its Amazon EBS volumes remain attached, and you can start the instance again at a later time. You are not charged for additional instance hours while the instance is in a stopped state.
Terminating an instance: When an instance is terminated, the instance performs a normal shutdown, then the attached Amazon EBS volumes are deleted unless the volume’s delete on termination attribute is set to false. The instance itself is also deleted, and you can’t start the instance again at a later time.

42. Explain what is S3?
Answer: S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. You can use the S3 interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time and from anywhere on the web. For S3, the payment model is “pay as you go”.

43. How can I load my data to Amazon Redshift from different data sources like Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon EC2?
Answer: You can load the data in the following two ways:
You can use the COPY command to load data in parallel directly to Amazon Redshift from Amazon EMR, Amazon DynamoDB, or any SSH-enabled host.
AWS Data Pipeline provides a high performance, reliable, fault-tolerant solution to load data from a variety of AWS data sources. You can use the AWS Data Pipeline to specify the data source, desired data transformations, and then execute a pre-written import script to load your data into Amazon Redshift.

44. What is the difference between Scalability and Elasticity?
Answer: Scalability is the ability of a system to increase its hardware resources to handle the increase in demand. It can be done by increasing the hardware specifications or increasing the processing nodes.
Elasticity is the ability of a system to handle the increase in the workload by adding additional hardware resources when the demand increases(same as scaling) but also rolling back the scaled resources when the resources are no longer needed. This is particularly helpful in Cloud environments, where a pay per use model is followed.

45. Give one instance where you would prefer Provisioned IOPS over Standard RDS storage?
Answer:
When you have batch-oriented workloads.
These are some of the popular questions asked in AWS architect interviews. Always be prepared to answer all types of questions — technical skills, interpersonal, leadership or methodology. If you are someone who has recently started your career in cloud computing, you can always get certified in one of the technical courses like AWS Architect to get the requisite knowledge and skills.

46. How is AWS Elastic Beanstalk different than AWS OpsWorks?
Answer: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an application management platform while OpsWorks is a configuration management platform. BeanStalk is an easy to use service which is used for deploying and scaling web applications developed with Java, .Net, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go and Docker. Customers upload their code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment. The application will be ready to use without any infrastructure or resource configuration.
In contrast, AWS Opsworks is an integrated configuration management platform for IT administrators or DevOps engineers who want a high degree of customization and control over operations.

47. How to implement a private connection to AWS Services?
Answer: AWS offers a service called AWS Direct Connect that lets you establish a dedicated network connection between your network and one of the AWS Direct Connect locations. This dedicated connection can be partitioned into multiple virtual interfaces as a VLAN. This allows you to use the same connection to access public resources using public IP address space, and private resources using private IP space while maintaining network separation between the public and private environments.
Describe the advantages and disadvantages of using private network connections.

48. Should encryption be used for S3?
Answer: Encryption should be considered for sensitive data as S3 is a proprietary technology.

49. How to do it?
Answer:
You can refer this tutorial for the same.

50. What is Simple DB?
Answer:
It is a structured data store that supports indexing and data queries to both EC2 and S3.

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