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AWS & Cloud Interview Questions

IAM and account structure, compute from EC2 to Lambda, VPC networking, S3 and storage classes, RDS and DynamoDB, queues and events, observability, and the cost and architecture judgement interviews actually probe.

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4 Easy70 Medium26 Hard

Showing 1–20 of 100

#1What is the shared responsibility model?

Easy
Fundamentals & IAM

#2What is the difference between a region and an availability zone?

Easy
Fundamentals & IAM

#3How does IAM policy evaluation work?

Hard
Fundamentals & IAM

#4What is the difference between an IAM role and an IAM user?

Medium
Fundamentals & IAM

#5How do you scope IAM permissions well?

Hard
Fundamentals & IAM

#6Why use multiple AWS accounts?

Medium
Fundamentals & IAM

#7How do you handle credentials for an application running on AWS?

Medium
Fundamentals & IAM

#8What is CloudTrail and what should you do with it?

Medium
Fundamentals & IAM

#9What is infrastructure as code and which tool would you choose?

Medium
Fundamentals & IAM

#10What are service quotas and why do they cause outages?

Medium
Fundamentals & IAM

#11What is the difference between IaaS, PaaS and serverless in practice?

Medium
Fundamentals & IAM

#12How do you think about the Well-Architected Framework?

Medium
Fundamentals & IAM

#13What is the principle of designing for failure in the cloud?

Medium
Fundamentals & IAM

#14How do you decide between AWS, GCP and Azure?

Medium
Fundamentals & IAM

#15When would you choose Lambda over a container service?

Medium
Compute

#16What causes Lambda cold starts and how do you reduce them?

Medium
Compute

#17How does Lambda concurrency work and what is throttling?

Hard
Compute

#18What is the difference between ECS and EKS, and Fargate?

Medium
Compute

#19How does auto scaling work and what should it scale on?

Medium
Compute

#20What are spot instances and when can you use them?

Medium
Compute

Showing 1–20 of 100

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All 100 AWS & Cloud questions at a glance
  1. What is the shared responsibility model?(Easy)
  2. What is the difference between a region and an availability zone?(Easy)
  3. How does IAM policy evaluation work?(Hard)
  4. What is the difference between an IAM role and an IAM user?(Medium)
  5. How do you scope IAM permissions well?(Hard)
  6. Why use multiple AWS accounts?(Medium)
  7. How do you handle credentials for an application running on AWS?(Medium)
  8. What is CloudTrail and what should you do with it?(Medium)
  9. What is infrastructure as code and which tool would you choose?(Medium)
  10. What are service quotas and why do they cause outages?(Medium)
  11. What is the difference between IaaS, PaaS and serverless in practice?(Medium)
  12. How do you think about the Well-Architected Framework?(Medium)
  13. What is the principle of designing for failure in the cloud?(Medium)
  14. How do you decide between AWS, GCP and Azure?(Medium)
  15. When would you choose Lambda over a container service?(Medium)
  16. What causes Lambda cold starts and how do you reduce them?(Medium)
  17. How does Lambda concurrency work and what is throttling?(Hard)
  18. What is the difference between ECS and EKS, and Fargate?(Medium)
  19. How does auto scaling work and what should it scale on?(Medium)
  20. What are spot instances and when can you use them?(Medium)
  21. How do you choose an EC2 instance type?(Medium)
  22. What is the difference between vertical and horizontal scaling in the cloud?(Easy)
  23. How do you handle deployments on ECS or EKS without downtime?(Medium)
  24. What is the difference between an ALB, an NLB and CloudFront?(Medium)
  25. How do you run scheduled or background jobs?(Medium)
  26. What is the metadata service and why does IMDSv2 matter?(Hard)
  27. How do you handle configuration and feature flags across environments?(Medium)
  28. What is the difference between stateless and stateful workloads in the cloud, and why does it matter so much?(Medium)
  29. How is a VPC structured?(Medium)
  30. What is the difference between a security group and a network ACL?(Medium)
  31. What is a NAT gateway and why is it expensive?(Medium)
  32. What is a VPC endpoint and when do you need one?(Medium)
  33. How do you connect two VPCs or connect to on-premises?(Hard)
  34. How does Route 53 support high availability?(Medium)
  35. What does CloudFront actually do for you?(Medium)
  36. How do you debug a connectivity problem in a VPC?(Medium)
  37. What are VPC Flow Logs used for?(Medium)
  38. What is PrivateLink and how does it differ from peering?(Hard)
  39. How does cross-AZ data transfer cost work and why does it matter?(Hard)
  40. What is WAF and what should it protect against?(Medium)
  41. How do you expose a service to the internet securely?(Medium)
  42. What is the difference between public, private and isolated subnets?(Medium)
  43. What consistency guarantees does S3 provide?(Medium)
  44. How do S3 storage classes work and how do you choose?(Medium)
  45. How do you secure an S3 bucket?(Medium)
  46. What is a presigned URL and when do you use it?(Medium)
  47. How do you handle large file uploads to S3?(Medium)
  48. What is the difference between EBS, EFS and S3?(Easy)
  49. How do EBS volume types and IOPS work?(Hard)
  50. How do you design a backup and recovery strategy?(Medium)
  51. How does S3 lifecycle management work?(Medium)
  52. What is KMS and how does envelope encryption work?(Hard)
  53. How do you optimise S3 request performance?(Hard)
  54. How do you handle data residency and compliance requirements?(Hard)
  55. What does RDS Multi-AZ give you and what does it not?(Medium)
  56. When would you choose DynamoDB over a relational database?(Medium)
  57. How do you model data in DynamoDB?(Hard)
  58. What is Aurora and how does it differ from standard RDS?(Medium)
  59. How do you handle database connections from Lambda?(Hard)
  60. When do you add a read replica and what are its limits?(Medium)
  61. What is ElastiCache and when do you use Redis versus Memcached?(Medium)
  62. How do you run a database migration safely in production?(Hard)
  63. What is DynamoDB on-demand versus provisioned capacity?(Medium)
  64. How do you choose between Athena, Redshift and a data warehouse approach?(Medium)
  65. What is DynamoDB Streams and what is it used for?(Hard)
  66. How do you decide where a piece of data belongs?(Medium)
  67. When do you use SQS versus SNS versus EventBridge?(Medium)
  68. What delivery guarantees does SQS provide?(Hard)
  69. What is a visibility timeout and how do you set it?(Medium)
  70. What is a dead-letter queue and how do you use it well?(Medium)
  71. How does Lambda consume from SQS and what can go wrong?(Hard)
  72. What is Kinesis and how does it differ from SQS?(Hard)
  73. What is Step Functions for?(Medium)
  74. How do you achieve exactly-once semantics in a distributed system?(Hard)
  75. How do you handle backpressure between services?(Hard)
  76. What is the transactional outbox pattern and why does it matter on AWS?(Hard)
  77. What are the three pillars of observability and how do they map to AWS services?(Medium)
  78. What should you alert on?(Medium)
  79. How do you control CloudWatch Logs cost?(Medium)
  80. What is distributed tracing and why is it necessary?(Hard)
  81. How do you structure logs so they are actually useful?(Medium)
  82. What is an SLO and how does it change how you operate?(Hard)
  83. How do you investigate a production incident on AWS?(Medium)
  84. What is a health check and what makes a good one?(Medium)
  85. How do you do a safe deployment and roll back quickly?(Medium)
  86. What is chaos engineering and is it worth doing?(Medium)
  87. How do you monitor cost as an operational concern?(Medium)
  88. What is a runbook and why does it matter more than documentation?(Medium)
  89. Where does cloud spend usually go, and where are the easy savings?(Medium)
  90. How do Savings Plans and Reserved Instances work?(Medium)
  91. What is the total cost of ownership argument for managed services?(Medium)
  92. How do you design for multi-region and should you?(Hard)
  93. How do you approach a migration to the cloud?(Hard)
  94. What is lock-in and how much should you worry about it?(Medium)
  95. How do you decide between a monolith and microservices on AWS?(Medium)
  96. How do you size infrastructure for a new application with no traffic data?(Medium)
  97. What is caching strategy and where should a cache sit?(Medium)
  98. How do you think about security in a cloud architecture beyond IAM?(Hard)
  99. What would you check first if the AWS bill doubled unexpectedly?(Medium)
  100. What are the mistakes you most often see in cloud architectures?(Medium)