Amazon says that Netflix, Airbnb, Samsung, and NASA are among the many leading organizations that are powered by AWS. This is why AWS professionals earn some of the highest salaries in the tech industry, and AWS Certification is among the highest-paid certifications worldwide.
MindMajix has prepared AWS Interview Questions that are packed with advanced concepts to crack AWS interviews and secure your dream job as an AWS Engineer, AWS Solutions Architect, or AWS DevOps Engineer.
We have categorized these questions into different levels. They are:
In this section, we'll discuss some basic AWS interview questions and answers to help you get better acquainted with AWS fundamentals.
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a comprehensive cloud computing platform offered by Amazon, featuring more than 200 fully featured services across data centers worldwide.
The primary services are EC2 (Compute) for compute power, S3 (Storage) for storage, RDS (Database Service) for databases, Lambda (Serverless Application) for serverless applications, and IAM (Identity and Access Management) for identity and access management.
EC2 is a virtual server that you can rent on AWS. It lets you run an operating system and any programs that run on it to the fullest extent. EC2 is scalable and cost-effective for a variety of compute needs.
AWS S3, or Simple Storage Service, is an object storage service provided by AWS. It's for storing and accessing any and all data, anytime, anywhere on the web. Images, backups, logs, videos, and more can be stored in S3, and these can be as large as 5TB.
# Upload a file to S3 using AWS CLI
aws s3 cp myfile.txt s3://my-bucket/myfile.txt
# List objects in a bucket
aws s3 ls s3://my-bucket/
IAM (Identity and Access Management) is where you manage what you can access within your AWS account. We have a user, a group, and a role to which we add policies that define permissions. The golden rule: The principle of least privilege always applies.
The example policy below gives read-only access to S3.
// Example IAM policy: Allow read-only S3 access
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": ["s3:GetObject", "s3:ListBucket"],
"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::my-bucket/*"
}
]
}
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service. You write a function, upload it, and AWS runs it when triggered — no servers to manage. Lambda scales automatically, and you are billed only for the milliseconds of execution.
# Simple Lambda function example
import json
def lambda_handler(event, context):
name = event.get("name", "World")
return {
"statusCode": 200,
"body": json.dumps(f"Hello, {name}!")
}
CloudWatch continuously monitors your AWS services and applications. Can gather logs, metrics, events, and can configure alarms to notify or trigger an action such as scaling or message sending based on when a metric exceeds a threshold.
AWS Management Console is a browser-based interface that we use to manage all services in AWS. It allows us to launch EC2 instances, create S3 buckets, configure IAM roles, policies, etc., basically the entire environment management with no requirement for CLI.
The top product categories of AWS are:
DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL key-value and document database that seamlessly scales to handle millions of requests per second with single-digit millisecond latency. No server management required.
Best for gaming leaderboards, user sessions, IoT telemetry, e-commerce carts, etc.
An AMI (Amazon Machine Image) is essentially a template that contains the information required to launch an EC2 instance. This includes the root device volume (which is an image of the operating system and applications) and launch permissions. It's like a blueprint for your server.
If we stop an EC2 instance, it shuts down while preserving its state and data, and it can be restarted when needed. Terminating an instance is equivalent to deleting it, where all volumes attached get deleted, and it cannot be restarted.
A VPC lets us create a secure, isolated network within AWS, similar to a traditional on-premises setup. It includes subnets (split into public & private networks), route tables (to define traffic paths), IGW/NAT for internet connectivity, and Security Groups (stateful, instance-level) vs NACLs (stateless, subnet-level) for layered security.

The AWS Shared Responsibility Model divides security duties between AWS and the customer. AWS secures the infrastructure, like hardware, software, and data centers, while customers manage data, access, and application security.
It is a storage class designed for data archiving, enabling flexible data retrieval with high performance. So, data can be accessed faster in milliseconds, and S3 Glacier offers a low-cost service.
There are three S3 Glacier storage classes: Glacier Instant Retrieval, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
This AWS service helps deploy and manage applications in the cloud quickly and easily. Here, developers need to upload the code; after that, Elastic Beanstalk will handle the other requirements automatically. Simply put, Elastic Beanstalk manages everything from capacity provisioning and auto-scaling to load balancing and application health monitoring.
This AWS service monitors user activity on AWS infrastructure and records it. This service identifies suspicious activity on AWS resources using CloudTrail insights and Amazon EventBridge. So, you can get reasonable control over your resources and response activities. In addition, it analyses the log files using Amazon Athena.
This AWS service reduces application downtime at scale by quickly recovering applications, both on-premises and in the cloud, in the event of an application failure. It needs minimal computing power and storage and achieves point-in-time recovery.
It helps restore applications to the same state they were in when they failed within a few minutes. Mainly, it reduces recovery costs considerably compared with typical recovery methods.
Next, let's move on to advanced AWS interview questions and answers that will deepen your expertise with the platform.
| Feature | S3 | EBS |
| Type | Object storage | Block storage |
| Access | Any app, globally | Only attached EC2 instance |
| Use Case | Files, backups, static assets | OS volumes, databases |
| Speed | Slower | Faster |
| Persistence | Always | Persists until deleted |
Use S3 for static files and data sharing. Use EBS when EC2 needs fast, persistent disk access.
The EC2 instances are clustered according to the type of workload:
Auto Scaling will add or remove EC2 instances according to configured policies to maintain performance and cost. Two modes:
# Create a simple Auto Scaling group via CLI
aws autoscaling create-auto-scaling-group \
--auto-scaling-group-name my-asg \
--launch-template LaunchTemplateName=my-template \
--min-size 1 --max-size 5 --desired-capacity 2 \
--availability-zones us-east-1a us-east-1b
ELB can balance incoming traffic across multiple targets to prevent any single target from being overwhelmed. There are three types:
S3 Object Lambda lets you run Lambda code on data as it is being retrieved from S3 — without storing a modified copy. Use cases include redacting PII before returning data to an app, converting file formats on the fly, and filtering rows from a dataset.
# S3 Object Lambda — redact email addresses before returning data
import boto3
import re
def lambda_handler(event, context):
s3 = boto3.client('s3')
# Get the original object
input_s3_url = event["getObjectContext"]["inputS3Url"]
response = boto3.client('s3').get_object(
Bucket="my-bucket", Key="data.txt"
)
data = response['Body'].read().decode('utf-8')
# Redact email addresses
redacted = re.sub(r'[\w.-]+@[\w.-]+', '[REDACTED]', data)
# Return modified data
s3.write_get_object_response(
Body=redacted,
RequestRoute=event["getObjectContext"]["outputRoute"],
RequestToken=event["getObjectContext"]["outputToken"]
)
ECS is AWS-native and tightly integrated with services like IAM, VPC, and ELB. These are the best for applications that don't require multi-cloud portability or advanced orchestration.
EKS provides a fully managed Kubernetes environment that supports the full Kubernetes ecosystem, but it requires deeper expertise and has a steeper learning curve.
By default, Lambda runs outside your VPC. To access private resources such as RDS, you configure Lambda to run within your VPC by specifying a subnet and security group.
# Configure Lambda to run inside your VPC
aws lambda update-function-configuration \
--function-name my-function \
--vpc-config SubnetIds=subnet-abc123,SecurityGroupIds=sg-xyz456
Ensure outbound connections to the RDS port (3306 for MySQL) are enabled on the security group, and inbound connections to the Lambda security group are enabled on the RDS security group.
| CloudWatch | CloudTrail | |
| Purpose | Monitor performance and metrics | Audit API calls and user activity |
| What it track | CPU, memory, logs, alarms | Who did what, when, and from where |
| Use Case | Ops monitoring and alerting | Security, compliance, and forensics |
Both are essential. CloudWatch tells you something went wrong. CloudTrail tells you who caused it.
It is the blueprint that AWS uses to develop reliable, efficient, safe, and cost-optimized cloud systems. Organized into 6 pillars:
All serious AWS interview questions eventually relate to one of these pillars.
All the user's requests within a session are sent to the same target via sticky sessions (also called session affinity). AWS session sticky duration is defined by cookie: AWSELB. This gives the users a continuous experience.
We were told: There is no clear scope, timeline, or even success criteria. Since the steps were not yet clear to me, I decided not to wait and organized multiple stakeholder meetings across data engineering, finance, and product. To determine requirements, I made notes of my assumptions, planned a phased approach in Glue & S3, and set up weekly stand-ups.
The first phase was finally put into operation two weeks early, and the costs of processing pipeline gas were cut 35%.
I would follow the following steps:
In a previous role, we were experiencing occasional, difficult-to-reproduce latency spikes in production. I owned this problem by setting up comprehensive CloudWatch dashboards and enabling X-Ray tracing across all microservices. By analyzing metrics and tracing, I identified that a specific RDS instance was getting connection exhausted during peak loads, so I implemented an ElastiCache tier and a read replica configuration for our RDS to reduce load.
As a result, average response times decreased by 60%, and we did not experience any further latency-related issues that quarter.
In such a situation, I will implement Autoscaling Groups with scaling policies based on CPU utilization, request count, or target tracking. I would then use an Elastic Load Balancer to distribute traffic evenly across healthy instances.
Next, I would need to cache frequently accessed data using Amazon ElastiCache or CloudFront and ensure that databases can handle the load by using Aurora Serverless or read replicas.
We had to migrate a legacy PostgreSQL database that served a customer-facing application and meet a 15-minute maximum downtime. To ensure the cloud database was always in sync with on-prem, I continuously replicated it to the cloud using AWS Database Migration Service for two weeks before the cutover. Data integrity was checked during each phase, and two practice cutovers were performed in a lower environment.
On the actual cutover night, we updated the DNS record in Route 53 and switched over in less than 10 minutes, with no data loss.
Common causes:
Solutions:
Should there be any error, resources in the stack may not be created or updated. To address this, we use the AWS CLI to identify the error within the template, validate the template and use change sets to check what changes will be deployed when we deploy the corrected template.
Global Accelerator and Route 53 latency routing between regions and data replication using DynamoDB Global Tables or Aurora Global Database. Then I would have to deploy the same stacks in each region using CloudFormation or Terraform.
An important point to keep in mind is that it is always important to begin our answer by stating the constraint, for example, "The business requires X, and the constraint is Y, so therefore I would design Z.
The first step would be to get the application running across multiple Availability Zones. Then I will create an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic across EC2 instances across AZs.
Next, you need to ensure Autoscaling Groups work by making sure instances are added or removed as traffic evolves. If a relational database is used in the application, I will deploy an RDS Multi-AZ setup once it is complete.
Lastly, I would keep static assets in S3, use CloudFront as the CDN for performance.
The typical flow in an AWS pipeline is that you've got CodeCommit or GitHub as your source, CodeBuild for compilation, and then you run tests. Changes are pushed to EC2 or Lambda using CodeDeploy, and everything is orchestrated using CodePipeline.
We have images stored in ECR for use with ECS or EKS on containers. The entire flow is as if it were an event: a commit initiates the pipeline, tests execute, artifacts are created, and deployment occurs without manual intervention.
Here, it would be tested manually before going into production.
If the pipelines are more complex and production-ready, you can deploy the infrastructure with CloudFormation or CDK for automated changes and use blue-green or canary deployments in CodeDeploy to minimize risk.
Moreover, we can configure an auto-rollback if an alarm is triggered in CloudWatch. So if something deteriorates after the deployment, it self-corrects without any human interaction.
Secrets Manager handles runtime credentials, so nothing sensitive is hardcoded. In fact, many teams are now using GitHub Actions or GitLab CI instead of CodePipeline and are therefore connecting to AWS via OIDC-federated IAM roles.
It's a much cleaner and more secure way to manage access keys than long-lived access keys.
I have done this a couple of times during my release. We deployed a Pilot Light using RDS cross-region replicas, S3 CRR, and Terraform IaC. We also relied on Route 53 failover, achieving an RTO of 15 minutes and an RPO of 5 minutes, with quarterly game-day testing.
I can secure it through applying IAM least privilege, private VPC subnets, WAF, and KMS encryption everywhere. We can then monitor it with GuardDuty, CloudTrail, and Config. Store secrets in Secrets Manager and scan IaC.
Certainly! Our team had built insurance automation while working with an insurance client. We had Textract-parsed PDFs. Rekognition Custom Labels could identify car damage, and SageMaker scored fraud risk. We also used A2I for human review on uncertain cases.
We can do that in the following steps:
Finally, Model Monitor detects drift and Lambda + Step Functions trigger automated retraining.
Well! These interview questions and answers must have enhanced your understanding of AWS.
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Absolutely, you can learn AWS over time. You can build a deeper understanding of networking, Linux, and databases, and that will make it easier to learn AWS concepts.
The fundamental concepts of AWS can be mastered in 3–4 weeks. Post-training hands-on practice will make you a more proficient AWS professional faster.
AWS is Amazon's most widely used cloud platform and the largest in the global market. Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform, and has seamless integration with other enterprise products, such as Office 365 and Active Directory. They are both hybrid-deployable, but AWS has a longer history and more developed tooling for DevOps and serverless workloads.
Yes, absolutely. AWS professionals are in high demand across every industry. AWS engineers in India with 1–6 years of experience can earn between ₹8 LPA and ₹20 LPA, according to AmbitionBox. In the USA, they can earn between $110,000 and $175,000 annually, according to ZipRecruiter.
MindMajix offers the following e-learning resources:
We will cover the basic and advanced skills that are needed by an AWS practitioner.
Primary Skills
Secondary Skills
Let's take a brief look at the job description for AWS engineers or AWS professionals working in cloud roles.
Hope you have understood AWS to a great extent with these AWS Interview Questions and Answers. Further, the AWS developer skills and job preparation tips in this section should help you become interview-ready.
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Usha Sri Mendi is a Senior Content writer with more than three years of experience in writing for Mindmajix on various IT platforms such as Tableau, Linux, and Cloud Computing. She spends her precious time on researching various technologies, and startups. Reach out to her via LinkedIn and Twitter.