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Table of Content
200 Beginner-Level AWS Interview Questions with Expert Answers..................................... 7
1. What is AWS and how does it help businesses?.................................................................7
2. What are AWS regions?...................................................................................................... 7
3. What is an Availability Zone?...............................................................................................7
4. What is Amazon EC2?.........................................................................................................7
5. What is the difference between EC2-Classic and EC2-VPC?............................................. 8
6. What are AWS AMIs?.......................................................................................................... 8
7. What is an instance type in AWS EC2?...............................................................................8
8. What is AWS Lambda?........................................................................................................8
9. What is AWS Glue?............................................................................................................. 8
10. How does AWS CloudFormation help manage resources?...............................................8
11. What is AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)?...................................................................... 9
12. What is the purpose of AWS S3 versioning?..................................................................... 9
13. Why do we make subnets in AWS?...................................................................................9
14. What are AWS policies and what are the different types?.................................................9
15. What are the different ways to encrypt a file in S3?.......................................................... 9
16. Is there a way to upload a file greater than 100 megabytes on Amazon S3?................. 10
17. What happens to an Elastic IP if you stop an EC2 instance and start it again?.............. 10
18. What service would you suggest for sending compliance emails using your domain?... 10
19. How do you handle large amounts of traffic for an RDS instance?................................. 10
20. How can you reduce load on an EC2 instance when CPU utilization reaches 80 percent?
11
21. What is the difference between On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot EC2 instances?....... 11
22. What is an EC2 placement group?.................................................................................. 11
23. What is an EC2 security group?...................................................................................... 11
24. What is the difference between public, private, and Elastic IP addresses?.....................12
25. What is the purpose of user data in EC2?....................................................................... 12
26. What is an EC2 instance store?...................................................................................... 12
27. What is an Auto Scaling group?...................................................................................... 12
28. What is a launch configuration in Auto Scaling?..............................................................12
29. What are EC2 instance metadata and dynamic data?.................................................... 13
30. What is the difference between stopping and terminating an EC2 instance?..................13
31. What is Amazon S3?....................................................................................................... 13
32. What are S3 buckets?..................................................................................................... 13
33. What are the storage classes available in Amazon S3?..................................................13
34. What is S3 lifecycle management?..................................................................................14
35. What is the maximum size of an S3 object?....................................................................14
36. How can you secure data in S3?..................................................................................... 14

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37. What is S3 Cross-Region Replication?............................................................................15
38. What is S3 Transfer Acceleration?.................................................................................. 15
39. What is the difference between a pre-signed URL and a S3 static website?.................. 15
40. How does S3 versioning work?....................................................................................... 15
41. What is Amazon RDS?.................................................................................................... 15
42. What is the difference between Amazon RDS and Amazon EC2 running a database?..16
43. What is Multi-AZ deployment in Amazon RDS?.............................................................. 16
44. What is a read replica in Amazon RDS?......................................................................... 16
45. What is Amazon DynamoDB?......................................................................................... 16
46. What are the key features of DynamoDB?...................................................................... 16
47. What is the difference between a partition key and a sort key in DynamoDB?............... 17
48. What is Amazon Aurora?.................................................................................................17
49. What is Amazon ElastiCache?........................................................................................ 17
50. What is Amazon Redshift?.............................................................................................. 17
51. What is Amazon VPC?.................................................................................................... 18
52. What is a subnet in AWS?............................................................................................... 18
53. What is an Internet Gateway?......................................................................................... 18
54. What is a NAT Gateway?.................................................................................................18
55. What is a route table in AWS?......................................................................................... 18
56. What is a security group in AWS?................................................................................... 19
57. What is a Network ACL?..................................................................................................19
58. What is a VPC endpoint?.................................................................................................19
59. What is AWS Direct Connect?......................................................................................... 19
60. What is a VPC peering connection?................................................................................ 19
61. What is IAM?................................................................................................................... 20
62. What are the key components of IAM?............................................................................20
63. What is the difference between an IAM role and an IAM user?.......................................20
64. What is an IAM policy?.................................................................................................... 20
65. What is the principle of least privilege and why is it important?.......................................21
66. What is AWS Organizations?...........................................................................................21
67. What is AWS CloudTrail?.................................................................................................21
68. What is AWS Shield?.......................................................................................................21
69. What is AWS WAF?......................................................................................................... 21
70. What is Amazon GuardDuty?.......................................................................................... 22
71. What is serverless computing?........................................................................................22
72. How does AWS Lambda work?....................................................................................... 22
73. What are the limitations of AWS Lambda?...................................................................... 22
74. What programming languages are supported by AWS Lambda?....................................23
75. What is the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM)?................................................. 23
76. What are Lambda layers?................................................................................................23
77. What is AWS Step Functions?.........................................................................................23

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78. What is Amazon API Gateway?.......................................................................................24
79. How does AWS Lambda pricing work?............................................................................24
80. What is Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)?...........................................................................24
81. What is Amazon CloudWatch?........................................................................................ 24
82. What are CloudWatch Metrics?....................................................................................... 24
83. What are CloudWatch Alarms?........................................................................................25
84. What is CloudWatch Logs?..............................................................................................25
85. What is AWS CloudTrail?.................................................................................................25
86. What is AWS Config?...................................................................................................... 25
87. What is AWS Systems Manager?....................................................................................25
88. What is AWS Trusted Advisor?........................................................................................26
89. What is AWS Service Health Dashboard?.......................................................................26
90. What is AWS X-Ray?.......................................................................................................26
91. What is Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)?................................................................... 26
92. What are the different types of EBS volumes?................................................................ 27
93. What is an EBS snapshot?.............................................................................................. 27
94. What is Amazon EFS?.....................................................................................................27
95. What is the difference between EBS and EFS?.............................................................. 27
96. What is Amazon FSx?..................................................................................................... 28
97. What is AWS Storage Gateway?..................................................................................... 28
98. What is Amazon S3 Glacier?...........................................................................................28
99. What is S3 Object Lock?................................................................................................. 28
100. What is AWS Snow Family?.......................................................................................... 28
101. What is Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)?.......................................................29
102. What is Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)?.................................................... 29
103. What is AWS Fargate?.................................................................................................. 29
104. What is AWS Batch?......................................................................................................29
105. What is AWS Lightsail?..................................................................................................30
106. What is AWS Outposts?................................................................................................ 30
107. What is AWS Wavelength?............................................................................................ 30
108. What is Amazon EC2 Image Builder?........................................................................... 30
109. What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?................................................................................... 30
110. What is AWS App Runner?............................................................................................31
111. What is Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)?.....................................................31
112. What is Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)?........................................................... 31
113. What is the difference between SNS and SQS?............................................................31
114. What is Amazon EventBridge?...................................................................................... 31
115. What is Amazon MQ?.................................................................................................... 32
116. What is AWS Step Functions?....................................................................................... 32
117. What is an SQS dead-letter queue?.............................................................................. 32
118. What are SQS message retention periods?.................................................................. 32

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119. What is Amazon AppFlow?............................................................................................ 32
120. What is AWS Application Integration?........................................................................... 33
121. What is AWS CodeCommit?..........................................................................................33
122. What is AWS CodeBuild?.............................................................................................. 33
123. What is AWS CodeDeploy?........................................................................................... 33
124. What is AWS CodePipeline?......................................................................................... 34
125. What is AWS CodeStar?................................................................................................34
126. What is AWS Cloud9?................................................................................................... 34
127. What is AWS X-Ray?.....................................................................................................34
128. What is AWS CloudShell?............................................................................................. 34
129. What is AWS Amplify?................................................................................................... 35
130. What is Amazon CodeGuru?......................................................................................... 35
131. What is Amazon Athena?.............................................................................................. 35
132. What is Amazon EMR?..................................................................................................35
133. What is Amazon Kinesis?.............................................................................................. 35
134. What is Amazon QuickSight?........................................................................................ 36
135. What is AWS Glue?....................................................................................................... 36
136. What is Amazon OpenSearch Service (formerly Amazon Elasticsearch Service)?...... 36
137. What is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK)?................................. 36
138. What is AWS Lake Formation?......................................................................................36
139. What is Amazon DataZone?..........................................................................................37
140. What is AWS Data Pipeline?......................................................................................... 37
141. What is Amazon SageMaker?....................................................................................... 37
142. What is Amazon Rekognition?.......................................................................................37
143. What is Amazon Comprehend?.....................................................................................37
144. What is Amazon Lex?....................................................................................................38
145. What is Amazon Polly?..................................................................................................38
146. What is Amazon Translate?...........................................................................................38
147. What is Amazon Forecast?............................................................................................38
148. What is Amazon Personalize?.......................................................................................38
149. What is Amazon Textract?............................................................................................. 39
150. What is Amazon Kendra?.............................................................................................. 39
151. What is AWS Organizations?.........................................................................................39
152. What is AWS Control Tower?.........................................................................................39
153. What is AWS Config?.................................................................................................... 39
154. What is AWS CloudTrail?...............................................................................................40
155. What is AWS Artifact?....................................................................................................40
156. What is AWS Audit Manager?....................................................................................... 40
157. What is AWS License Manager?................................................................................... 40
158. What is Amazon Macie?................................................................................................ 40
159. What is AWS Backup?...................................................................................................41

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160. What is Service Control Policies (SCPs)?..................................................................... 41
161. What is AWS Cost Explorer?......................................................................................... 41
162. What is AWS Budgets?..................................................................................................41
163. What are AWS Cost and Usage Reports?.....................................................................41
164. What is AWS Trusted Advisor Cost Optimization checks?............................................ 42
165. What is a Reserved Instance?.......................................................................................42
166. What is a Savings Plan?................................................................................................42
167. What is AWS Cost Categories?..................................................................................... 42
168. What is AWS Cost Anomaly Detection?........................................................................ 43
169. What is AWS Purchase Orders?....................................................................................43
170. What is AWS Billing Conductor?....................................................................................43
171. What is AWS Key Management Service (KMS)?.......................................................... 43
172. What is AWS Secrets Manager?................................................................................... 43
173. What is AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)?.................................................................... 44
174. What is AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)?............................................................ 44
175. What is Amazon Inspector?...........................................................................................44
176. What is Amazon Detective?...........................................................................................44
177. What is AWS Shield?.....................................................................................................44
178. What is AWS Firewall Manager?................................................................................... 45
179. What is AWS Single Sign-On (AWS IAM Identity Center)?........................................... 45
180. What is Amazon Cognito?............................................................................................. 45
181. What is AWS IoT Core?.................................................................................................45
182. What is AWS IoT Greengrass?......................................................................................45
183. What is AWS IoT Analytics?.......................................................................................... 46
184. What is AWS IoT Events?..............................................................................................46
185. What is AWS IoT Button?.............................................................................................. 46
186. What is AWS IoT Device Management?........................................................................46
187. What is AWS IoT SiteWise?.......................................................................................... 46
188. What is AWS Snow Family for IoT?...............................................................................47
189. What is AWS IoT 1-Click?..............................................................................................47
190. What is AWS IoT TwinMaker?....................................................................................... 47
191. What is Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)?............................................................. 47
192. What is Amazon Route 53?........................................................................................... 47
193. What is AWS AppSync?................................................................................................ 48
194. What is AWS Amplify?................................................................................................... 48
195. What is Amazon WorkSpaces?..................................................................................... 48
196. What is AWS Marketplace?........................................................................................... 48
197. What is AWS Ground Station?.......................................................................................48
198. What is Amazon Honeycode?....................................................................................... 49
199. What is AWS Health Dashboard?..................................................................................49
200. What is AWS Wavelength?............................................................................................ 49

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 Conclusion............................................................................................................................. 50
50 Intermediate-Level AWS Interview Questions with Expert Answers............................... 51
1. What is the difference between EC2 Spot Instances and Spot Fleets?............................ 51
2. How does EC2 Enhanced Networking improve performance?..........................................51
3. When would you use a Placement Group?....................................................................... 51
4. How do you troubleshoot EC2 instance connectivity issues?............................................51
5. What is EC2 Hibernation and its use cases?.....................................................................52
6. How does S3 Intelligent-Tiering reduce costs?..................................................................52
7. What is S3 Batch Operations?...........................................................................................52
8. How do S3 Pre-signed URLs differ from AWS STS temporary credentials?..................... 52
9. What is S3 Object Lock Governance Mode?.....................................................................52
10. When would you use S3 Transfer Acceleration?............................................................. 52
11. How does Transit Gateway differ from VPC Peering?..................................................... 53
12. What is a VPC Endpoint Policy?......................................................................................53
13. How do you analyze VPC Flow Logs?.............................................................................53
14. What is AWS PrivateLink?............................................................................................... 53
15. How does Direct Connect differ from VPN?.................................................................... 53
16. What are IAM Permission Boundaries?...........................................................................54
17. How do you enforce MFA for AWS Console access?......................................................54
18. What is a Service-Linked Role?.......................................................................................54
19. How does AWS Config enforce compliance?.................................................................. 54
20. What is GuardDuty’s EC2 finding types?.........................................................................54
21. How do you mitigate Lambda cold starts?.......................................................................55
22. What are Lambda Destinations?..................................................................................... 55
23. How do Lambda Layers reduce duplication?...................................................................55
24. What is Lambda@Edge?.................................................................................................55
25. How do you monitor Lambda throttling?.......................................................................... 55
26. What are CloudFormation Macros?.................................................................................55
27. How do Nested Stacks improve reusability?................................................................... 56
28. What is CloudFormation Drift Detection?........................................................................ 56
29. How do you handle sensitive data in CloudFormation?...................................................56
30. What is a Custom Resource?.......................................................................................... 56
31. How does Aurora Serverless v2 differ from v1?.............................................................. 56
32. What is RDS Performance Insights?............................................................................... 56
33. How do you migrate from RDS MySQL to Aurora?......................................................... 56
34. What is RDS Blue/Green Deployments?......................................................................... 57
35. How does Aurora Global Database handle DR?............................................................. 57
36. What is DynamoDB Adaptive Capacity?......................................................................... 57
37. How do Global Tables differ from Cross-Region Replication?......................................... 57
38. What is DynamoDB DAX?............................................................................................... 57
39. How do you handle large items (>400 KB) in DynamoDB?............................................. 57

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 40. When would you use DynamoDB On-Demand vs Provisioned?..................................... 58
41. What is EKS Pod Identity?...............................................................................................58
42. How do Managed Node Groups simplify EKS?............................................................... 58
43. What is EKS Fargate Profiles?........................................................................................ 58
44. How do you troubleshoot EKS networking issues?......................................................... 58
45. What is EKS Blueprints?..................................................................................................58
46. How do you implement cross-region deployment with CodePipeline?............................ 59
47. What is CodeBuild’s Local Cache?..................................................................................59
48. How do you secure CodeCommit repositories?.............................................................. 59
49. What is CodeDeploy’s Blue/Green Deployment?............................................................ 59
50. How do you integrate CodePipeline with GitHub Enterprise?......................................... 59
11. Enforce KMS key policies with conditional IAM policies.................................................. 60
12. Rotate Secrets Manager secrets with Lambda and custom logic....................................60
13. Detect credential exfiltration with GuardDuty................................................................... 60
14. Configure AWS Config aggregator for multi-account compliance....................................61
15. Implement VPC Flow Logs analytics with Athena........................................................... 61
16. Harden SSM Session Manager access........................................................................... 61
17. Audit cross-account S3 access with Access Analyzer.....................................................62
18. Mitigate SSRF vulnerabilities in Lambda......................................................................... 62
19. Enforce TLS 1.2+ for API Gateway using WAF............................................................... 62
20. Secure EKS Pods with IMDSv2 and IAM Roles for Service Accounts............................ 62
21. Optimize Lambda Provisioned Concurrency for spiky traffic........................................... 63
22. Debug Step Functions state machine timeouts............................................................... 63
23. Implement canary deployments for App Runner..............................................................63
24. Secure ECS Fargate tasks with ephemeral storage encryption...................................... 63
25. Automate container patching in ECR with Inspector........................................................63
26. Orchestrate Lambda with SQS FIFO for ordered processing..........................................63
27. Reduce Cold Starts in Lambda with SnapStart............................................................... 64
28. Migrate Docker Compose workloads to ECS.................................................................. 64
29. Troubleshoot EventBridge schema discovery failures..................................................... 64
30. Enforce container immutability in EKS.............................................................................64
160 Advanced-Level AWS Interview Questions With Expert Answers.................................65
1. How does AWS Transit Gateway Connect simplify SD-WAN integration?........................ 65
2. What is VPC Sharing and its security implications?.......................................................... 65
3. How do you implement cross-region VPC peering with overlapping CIDRs?................... 65
4. What is Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall?........................................................................ 65
5. How does AWS Network Firewall differ from NACLs?.......................................................65
6. Configure Direct Connect Gateway for multi-account access........................................... 66
7. Optimize Global Accelerator for multi-region latency-sensitive apps.................................66
8. Troubleshoot asymmetric routing in a Transit Gateway setup........................................... 66
9. Implement AWS Client VPN with MFA using SAML.......................................................... 66

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10. Secure hybrid DNS with Route 53 Resolver Endpoints...................................................67
11. Enforce KMS key policies with conditional IAM policies.................................................. 67
12. Rotate Secrets Manager secrets with Lambda and custom logic....................................67
13. Detect credential exfiltration with GuardDuty................................................................... 67
14. Configure AWS Config aggregator for multi-account compliance....................................68
15. Implement VPC Flow Logs analytics with Athena........................................................... 68
16. Harden SSM Session Manager access........................................................................... 68
17. Audit cross-account S3 access with Access Analyzer.....................................................69
18. Mitigate SSRF vulnerabilities in Lambda......................................................................... 69
19. Enforce TLS 1.2+ for API Gateway using WAF............................................................... 69
20. Secure EKS Pods with IMDSv2 and IAM Roles for Service Accounts............................ 69
21. Optimize Lambda Provisioned Concurrency for spiky traffic........................................... 70
22. Debug Step Functions state machine timeouts............................................................... 70
23. Implement canary deployments for App Runner..............................................................70
24. Secure ECS Fargate tasks with ephemeral storage encryption...................................... 70
25. Automate container patching in ECR with Inspector........................................................70
26. Orchestrate Lambda with SQS FIFO for ordered processing..........................................71
27. Reduce Cold Starts in Lambda with SnapStart............................................................... 71
28. Migrate Docker Compose workloads to ECS.................................................................. 71
29. Troubleshoot EventBridge schema discovery failures..................................................... 71
30. Enforce container immutability in EKS.............................................................................71
31. How can you achieve cross-region RDS failover with minimal downtime?..................... 71
32. How does AWS Nitro Enclaves enhance EC2 instance security?................................... 72
33. What is the purpose of S3 Object Lock, and how does it support regulatory compliance?.
72
34. How would you implement a multi-account, multi-region logging strategy in AWS?....... 72
35. How does Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall work?........................................... 72
36. Explain the use of AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) in a multi-account
architecture............................................................................................................................ 72
37. How do you implement custom encryption logic for S3 objects?.....................................72
38. What is the difference between AWS Transit Gateway and AWS Cloud WAN?..............73
39. How can you enforce network-level isolation for Lambda functions?.............................. 73
40. Describe how to use AWS Step Functions for error handling and retries in workflows... 73
41. How does Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 improve upon v1?.......................................... 73
42. What is the role of AWS Glue Data Catalog in a data lake architecture?........................ 73
43. How do you implement a secure, automated golden AMI pipeline?................................74
44. What is the advantage of using AWS Elastic File System (EFS) One Zone?..................74
45. How does Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering optimize storage costs?.................................. 74
46. Explain how Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) handles high
availability...............................................................................................................................74
47. What are the benefits of using AWS Gateway Load Balancer?.......................................74

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48. How can you enforce encryption in transit for all AWS services in your organization?... 74
49. What is AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry, and how does it help with application
governance?.......................................................................................................................... 75
50. How do you implement cross-region DynamoDB backups and restores?.......................75
51. What is the significance of Amazon S3 Access Points for large-scale data sharing?..... 75
52. How does AWS Network Firewall support advanced traffic inspection?..........................75
53. How can you automate security group management across multiple accounts?............ 75
54. What is the benefit of using Amazon Redshift RA3 nodes?............................................ 75
55. How does AWS Glue Elastic Views enable data integration?......................................... 76
56. How do you implement a secure API gateway for private VPC endpoints?.................... 76
57. How does Amazon S3 Batch Operations improve data management?...........................76
58. What is the use case for AWS Outposts servers?........................................................... 76
59. How can you secure cross-region VPC peering traffic?.................................................. 76
60. How does Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) support multi-cluster
management?........................................................................................................................76
61. What is the benefit of using Amazon S3 Select?.............................................................77
62. How do you implement automated compliance drift detection in AWS?..........................77
63. How does AWS App Runner simplify container deployment?......................................... 77
64. What is the purpose of Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights?................................ 77
65. How do you enforce S3 bucket-level public access prevention at scale?....................... 77
66. How does AWS Lake Formation support row-level security?.......................................... 77
67. What is the advantage of using Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet with capacity-optimized
allocation?..............................................................................................................................78
68. How can you implement cross-region, cross-account S3 replication securely?.............. 78
69. What is AWS Fault Injection Simulator, and how does it help with resilience engineering?
78
70. How does AWS Wavelength enable ultra-low latency applications?............................... 78
71. What is the benefit of using AWS Step Functions Distributed Map state?...................... 78
72. How do you implement secure, auditable cross-account Lambda invocations?............. 78
73. How does Amazon S3 Object Lambda transform data on the fly?.................................. 79
74. What is the role of AWS Direct Connect Gateway?.........................................................79
75. How do you implement centralized certificate management in AWS?.............................79
76. What is the use case for Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points?................................79
77. How does AWS Control Tower Account Factory streamline account provisioning?........ 79
78. What is the benefit of using AWS Glue streaming ETL?................................................. 79
79. How do you implement cross-account, cross-region SNS topic subscriptions?.............. 79
80. How does Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) lifecycle management reduce costs?......80
81. What is the purpose of AWS Systems Manager Change Manager?............................... 80
82. How do you implement secure, scalable bastion hosts in AWS?.................................... 80
83. What is the benefit of using Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval?................................ 80
84. How does AWS Identity Center (formerly SSO) support fine-grained access?............... 80
85. How do you automate cross-region CloudFormation stack deployments?......................80

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86. What is the advantage of using Amazon EC2 Mac instances?....................................... 81
87. How does AWS DMS (Database Migration Service) handle schema conversion for
heterogeneous migrations?................................................................................................... 81
88. What is the benefit of using AWS Lambda Powertools?..................................................81
89. How does Amazon Redshift data sharing work?............................................................. 81
90. How do you implement secure, automated patch management for container images?.. 81
91. What is the purpose of AWS CloudFormation Stack Policies?........................................81
92. How does AWS Service Quotas API help with automation and governance?.................82
93. How do you implement event-driven security automation in AWS?................................ 82
94. What is the role of AWS Private Certificate Authority (CA)?............................................82
95. How does Amazon FSx for ONTAP support hybrid cloud storage?................................ 82
96. What is the benefit of using Amazon Aurora Global Database for disaster recovery?.... 82
97. How do you implement secure, scalable webhooks in AWS?......................................... 82
98. What is the use case for AWS Lambda Extensions?.......................................................83
99. How does AWS App Mesh support multi-cluster service discovery?...............................83
100. What is the benefit of using Amazon S3 Replication Time Control (RTC)?...................83
101. How does AWS Glue DataBrew support data quality and profiling?............................. 83
102. How do you implement secure, auditable access to AWS Management Console for
contractors?........................................................................................................................... 83
103. What is the purpose of Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller?................83
104. How does AWS Backup Vault Lock support compliance requirements?....................... 84
105. What is the benefit of using Amazon Elasticache Global Datastore?............................84
106. How do you implement secure, scalable API rate limiting in AWS?.............................. 84
107. What is the role of AWS Network Manager?................................................................. 84
108. How does Amazon SageMaker Feature Store support ML workflows?........................ 84
109. What is the advantage of using AWS CloudFormation Change Sets?.......................... 84
110. How do you implement secure, automated secrets rotation in AWS?........................... 84
111. What is the benefit of using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose?........................................85
112. How does AWS Resource Explorer help with large-scale cloud environments?........... 85
113. How do you implement secure, scalable multi-tenant SaaS on AWS?..........................85
114. What is the purpose of Amazon S3 Event Notifications?...............................................85
115. How does AWS CloudTrail Lake enable advanced security analytics?......................... 85
116. How do you implement secure, automated user provisioning in AWS Identity Center? 85
117. What is the benefit of using AWS Step Functions Callback Patterns?.......................... 86
118. How does Amazon S3 Inventory help with compliance and auditing?...........................86
119. How do you implement secure, scalable data ingestion pipelines in AWS?.................. 86
120. What is the role of AWS CodeBuild report groups?.......................................................86
121. How does AWS Security Hub support automated security posture management?.......86
122. How do you implement secure, scalable file transfers with AWS Transfer Family?...... 86
123. What is the benefit of using Amazon EC2 Hibernate?...................................................87
124. How does AWS Application Load Balancer support advanced routing?....................... 87

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125. How do you implement secure, automated compliance reporting in AWS?.................. 87
126. What is the advantage of using AWS Glue partition indexing?......................................87
127. How does Amazon S3 Storage Lens provide storage insights?....................................87
128. How do you implement secure, scalable container image distribution in AWS?........... 87
129. What is the benefit of using Amazon CloudFront Signed URLs and Cookies?............. 87
130. How does AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter improve incident management?.......... 88
131. How do you implement secure, scalable audit trails for data access in AWS?..............88
132. What is the role of AWS AppConfig deployment strategies?.........................................88
133. How does AWS Glue job bookmarking work?............................................................... 88
134. What is the benefit of using AWS Global Accelerator with endpoint groups?................88
135. How do you implement secure, scalable email receipt processing in AWS?.................88
136. How does AWS CloudFormation StackSets support drift detection?............................ 89
137. What is the purpose of Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service v2 (IMDSv2)?.......... 89
138. How do you implement secure, scalable ML model deployment in AWS?.................... 89
139. What is the benefit of using AWS Direct Connect MACsec encryption?....................... 89
140. How does Amazon OpenSearch Service support fine-grained access control?........... 89
141. How do you implement secure, automated infrastructure drift remediation in AWS?....89
142. What is the advantage of using AWS Lambda Destinations?........................................90
143. How does Amazon S3 Object Ownership simplify access management?.................... 90
144. How do you implement secure, scalable DNS resolution for hybrid environments?..... 90
145. What is the benefit of using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler?................................90
146. How does AWS CloudFormation macros support custom resource logic?................... 90
147. How do you implement secure, scalable API authentication with Amazon Cognito?.... 90
148. What is the purpose of AWS License Manager automated discovery?......................... 91
149. How does Amazon Redshift Spectrum support federated query?.................................91
150. How do you implement secure, automated resource tagging in AWS?.........................91
151. What is the benefit of using Amazon EC2 Capacity Reservations?.............................. 91
152. How does AWS CloudTrail Insights detect unusual activity?.........................................91
153. How do you implement secure, scalable real-time analytics with Amazon Kinesis
Analytics?.............................................................................................................................. 91
154. What is the purpose of AWS Glue Schema Registry?...................................................91
155. How does AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store support secure configuration
management?........................................................................................................................92
156. How do you implement secure, scalable serverless ETL pipelines in AWS?................ 92
157. What is the benefit of using AWS CloudWatch Metric Streams?...................................92
158. How does Amazon S3 Object Expiration support data lifecycle management?............ 92
159. How do you implement secure, automated data redaction in AWS data lakes?........... 92
160. What is the advantage of using Amazon RDS Proxy?.................................................. 92
161. How does AWS CodeDeploy Blue/Green deployment work for ECS?.......................... 93
162. How do you implement secure, scalable data sharing with AWS Data Exchange?...... 93

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Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep
200 Beginner-Level AWS Interview Questions with
Expert Answers
This comprehensive guide contains 200 of the most important beginner-level AWS interview
questions with expert answers. The questions cover fundamental AWS services and concepts,
including compute, storage, databases, networking, security, and serverless technologies. Each
question is numbered and formatted for easy reference, making this an essential resource for
AWS interview preparation.

1. What is AWS and how does it help businesses?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud platform that allows businesses to rent infrastructure
(servers, storage, databases) rather than buy it. AWS uses a Pay-as-You-Go pricing model,
meaning you only pay for what you use. Businesses benefit from AWS through reduced
hardware maintenance costs, high availability (AWS promises 99.99% SLA), scalability options,
and the ability to automatically scale resources based on traffic or CPU usage5.

2. What are AWS regions?

An AWS region is a geographic location with multiple Availability Zones. Each region is
completely independent and isolated from other regions, allowing for fault tolerance and stability.
AWS regions are distributed worldwide to provide lower latency and better compliance with local
regulations2.

3. What is an Availability Zone?

An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power,
networking, and connectivity within an AWS region. Each AZ is physically separated from others
but connected through low-latency links. This design enables high availability and fault tolerance
for applications2.

4. What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides scalable computing capacity in the cloud. It
allows users to run virtual machines, known as instances, in the AWS cloud. EC2 instances can
be quickly scaled up or down based on computing requirements, eliminating the need for
hardware investments2.

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5. What is the difference between EC2-Classic and
EC2-VPC?
EC2-Classic was the original platform where instances ran in a single, flat network shared with
other customers. EC2-VPC is the newer platform where instances run in a virtual private cloud
that's logically isolated to your AWS account. EC2-Classic has been deprecated, and all new
AWS accounts only support EC2-VPC5.

6. What are AWS AMIs?

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are pre-configured templates that contain the operating
system, application server, and applications required to launch an EC2 instance. AMIs can be
AWS-provided, marketplace AMIs, or custom AMIs created by users5.

7. What is an instance type in AWS EC2?

Instance types define the CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity of an EC2 instance.
AWS offers a variety of instance types optimized for different use cases, such as
compute-optimized, memory-optimized, storage-optimized, and general-purpose instances5.

8. What is AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs code in response to events,
automatically managing the underlying compute resources. It enables developers to build
applications that automatically scale without provisioning or managing servers, making it ideal
for event-driven applications2.

9. What is AWS Glue?

AWS Glue is a fully managed Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) service that helps prepare and
transform data for analytics. It allows users to categorize, clean, enrich, and move data between
various data stores and data streams, simplifying data integration processes2.

10. How does AWS CloudFormation help manage

resources?
CloudFormation automates resource provisioning using templates written in JSON or YAML. It
enables infrastructure as code, allowing version control of infrastructure and ensuring
consistency across environments. CloudFormation templates describe all the AWS resources
needed for applications and their dependencies2.

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11. What is AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)?
ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets such as EC2
instances, containers, and IP addresses. It helps ensure high availability and fault tolerance by
detecting unhealthy instances and routing traffic only to healthy instances2.

12. What is the purpose of AWS S3 versioning?

S3 versioning keeps multiple versions of an object in the same bucket. It helps protect against
accidental deletions and provides the ability to retrieve previous versions of objects. When
enabled, versioning preserves every version of every object, allowing for data recovery and
rollback capabilities2.

13. Why do we make subnets in AWS?

Subnets are created to segment a VPC into multiple networks for better security, isolation, and
routing control. They allow you to place resources in different network tiers (public or private),
implement network access controls, and distribute resources across multiple Availability Zones
for high availability5.

14. What are AWS policies and what are the different
types?
AWS policies are documents that define permissions and access controls. The main types
include:

●​ Identity-based policies: Attached to IAM identities (users, groups, roles)​

●​ Resource-based policies: Attached to resources (S3 buckets, SQS queues)​

●​ Permission boundaries: Set maximum permissions for IAM entities​

●​ Service control policies (SCPs): Define maximum permissions for AWS Organizations​

●​ Access control lists (ACLs): Control access to specific resources​

●​ Session policies: Limit permissions for temporary sessions5​

15. What are the different ways to encrypt a file in S3?

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Files in S3 can be encrypted using:

1.​ Server-Side Encryption with Amazon S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3)​

2.​ Server-Side Encryption with AWS KMS-Managed Keys (SSE-KMS)​

3.​ Server-Side Encryption with Customer-Provided Keys (SSE-C)​

4.​ Client-Side Encryption before uploading to S35​

16. Is there a way to upload a file greater than 100

megabytes on Amazon S3?
Yes, for files larger than 100MB, AWS recommends using multipart upload. This feature allows
you to upload a single object as a set of parts, each ranging from 5MB to 5GB. The multipart
upload API is designed to improve upload performance and allows quick recovery from network
issues5.

17. What happens to an Elastic IP if you stop an EC2

instance and start it again?
If you stop an EC2 instance with an associated Elastic IP address and then start it again, the
Elastic IP remains associated with the instance. Elastic IPs are designed to provide a static
public IP address that can be remapped to other instances if needed, ensuring continuous
access to your applications5.

18. What service would you suggest for sending

compliance emails using your domain?
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) would be the most suitable service for sending and
receiving compliance emails using your own email address and domain. SES is cost-effective,
provides high deliverability, and includes features for tracking delivery metrics, handling
bounces, and managing email reputation5.

19. How do you handle large amounts of traffic for an

RDS instance?
To handle large amounts of traffic for an RDS instance, you should:

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 1.​ Opt for a larger instance type with more capacity​

2.​ Implement read replicas to offload read traffic​

3.​ Create manual or automated snapshots for data recovery​

4.​ Use Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments for high availability​

5.​ Consider database sharding for very large workloads5​

20. How can you reduce load on an EC2 instance when

CPU utilization reaches 80 percent?
You can reduce load on an EC2 instance by creating an Auto Scaling group that automatically
deploys additional instances when CPU utilization exceeds 80 percent. This ensures that your
application can handle traffic spikes without manual intervention while maintaining
performance5.

21. What is the difference between On-Demand,

Reserved, and Spot EC2 instances?
On-Demand instances are paid by the hour with no upfront costs or long-term commitments,
ideal for short-term workloads. Reserved instances offer significant discounts (up to 72%)
compared to On-Demand pricing in exchange for a 1-3 year commitment, perfect for predictable
workloads. Spot instances allow you to bid on unused EC2 capacity at up to 90% off
On-Demand pricing but can be terminated with short notice, suitable for flexible, non-critical
workloads5.

22. What is an EC2 placement group?

An EC2 placement group is a logical grouping of instances within a single Availability Zone.
AWS offers three placement strategies: Cluster (low-latency, high-throughput applications),
Partition (large distributed workloads), and Spread (critical applications requiring high
availability). Placement groups help optimize instance placement for specific workload
requirements5.

23. What is an EC2 security group?

An EC2 security group acts as a virtual firewall that controls inbound and outbound traffic for
EC2 instances. Security groups operate at the instance level and allow you to specify permitted

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protocols, ports, and source/destination IP ranges. They are stateful, meaning return traffic is
automatically allowed regardless of outbound rules5.

24. What is the difference between public, private, and

Elastic IP addresses?
Public IP addresses are automatically assigned to instances in public subnets but change when
an instance is stopped and started. Private IP addresses are assigned to all instances and
remain constant throughout the instance's lifetime. Elastic IP addresses are static public IPv4
addresses that you allocate to your account and can associate with any instance, providing
consistent public addressing5.

25. What is the purpose of user data in EC2?

User data is script data that can be passed to an EC2 instance during launch to automate
configuration tasks. This script runs only once when the instance is first launched, allowing you
to install software, download files, or perform other setup operations automatically without
manual intervention5.

26. What is an EC2 instance store?

EC2 instance store provides temporary block-level storage directly attached to the host
computer. This storage offers very high I/O performance but is ephemeral, meaning data is lost
when the instance is stopped or terminated. Instance stores are ideal for temporary data,
caches, or data that is replicated across multiple instances5.

27. What is an Auto Scaling group?

An Auto Scaling group is a collection of EC2 instances that are treated as a logical unit for
scaling and management. It automatically adjusts the number of instances based on predefined
conditions (like CPU utilization or network traffic) to ensure you have the correct number of
instances to handle application load while minimizing costs5.

28. What is a launch configuration in Auto Scaling?

A launch configuration is a template that defines instance configuration settings when Auto
Scaling launches new EC2 instances. It specifies information such as the AMI ID, instance type,
key pair, security groups, block device mapping, and user data. Launch configurations are being
replaced by launch templates, which offer versioning capabilities5.

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29. What are EC2 instance metadata and dynamic data?
EC2 instance metadata is data about your instance that you can use to configure or manage the
running instance. Dynamic data is information that is generated when the instance is launched.
Both can be accessed from within the instance using the instance metadata service (IMDS) at
[Link] and
[Link]

30. What is the difference between stopping and

terminating an EC2 instance?
Stopping an EC2 instance shuts down the virtual machine but preserves the root EBS volume
and data, allowing you to start it again later (though ephemeral storage is lost). Terminating an
instance permanently destroys the instance and, by default, deletes its root EBS volume,
making all data irrecoverable unless you've enabled termination protection or created backups5.

31. What is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an object storage service offering industry-leading
scalability, data availability, security, and performance. It allows storing and retrieving any
amount of data from anywhere on the web and is commonly used for backup and restore,
archiving, content distribution, and data lakes for analytics5.

32. What are S3 buckets?

S3 buckets are containers for storing objects in Amazon S3. Each object is stored in a bucket,
and buckets have globally unique names across all AWS accounts. Buckets serve as the
foundation for organizing the Amazon S3 namespace and are used for access control and
usage reporting5.

33. What are the storage classes available in Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 offers multiple storage classes:

●​ Standard: Default, high durability, availability, and performance​

●​ Intelligent-Tiering: Automatic cost optimization by moving data between two access tiers​

●​ Standard-IA (Infrequent Access): For data accessed less frequently but requiring rapid
access​

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 ●​ One Zone-IA: Like Standard-IA but stored in a single AZ​

●​ Glacier: Low-cost archival storage with retrieval times from minutes to hours​

●​ Glacier Deep Archive: Lowest-cost storage for long-term retention with retrieval times of
hours​

●​ Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS): Legacy class, not recommended for new
workloads5​

34. What is S3 lifecycle management?

S3 lifecycle management is a feature that allows you to define rules to automatically transition
objects between storage classes or delete them after a specified time period. This helps
optimize storage costs by moving less frequently accessed data to lower-cost storage tiers or
removing unnecessary data completely5.

35. What is the maximum size of an S3 object?

The maximum size of an S3 object is 5 terabytes (5TB). For objects larger than 100 megabytes,
Amazon recommends using the multipart upload capability, which allows you to upload parts of
the object in parallel for improved throughput5.

36. How can you secure data in S3?

You can secure data in S3 using:

1.​ Bucket policies and IAM policies for access control​

2.​ Access Control Lists (ACLs) for legacy access control​

3.​ S3 Block Public Access settings​

4.​ Encryption (SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, SSE-C, or client-side encryption)​

5.​ Versioning to prevent accidental deletions​

6.​ S3 Object Lock for WORM (Write Once Read Many) protection​

7.​ VPC endpoints for private network access​

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 8.​ Access logging and AWS CloudTrail for auditing5​

37. What is S3 Cross-Region Replication?

S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) automatically replicates objects from a source bucket to a
destination bucket in a different AWS region. CRR provides increased availability and disaster
recovery capabilities, helps meet compliance requirements, and can minimize latency by placing
data closer to users in different geographic locations5.

38. What is S3 Transfer Acceleration?

S3 Transfer Acceleration enables fast, secure file transfers over long distances between your
client and an S3 bucket. It leverages Amazon CloudFront's globally distributed edge locations to
route data through an optimized network path, improving transfer speeds by 50-500% for
long-distance transfers of larger objects5.

39. What is the difference between a pre-signed URL and

a S3 static website?
A pre-signed URL provides temporary access to private S3 objects without requiring AWS
credentials, useful for temporary downloads or uploads. An S3 static website configures a
bucket to serve static content (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) through a public web endpoint, making
it accessible to anyone on the internet. Pre-signed URLs provide secure, temporary access to
specific objects, while static websites offer permanent public access to entire sites5.

40. How does S3 versioning work?

S3 versioning keeps multiple versions of an object in the same bucket. When enabled, it
automatically generates a unique version ID for each object uploaded to the bucket. This
preserves, retrieves, and restores every version of every object, providing protection against
both unintended user actions and application failures. All versions of an object remain stored
until explicitly deleted, with each version incurring standard S3 charges2.

41. What is Amazon RDS?

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed service that makes it easier to set
up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable
capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning,
database setup, patching, and backups. RDS supports multiple database engines including
MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server5.
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42. What is the difference between Amazon RDS and
Amazon EC2 running a database?
RDS is a managed database service where AWS handles routine database tasks, offers
automated backups, software patching, and easy scaling, but provides limited control over the
underlying system. Running a database on EC2 gives you full control over the database and
operating system, allowing custom configurations and database features not available in RDS,
but requires you to handle all administration, backups, high availability, and scaling manually5.

43. What is Multi-AZ deployment in Amazon RDS?

Multi-AZ (Availability Zone) deployment in RDS creates a primary database instance and a
synchronous standby replica in a different AZ. This provides high availability and failover
support, as Amazon automatically fails over to the standby if the primary experiences an
outage. During normal operations, only the primary instance actively serves requests, with the
standby used exclusively for failover scenarios5.

44. What is a read replica in Amazon RDS?

A read replica is a read-only copy of a database instance that uses the database engine's
built-in replication functionality. Read replicas help scale read-heavy database workloads by
serving read traffic while the primary instance handles write operations. They can also be
promoted to standalone instances and can be created in different regions for improved
performance and disaster recovery5.

45. What is Amazon DynamoDB?

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and
predictable performance with seamless scalability. It's a serverless database that automatically
scales throughput capacity to meet workload demands and offers single-digit millisecond
latency. DynamoDB is ideal for applications that need consistent, single-digit millisecond
response times at any scale5.

46. What are the key features of DynamoDB?

Key features of DynamoDB include:

1.​ Serverless with automatic scaling​

2.​ Single-digit millisecond performance at any scale​

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 3.​ Built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching​

4.​ Global tables for multi-region, multi-master deployments​

5.​ Transactions for complex business workflows​

6.​ On-demand capacity mode for pay-per-request pricing​

7.​ Point-in-time recovery to protect against accidental writes or deletes​

8.​ DynamoDB Streams for capturing data modification events5​

47. What is the difference between a partition key and a

sort key in DynamoDB?
In DynamoDB, a partition key (also called a hash key) determines which partition data is stored
in, helping distribute data across partitions for better performance. A sort key (also called a
range key) is optional and defines how items with the same partition key are sorted within a
partition. Together, they form a composite primary key that makes each item in the table
uniquely identifiable5.

48. What is Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud
that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the
simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. Aurora delivers up to 5x the
throughput of standard MySQL and 3x the throughput of standard PostgreSQL, while providing
enterprise-grade reliability and availability5.

49. What is Amazon ElastiCache?

Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed in-memory caching service supporting Redis and
Memcached engines. It improves application performance by retrieving data from fast,
managed, in-memory caches instead of slower disk-based databases. ElastiCache is commonly
used for real-time applications requiring sub-millisecond response times, such as gaming
leaderboards, session stores, and real-time analytics5.

50. What is Amazon Redshift?

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Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. It
allows you to analyze all your data using standard SQL and existing business intelligence tools.
Redshift delivers fast query performance using columnar storage technology and parallel query
execution. It's designed for analyzing large datasets and is commonly used for business
intelligence applications5.

51. What is Amazon VPC?

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a service that lets you launch AWS resources in a
logically isolated virtual network. VPC gives you complete control over your virtual networking
environment, including IP address ranges, subnets, route tables, and network gateways. This
allows you to create a network topology similar to a traditional network in your own data center
but with the benefits of AWS's scalable infrastructure5.

52. What is a subnet in AWS?

A subnet is a range of IP addresses in a VPC. Subnets must reside within a single Availability
Zone and cannot span zones. Subnets can be public (with a route to an Internet Gateway) or
private (without direct internet access). They're used to group resources based on security and
operational needs while enabling high availability by distributing resources across multiple
Availability Zones5.

53. What is an Internet Gateway?

An Internet Gateway (IGW) is a horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC
component that allows communication between instances in your VPC and the internet. It
enables resources in public subnets to connect to the internet and allows internet traffic to reach
resources in your VPC. An IGW is required for instances to receive a public IP address5.

54. What is a NAT Gateway?

A NAT (Network Address Translation) Gateway allows instances in a private subnet to connect
to the internet or other AWS services while preventing the internet from initiating connections
with those instances. NAT Gateways are managed by AWS, provide better availability and
bandwidth compared to NAT instances, and are deployed in a specific Availability Zone with
automatic scaling capabilities5.

55. What is a route table in AWS?

A route table contains a set of rules, called routes, that determine where network traffic from
your subnet or gateway is directed. Each subnet in your VPC must be associated with a route

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table, which controls the routing for the subnet. A subnet can only be associated with one route
table at a time, but you can associate multiple subnets with the same route table5.

56. What is a security group in AWS?

A security group acts as a virtual firewall for instances to control inbound and outbound traffic.
Security groups operate at the instance level and are stateful (return traffic is automatically
allowed). Rules specify which traffic is allowed, with all other traffic being denied by default.
Multiple security groups can be assigned to an instance, and rules can be modified at any time
with changes taking effect immediately2.

57. What is a Network ACL?

A Network Access Control List (NACL) is an optional layer of security that acts as a firewall for
controlling traffic in and out of a subnet. Unlike security groups, NACLs are stateless (return
traffic must be explicitly allowed) and operate at the subnet level. Each subnet must be
associated with a NACL, and if not explicitly associated, the subnet is automatically associated
with the default NACL5.

58. What is a VPC endpoint?

A VPC endpoint enables private connections between your VPC and supported AWS services
without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN, or AWS Direct Connect. Traffic
between your VPC and the service stays within the Amazon network and doesn't traverse the
public internet. There are two types of VPC endpoints: Gateway endpoints (for S3 and
DynamoDB) and Interface endpoints (for other AWS services)5.

59. What is AWS Direct Connect?

AWS Direct Connect establishes a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS.
This private connection can reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide
a more consistent network experience than internet-based connections. Direct Connect is useful
for large dataset migrations, real-time data feeds, or applications requiring predictable network
performance5.

60. What is a VPC peering connection?

A VPC peering connection is a networking connection between two VPCs that enables routing
using private IP addresses as if they were in the same network. Instances in either VPC can
communicate with each other without using a gateway or public IP addresses. VPC peering

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connections do not transitively connect VPCs (if A connects to B and B connects to C, A cannot
connect to C through B)5.

61. What is IAM?

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control
access to AWS resources. IAM allows you to create and manage AWS users and groups and
use permissions to allow or deny their access to AWS resources. IAM is used to specify who
(identity) can access what (resources) and how (permissions) in your AWS account5.

62. What are the key components of IAM?

The key components of IAM are:

1.​ Users: Individual identities for people or applications​

2.​ Groups: Collections of users that share the same permissions​

3.​ Roles: Sets of permissions that can be assumed by entities (users, applications, AWS
services)​

4.​ Policies: JSON documents defining permissions​

5.​ Identity providers: External identity services that can be federated with AWS​

6.​ Multi-factor authentication (MFA): Additional security for user sign-ins5​

63. What is the difference between an IAM role and an

IAM user?
An IAM user is a persistent identity with long-term credentials that represents a person or
application. An IAM role is a temporary set of permissions and credentials that any entity (user,
application, or AWS service) can assume. Roles don't have standard long-term credentials;
instead, when a role is assumed, temporary security credentials are provided. Roles are ideal
for cross-account access and for granting permissions to AWS services5.

64. What is an IAM policy?

An IAM policy is a JSON document that defines permissions, specifying what actions are
allowed or denied on what AWS resources and under what conditions. Policies can be attached

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to IAM identities (users, groups, roles) or directly to resources. AWS evaluates these policies
when a principal makes a request, determining whether to allow or deny the request based on
the applicable policies5.

65. What is the principle of least privilege and why is it

important?
The principle of least privilege means granting only the permissions required to perform a task,
nothing more. This is important in AWS because it minimizes the potential impact of security
breaches, reduces the risk of accidental changes, and helps meet compliance requirements.
Implementing least privilege using IAM policies ensures that users and applications have just
enough access to perform their functions without excessive permissions5.

66. What is AWS Organizations?

AWS Organizations is a service for centrally managing and governing multiple AWS accounts. It
allows you to create groups of accounts, apply policies, and simplify billing. Key features include
consolidated billing, hierarchical organization using Organizational Units (OUs), service control
policies (SCPs) to centrally control permissions, and integration with other AWS services for
centralized deployment5.

67. What is AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk
auditing of your AWS account. CloudTrail records API calls made in your account and delivers
log files to an S3 bucket. These logs capture details about API calls including the identity of the
caller, time, source IP address, request parameters, and response elements, helping with
security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing8.

68. What is AWS Shield?

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that
safeguards applications running on AWS. AWS Shield Standard is automatically included at no
extra cost for all AWS customers. AWS Shield Advanced provides enhanced protections for
applications running on Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global
Accelerator, and Route 53 resources against larger and more sophisticated attacks5.

69. What is AWS WAF?

AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) helps protect web applications from common web exploits
that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.
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WAF allows you to create rules that block common attack patterns such as SQL injection or
cross-site scripting (XSS) and rules designed for your specific application. WAF integrates with
CloudFront, Application Load Balancer, API Gateway, and AppSync5.

70. What is Amazon GuardDuty?

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity
and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS accounts and workloads. It uses machine
learning, anomaly detection, and integrated threat intelligence to identify potentially
unauthorized and malicious activity. GuardDuty analyzes billions of events across multiple AWS
data sources, including CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs5.

71. What is serverless computing?

Serverless computing is a cloud execution model where the cloud provider dynamically
manages the allocation of machine resources. Developers build and deploy applications without
thinking about servers, focusing solely on individual functions in their application code. The
cloud provider handles all infrastructure management, scaling, and maintenance, charging only
for the exact resources used during execution, typically measured in milliseconds2.

72. How does AWS Lambda work?

AWS Lambda runs your code in response to events such as changes to data in an S3 bucket,
updates to a DynamoDB table, HTTP requests via API Gateway, or direct invocations. When a
trigger event occurs, Lambda automatically provisions and manages the compute resources
needed to run your code, scales automatically based on the number of incoming requests, and
terminates resources when execution finishes. You only pay for the compute time consumed
during execution2.

73. What are the limitations of AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda limitations include:

1.​ Execution timeout: Maximum 15 minutes​

2.​ Memory allocation: 128 MB to 10 GB​

3.​ Deployment package size: 50 MB (zipped), 250 MB (unzipped)​

4.​ Temporary disk space: 512 MB to /tmp directory​

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 5.​ Concurrent executions: Default soft limit of 1000 per region​

6.​ Invocation payload size: 6 MB for synchronous, 256 KB for asynchronous​

7.​ Environment variables: Limited to 4 KB total5​

74. What programming languages are supported by AWS

Lambda?
AWS Lambda natively supports [Link], Python, Ruby, Java, Go, .NET Core, and PowerShell.
Additionally, you can use custom runtimes for languages not directly supported or use the
Lambda Runtime API to implement support for any programming language. The Lambda
container image functionality also allows you to package and deploy Lambda functions as
container images5.

75. What is the AWS Serverless Application Model

(SAM)?
AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) is an open-source framework for building serverless
applications. It extends AWS CloudFormation to provide a simplified way of defining serverless
resources such as Lambda functions, API Gateway APIs, and DynamoDB tables. SAM includes
a command-line interface for local development, testing, and deployment of serverless
applications, making the developer experience more streamlined5.

76. What are Lambda layers?

Lambda layers are a distribution mechanism for libraries, custom runtimes, and other function
dependencies. Layers let you keep your deployment package small and separate code and
resources that you aren't actively developing. Layers can be shared across multiple functions
and multiple AWS accounts, promoting code reuse and separation of responsibilities between
development teams5.

77. What is AWS Step Functions?

AWS Step Functions is a serverless workflow orchestration service that makes it easy to
coordinate multiple Lambda functions into serverless workflows. It provides a visual workflow to
arrange and visualize the components of your application as a series of steps, automatically
triggering and tracking each step while handling errors. Step Functions manages state,
checkpoints, and restarts, making it easier to build and update applications5.

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78. What is Amazon API Gateway?
Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service for creating, publishing, maintaining,
monitoring, and securing APIs at any scale. It acts as a "front door" for applications to access
data, business logic, or functionality from your backend services, including Lambda functions,
EC2 instances, or any web application. API Gateway handles all tasks involved in accepting and
processing API calls, including traffic management, authorization, monitoring, and API version
management5.

79. How does AWS Lambda pricing work?

AWS Lambda pricing is based on:

1.​ Number of requests: $0.20 per 1 million requests (first 1 million requests per month are
free)​

2.​ Duration: $0.0000166667 per GB-second (first 400,000 GB-seconds per month are free)​
Duration is calculated from the time your code begins executing until it returns or
terminates, rounded up to the nearest 1ms. The price depends on the amount of
memory you allocate to your function. There are no charges when your function isn't
running5.​

80. What is Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)?

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a platform
allowing customers to develop, run, and manage application functionalities without the
complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure. AWS Lambda is AWS's
implementation of FaaS. In this model, you upload your code and the cloud provider takes care
of provisioning servers, maintaining server software, scaling, and capacity planning. The code
runs only when needed and scales automatically5.

81. What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that provides data and actionable
insights for AWS resources and applications. It collects and tracks metrics, monitors log files,
sets alarms, and automatically reacts to changes in your AWS resources. CloudWatch enables
you to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and
operational health5.

82. What are CloudWatch Metrics?

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CloudWatch Metrics are time-ordered data points published to CloudWatch by AWS services or
your applications. They represent variables to monitor (such as CPU utilization, network
throughput, or error counts) and contain a timestamp and a value. AWS services automatically
send many metrics to CloudWatch at no charge, and you can publish your own custom metrics
at a standard resolution of one minute or a high resolution of one second5.

83. What are CloudWatch Alarms?

CloudWatch Alarms monitor metrics and can initiate actions when a metric breaches a threshold
you define. Alarms can trigger notifications via Amazon SNS, execute Auto Scaling policies, or
perform EC2 actions (stop, terminate, reboot, or recover an instance). You can configure alarms
to evaluate metrics over specified time periods and perform one or more actions based on the
value of the metric relative to a threshold5.

84. What is CloudWatch Logs?

CloudWatch Logs helps you centralize logs from all your systems, applications, and AWS
services. You can monitor, store, and access log files from EC2 instances, Lambda functions,
Route 53, and other sources. CloudWatch Logs enables you to search, filter, and analyze logs
for specific phrases, values, or patterns, and set alarms on specific terms or patterns in log
data5.

85. What is AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk
auditing of your AWS account. It records AWS API calls for your account and delivers log files to
an S3 bucket. These logs capture details including the identity of the caller, time, source IP
address, request parameters, and response elements. CloudTrail helps with security analysis,
resource change tracking, and compliance auditing8.

86. What is AWS Config?

AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of
your AWS resources. It continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations
and allows you to automate the evaluation of these configurations against desired settings.
AWS Config provides an inventory of resources, configuration history, and configuration change
notifications, making it easier to audit compliance with internal policies and regulatory
requirements5.

87. What is AWS Systems Manager?

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AWS Systems Manager provides a unified interface for viewing and controlling your
infrastructure on AWS, on-premises, and other cloud providers. It provides a complete view of
your infrastructure performance and configuration, simplifies resource and application
management, and makes it easy to operate and manage your infrastructure at scale. Key
capabilities include patching, configuration management, automation, and secure remote
access to instances5.

88. What is AWS Trusted Advisor?

AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides real-time guidance to help you provision
your resources following AWS best practices. It inspects your AWS environment and makes
recommendations for saving money, improving system performance and reliability, closing
security gaps, and optimizing your account. Trusted Advisor checks across five categories: cost
optimization, security, fault tolerance, performance, and service limits5.

89. What is AWS Service Health Dashboard?

The AWS Service Health Dashboard displays the general status of AWS services across all
regions. It shows the current health status and any historical information about each AWS
service. The dashboard is the best place to check for service-wide issues affecting multiple
customers. For account-specific issues, AWS provides the Personal Health Dashboard, which
gives personalized information about service issues that might affect your specific AWS
resources5.

90. What is AWS X-Ray?

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications,
particularly those built using a microservices architecture. It provides an end-to-end view of
requests as they travel through your application and shows a map of your application's
underlying components. X-Ray collects data about requests that your application serves and
provides tools to view, filter, and gain insights into that data to identify issues and optimization
opportunities5.

91. What is Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)?

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block-level storage volumes for use with EC2
instances. EBS volumes are highly available and reliable storage volumes that can be attached
to any running instance in the same Availability Zone. They persist independently from the life of
an instance and can be used like raw, unformatted block devices. EBS volumes are particularly
well-suited for database-style applications that require frequent and granular updates5.

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92. What are the different types of EBS volumes?
Amazon EBS offers several volume types:

1.​ General Purpose SSD (gp2/gp3): Balance of price and performance for a wide variety of
workloads​

2.​ Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1/io2): High-performance for mission-critical, low-latency, or

high-throughput workloads​

3.​ Throughput Optimized HDD (st1): Low-cost magnetic storage for frequently accessed,
throughput-intensive workloads​

4.​ Cold HDD (sc1): Lowest cost magnetic storage for less frequently accessed workloads​

5.​ Magnetic (standard): Previous generation HDD volumes5​

93. What is an EBS snapshot?

An EBS snapshot is a point-in-time copy of an EBS volume that is stored in Amazon S3.
Snapshots are incremental backups, meaning only the blocks that have changed since your last
snapshot are saved. This minimizes the time required to create the snapshot and saves on
storage costs. Snapshots can be used to create new volumes, move volumes across Availability
Zones, or back up data for long-term durability5.

94. What is Amazon EFS?

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a fully managed, elastic file system for use with AWS
Cloud services and on-premises resources. It scales automatically as files are added or
removed, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files. EFS supports the
Network File System version 4 (NFSv4) protocol, allowing concurrent access from multiple EC2
instances across different Availability Zones. It's ideal for content management, web serving,
and development environments5.

95. What is the difference between EBS and EFS?

EBS volumes can only be attached to a single EC2 instance in the same Availability Zone and
provide block-level storage (like a hard drive). EFS provides file-level storage that can be
mounted by multiple EC2 instances simultaneously across multiple Availability Zones. EBS is
typically faster with lower latency but lacks concurrent access, while EFS offers shared access

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but with potentially higher latency. EBS is priced based on provisioned capacity, while EFS is
priced based on actual storage used5.

96. What is Amazon FSx?

Amazon FSx provides fully managed file systems built on common file system technologies. It
offers two main services: FSx for Windows File Server (built on Windows Server, supporting
SMB protocol and NTFS) and FSx for Lustre (high-performance file system designed for
compute-intensive workloads). Both services provide fully managed, highly reliable, and
scalable file storage that is accessible from multiple instances simultaneously5.

97. What is AWS Storage Gateway?

AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that connects your on-premises
environment with AWS cloud storage. It provides three types of gateways: File Gateway (SMB
or NFS interface to S3), Volume Gateway (iSCSI block storage with cloud backup), and Tape
Gateway (virtual tape library interface). Storage Gateway helps migrate data to AWS, provide
low-latency access to cloud data from on-premises, and implement backup and disaster
recovery solutions5.

98. What is Amazon S3 Glacier?

Amazon S3 Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost cloud storage service for data
archiving and long-term backup. It provides storage optimization and secure transfer with
encryption. Glacier offers multiple retrieval options ranging from minutes to hours, with costs
varying based on retrieval speed. It's ideal for storing rarely accessed data with retrieval time
requirements from minutes to hours2.

99. What is S3 Object Lock?

S3 Object Lock enables you to store objects using a "write once, read many" (WORM) model.
Object Lock can help prevent objects from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of
time or indefinitely. It offers two retention modes: Compliance Mode, where no user (including
the root user) can override or delete protected objects, and Governance Mode, where special
permissions are required to modify protected objects. Object Lock is useful for regulatory
requirements and data protection strategies5.

100. What is AWS Snow Family?

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The AWS Snow Family consists of physical devices that help migrate large amounts of data into
and out of AWS when network transfer isn't feasible due to time, cost, or bandwidth constraints.
It includes:

●​ Snowcone: Small, rugged device (8TB) for edge computing and data transfer​

●​ Snowball: Suitcase-sized device (80TB) for data migration and edge computing​

●​ Snowmobile: Shipping container transported by semi-trailer truck for exabyte-scale data

migration​
These devices provide secure, offline data transfer with built-in encryption5.​

101. What is Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)?

Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy to deploy,
manage, and scale containerized applications. It integrates with other AWS services such as
IAM, CloudWatch, and VPC, providing security, monitoring, and networking. ECS supports
Docker containers and allows you to run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2
instances or in a serverless environment using AWS Fargate5.

102. What is Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)?

Amazon EKS is a managed Kubernetes service that makes it easier to deploy, manage, and
scale containerized applications using Kubernetes. EKS runs the Kubernetes control plane
across multiple AWS Availability Zones, automatically detects and replaces unhealthy control
plane instances, and provides on-demand upgrades and patching. EKS integrates with AWS
services for load balancing, authentication, and monitoring5.

103. What is AWS Fargate?

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon ECS
and Amazon EKS. With Fargate, you don't need to provision or manage servers; you just define
your container specifications and pay for the resources required to run your containers. Fargate
removes the need to choose server types, decide when to scale clusters, or optimize cluster
packing, making container deployment significantly simpler5.

104. What is AWS Batch?

AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds
of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. It dynamically provisions the optimal quantity
and type of compute resources based on the volume and specific requirements of the batch

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jobs submitted. AWS Batch plans, schedules, and executes batch computing workloads without
requiring you to install and manage batch computing software5.

105. What is AWS Lightsail?

AWS Lightsail is a simplified compute service that offers virtual private servers (VPS) with
bundled storage, DNS management, and data transfer at a low, predictable monthly price. It's
designed for small business owners, developers, and individuals who need a simple virtual
private server solution. Lightsail provides easy-to-use plans for running websites, web
applications, business software, and development environments5.

106. What is AWS Outposts?

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and
tools to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. Outposts provides
consistent hybrid cloud experiences for applications and workloads that need to remain
on-premises due to latency, data residency, or local data processing requirements, while still
using familiar AWS services and management tools5.

107. What is AWS Wavelength?

AWS Wavelength embeds AWS compute and storage services within 5G networks, providing
ultra-low-latency applications for mobile devices and users. By deploying AWS services to the
edge of 5G networks, applications can deliver single-digit millisecond latencies to mobile
devices and users. Wavelength is ideal for applications that require ultra-low latency such as
game streaming, AR/VR, machine learning inference at the edge, and IoT5.

108. What is Amazon EC2 Image Builder?

Amazon EC2 Image Builder is a fully managed service that makes it easier to automate the
creation, management, and deployment of customized, secure, and up-to-date server images. It
simplifies the building and testing of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with automated pipelines,
helping maintain security standards through integration with AWS security services and
providing a consistent process for image management across multiple regions5.

109. What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service for deploying and scaling web applications and services. You
upload your code, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, capacity
provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. It supports

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applications developed in Java, .NET, PHP, [Link], Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker, allowing
developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure5.

110. What is AWS App Runner?

AWS App Runner is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to quickly deploy
containerized web applications and APIs at scale without requiring infrastructure expertise. It
automatically builds and deploys web applications from source code or container images,
handles traffic encryption, load balancing, auto-scaling, and health monitoring. App Runner lets
developers focus on code rather than configuring services, managing servers, or scaling
infrastructure5.

111. What is Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)?

Amazon SNS is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables you to decouple
microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. It provides topics for
high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging. Publishers send messages to topics,
which then deliver to multiple subscribing endpoints such as email, SMS, mobile push
notifications, HTTP endpoints, SQS queues, and Lambda functions5.

112. What is Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)?

Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and
scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS eliminates the
complexity of managing and operating message-oriented middleware, allowing you to focus on
building applications. It provides two types of queues: Standard queues with high throughput but
potential out-of-order messages and FIFO queues with exactly-once processing and in-order
message delivery5.

113. What is the difference between SNS and SQS?

SNS is a push-based service where messages are immediately pushed to multiple subscribers,
ideal for broadcasting messages to multiple endpoints simultaneously. SQS is a pull-based
service where messages are stored until consumers retrieve them, ideal for workload
processing and decoupling components. SNS is optimal for fanout scenarios (one message to
many receivers) while SQS is better for application integration and task processing (one
message processed by one receiver)5.

114. What is Amazon EventBridge?

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Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) is a serverless event bus service that
makes it easy to connect applications using data from your own applications, SaaS applications,
and AWS services. EventBridge delivers a stream of real-time data from event sources and
routes that data to targets such as Lambda, SQS, SNS, or other destinations. It simplifies
building event-driven architectures and helps reduce code complexity5.

115. What is Amazon MQ?

Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ that
makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. It provides multiple
deployment modes, high availability, message durability, and security features while supporting
industry-standard APIs and protocols including JMS, AMQP, MQTT, OpenWire, and STOMP.
Amazon MQ helps migrate messaging from on-premises to the cloud without rewriting
messaging code5.

116. What is AWS Step Functions?

AWS Step Functions is a serverless workflow orchestration service that makes it easy to
coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows. It provides a visual interface to
arrange and visualize components of your application as a series of steps. Step Functions
automatically triggers and tracks each step, retries when there are errors, and logs the state of
each step, making it easier to build and monitor multi-step applications5.

117. What is an SQS dead-letter queue?

An SQS dead-letter queue is a special queue that receives messages that couldn't be
processed successfully after a maximum number of receive attempts. Dead-letter queues help
isolate problematic messages for troubleshooting or reprocessing later, preventing them from
blocking the processing of other messages. This is useful for handling poison messages
(messages that can't be processed due to bugs) and implementing robust error handling in
distributed systems5.

118. What are SQS message retention periods?

SQS message retention period is the amount of time a message will stay in the queue if it's not
deleted. The default retention period is 4 days, but it can be configured between 60 seconds (1
minute) and 1,209,600 seconds (14 days). After the retention period expires, messages are
automatically deleted from the queue. This feature helps prevent processing stale messages
and manages queue storage5.

119. What is Amazon AppFlow?

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Amazon AppFlow is a fully managed integration service that enables you to securely transfer
data between SaaS applications like Salesforce, Marketo, Slack, and ServiceNow, and AWS
services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift. AppFlow allows you to run data flows at
scheduled intervals, in response to business events, or on-demand. It provides data
transformation capabilities and encrypts data in transit to ensure security5.

120. What is AWS Application Integration?

AWS Application Integration is a suite of services designed to help connect applications and
data sources across organizations. It includes services like Amazon AppFlow, Amazon
EventBridge, Amazon MQ, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, AWS Step Functions, and Amazon API
Gateway. These services work together to enable various integration patterns including
messaging, workflow orchestration, event-driven architectures, and data integration, helping
businesses build connected applications with reduced complexity5.

121. What is AWS CodeCommit?

AWS CodeCommit is a fully managed source control service that hosts secure Git-based
repositories. It eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about
scaling its infrastructure. CodeCommit provides secure, highly scalable, managed private Git
repositories that integrate with other AWS services and works with existing Git tools. It offers
encrypted repositories with no size limits, making code storage and collaboration secure and
scalable5.

122. What is AWS CodeBuild?

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code,
runs tests, and produces software packages ready for deployment. It scales continuously and
processes multiple builds concurrently, eliminating build queue bottlenecks. CodeBuild removes
the need to set up, patch, update, and manage build servers. It provides prepackaged build
environments for popular programming languages and can be extended with custom build
environments5.

123. What is AWS CodeDeploy?

AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments
to various compute services including Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and on-premises servers. It
makes it easier to rapidly release new features, avoid downtime during application deployment,
and handle the complexity of updating applications. CodeDeploy can deploy application content,
AWS Lambda functions, and applications packaged in Docker containers5.

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124. What is AWS CodePipeline?
AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps automate release
pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. It automates the build, test,
and deploy phases of your release process every time there is a code change. CodePipeline
integrates with third-party services like GitHub and custom plugins, allowing you to model your
complete release process5.

125. What is AWS CodeStar?

AWS CodeStar is a cloud service that provides a unified user interface, enabling you to easily
manage software development activities in one place. It helps you quickly develop, build, and
deploy applications on AWS by providing a project management dashboard, code tools, and
templates. CodeStar includes project templates for various programming languages and AWS
services, making it easier to set up a continuous delivery toolchain5.

126. What is AWS Cloud9?

AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you write,
run, and debug code with just a browser. It includes a code editor, debugger, and terminal, and
comes prepackaged with essential tools for popular programming languages. Cloud9 enables
code collaboration in real-time, allowing team members to work together on projects from
different locations. It integrates with AWS services, simplifying serverless application
development5.

127. What is AWS X-Ray?

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug distributed applications, such as those built
using a microservices architecture. It traces requests as they travel through your application and
provides tools to view, filter, and analyze data to identify issues and optimization opportunities.
X-Ray integrates with AWS services like EC2, ECS, Lambda, and API Gateway, helping you
analyze latencies, identify error paths, and improve application performance5.

128. What is AWS CloudShell?

AWS CloudShell is a browser-based shell that provides command-line access to AWS
resources directly from the AWS Management Console. It comes pre-authenticated with your
console credentials and pre-installed with popular tools like the AWS CLI, Python, [Link], and
more. CloudShell provides 1GB of persistent storage, making it easy to run AWS CLI
commands without having to install tools locally or manage access keys5.

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129. What is AWS Amplify?
AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services that helps front-end web and mobile developers build
full-stack applications powered by AWS. Amplify includes a command-line interface and libraries
for frameworks like React, Angular, Vue, and React Native. It provides ready-to-use components
for authentication, storage, data, APIs, analytics, and hosting, enabling rapid development of
scalable applications with minimal backend configuration5.

130. What is Amazon CodeGuru?

Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool that provides intelligent recommendations for improving
code quality and identifying an application's most expensive lines of code. It consists of two
components: CodeGuru Reviewer uses machine learning to identify critical issues, security
vulnerabilities, and hard-to-find bugs during application development, while CodeGuru Profiler
helps optimize application performance and reduce compute costs by identifying inefficient
code5.

131. What is Amazon Athena?

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3
using standard SQL. It's serverless, so there's no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for
the queries you run. Athena scales automatically, executing queries in parallel, which gives
results in seconds. Athena integrates with Amazon QuickSight for visualization and works with a
variety of standard data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet5.

132. What is Amazon EMR?

Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) is a managed cluster platform that simplifies running big
data frameworks like Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Presto in the AWS
Cloud. EMR handles the provisioning, configuration, and tuning of clusters, allowing you to
process and analyze vast amounts of data. It offers flexible deployment options, automatic
scaling, and integration with other AWS services like S3, DynamoDB, and Redshift5.

133. What is Amazon Kinesis?

Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data. It
offers four services: Kinesis Data Streams for custom applications, Kinesis Data Firehose for
loading streaming data into AWS services, Kinesis Data Analytics for processing streaming data
with SQL or Apache Flink, and Kinesis Video Streams for processing video streams. Kinesis
enables real-time dashboards, anomaly detection, and dynamic pricing strategies5.

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134. What is Amazon QuickSight?
Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business intelligence service that makes it easy to
deliver insights to everyone in your organization. It connects to various data sources including
AWS services (Redshift, RDS, Aurora, S3, Athena), third-party databases, and SaaS
applications. QuickSight features machine learning-powered insights, interactive dashboards,
and embedded analytics with pay-per-session pricing and no upfront costs or annual
commitments5.

135. What is AWS Glue?

AWS Glue is a fully managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) service that makes it easy to
prepare and transform data for analytics. It discovers and profiles data from various sources,
creates ETL jobs to transform and load data into target destinations, and maintains a centralized
metadata repository. Glue is serverless, which means there's no infrastructure to provision or
manage, and it scales dynamically to handle your ETL workloads2.

136. What is Amazon OpenSearch Service (formerly

Amazon Elasticsearch Service)?
Amazon OpenSearch Service makes it easy to deploy, secure, and operate OpenSearch
clusters at scale. It offers real-time analytics and visualization capabilities with compatibility for
open-source OpenSearch and legacy Elasticsearch APIs. The service handles routine tasks like
hardware provisioning, software installation, failure recovery, backups, and integrates with
services like Amazon VPC, AWS KMS, and AWS IAM for security5.

137. What is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache

Kafka (MSK)?
Amazon MSK is a fully managed service that makes it easy to build and run applications that
use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. It handles the provisioning, configuration, and
maintenance of Apache Kafka clusters and Apache ZooKeeper nodes. MSK offers high
availability with multi-AZ replication, automatic recovery from common Apache Kafka failures,
and integration with AWS services for security, monitoring, and data pipelines5.

138. What is AWS Lake Formation?

AWS Lake Formation is a service that makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in days. It
simplifies the process of collecting, cleaning, cataloging, and securing data, and making that
data available for analytics and machine learning. Lake Formation helps you define and enforce

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security policies centrally, ensuring proper data access governance. It builds on AWS Glue,
providing a single point of control for all your data lake tasks5.

139. What is Amazon DataZone?

Amazon DataZone is a data management service that makes it easier for organizations to
catalog, discover, share, and govern their data across organizational boundaries. It provides a
unified interface for data producers to share data and for data consumers to find and access it.
DataZone includes business glossaries, metadata management, access controls, and
integrations with various AWS analytics services5.

140. What is AWS Data Pipeline?

AWS Data Pipeline is a web service that helps you reliably process and move data between
different AWS compute and storage services, as well as on-premises data sources, at specified
intervals. It orchestrates the movement and transformation of data for use cases like log
processing, data warehousing, and ETL workflows. Data Pipeline manages task dependencies,
retry logic, and ensures reliable completion of workflows even when faced with infrastructure
failures5.

141. What is Amazon SageMaker?

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed machine learning service that enables data scientists
and developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly. It provides all the
components used for machine learning in a single toolset, including notebook instances for data
exploration, distributed training infrastructure, and model hosting services with auto-scaling.
SageMaker removes the heavy lifting from each step of the machine learning process to make it
easier to develop high-quality models5.

142. What is Amazon Rekognition?

Amazon Rekognition is a computer vision service that makes it easy to add image and video
analysis to applications. It can identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities in images and
videos, as well as detect any inappropriate content. Rekognition provides highly accurate facial
analysis, face comparison, and facial search capabilities. It's used for user verification,
cataloging, people counting, public safety, and content moderation5.

143. What is Amazon Comprehend?

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Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine
learning to find insights and relationships in text. It identifies the language of the text; extracts
key phrases, places, people, brands, or events; understands sentiment; analyzes text using
tokenization and parts of speech; and automatically organizes a collection of text files by topic. It
requires no machine learning experience to use5.

144. What is Amazon Lex?

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice
and text. It provides the deep functionality and flexibility of natural language understanding
(NLU) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) to enable building highly engaging user
experiences with lifelike conversational interactions. Amazon Lex powers Amazon Alexa and
enables you to create sophisticated, natural language chatbots in your applications5.

145. What is Amazon Polly?

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. It lets you create applications that
talk and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Polly's Text-to-Speech
service uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize natural-sounding human
speech. It offers dozens of lifelike voices across a wide variety of languages, making it easy to
build speech-enabled applications that work in many different countries5.

146. What is Amazon Translate?

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and
affordable language translation. It uses deep learning models to provide more accurate and
natural-sounding translation than traditional statistical and rule-based translation algorithms.
Translate supports a wide variety of languages and can translate content in real-time or batch
mode for websites, applications, or large collections of documents5.

147. What is Amazon Forecast?

Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly
accurate forecasts. It uses the same technology used by [Link] and requires no machine
learning experience to use. Forecast can be used to forecast business metrics such as product
demand, resource needs, or financial performance. It automatically handles complex data,
including multiple seasonality patterns, holidays, and other factors that impact forecasting
accuracy5.

148. What is Amazon Personalize?

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Amazon Personalize is a machine learning service that makes it easy for developers to create
individualized recommendations for customers using their applications. It enables you to
implement personalized product and content recommendations, tailored search results, and
targeted marketing promotions. Personalize uses the same technology used by [Link]
for its own product recommendations but requires no machine learning expertise to implement5.

149. What is Amazon Textract?

Amazon Textract is a service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents.
It goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract
data from forms and tables. It uses machine learning to read and process any type of document,
accurately extracting text, handwriting, forms, and tables without the need for manual review or
custom code. Textract makes document processing workflows more efficient5.

150. What is Amazon Kendra?

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Kendra
reimagines enterprise search for websites and applications by using natural language
processing and advanced machine learning algorithms to return specific answers to search
questions from within your structured and unstructured data. It learns from user interactions and
relevance feedback to improve search results over time, reducing the time spent searching for
information5.

151. What is AWS Organizations?

AWS Organizations is a service that helps you centrally manage and govern multiple AWS
accounts. It allows you to create groups of accounts called Organizational Units (OUs), apply
policies to these OUs or individual accounts, and simplify billing with consolidated billing
features. Organizations enables policy-based management for multiple accounts, helping
implement security and compliance controls across your entire AWS environment5.

152. What is AWS Control Tower?

AWS Control Tower provides a way to set up and govern a secure, compliant, multi-account
AWS environment based on best practices. It automates the setup of landing zones, an
environment for running secure and scalable workloads, implements guardrails for governance,
and provides a dashboard for visibility. Control Tower helps organizations implement a
structured multi-account strategy with centralized governance and compliance monitoring5.

153. What is AWS Config?

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AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in your AWS
account. It continuously records configuration changes to resources and evaluates these
recorded configurations against desired configurations. AWS Config enables compliance
auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting. It helps assess,
audit, and evaluate resource configurations for compliance with internal policies and regulatory
standards5.

154. What is AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk
auditing of your AWS account. It records API calls made in your account and delivers log files to
an S3 bucket. These logs capture details including the identity of the caller, time, source IP
address, request parameters, and response elements. CloudTrail helps with security analysis,
resource change tracking, and compliance auditing8.

155. What is AWS Artifact?

AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports and
agreements. It provides access to AWS security and compliance documents, such as SOC
reports, PCI reports, and certifications from accreditation bodies. AWS Artifact helps you
demonstrate to auditors or regulators that your infrastructure complies with various compliance
standards and regulations, supporting your compliance needs5.

156. What is AWS Audit Manager?

AWS Audit Manager helps you continuously audit your AWS usage to simplify how you assess
risk and compliance with regulations and industry standards. It automates evidence collection
and organizes it by compliance requirement, reducing the manual effort needed for audits. Audit
Manager provides pre-built frameworks for common industry standards and regulations or
allows you to create custom frameworks based on internal audit requirements5.

157. What is AWS License Manager?

AWS License Manager makes it easier to manage software licenses from vendors like
Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM across AWS and on-premises environments. It helps you
control costs by stopping the use of licenses that violate your rules, limiting overages and
penalties. License Manager reduces the risk of non-compliance through inventory tracking and
automated controls, and simplifies license management at scale with rule-based controls5.

158. What is Amazon Macie?

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Amazon Macie is a fully managed data security and data privacy service that uses machine
learning and pattern matching to discover, classify, and protect sensitive data in AWS. It
provides visibility into how sensitive data is being accessed or moved in your organization.
Macie automatically detects a large and growing list of sensitive data types, including PII such
as names, addresses, and credit card numbers, helping protect data privacy and security5.

159. What is AWS Backup?

AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service that makes it easy to centralize and automate
the backup of data across AWS services. It offers a cost-effective, fully managed policy-based
backup solution, simplifying backup management while helping ensure compliance with
business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. AWS Backup centralizes backup
across AWS services including EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, EFS, and EC2 instances5.

160. What is Service Control Policies (SCPs)?

Service Control Policies (SCPs) are a type of organization policy that you can use to manage
permissions across your organization in AWS Organizations. SCPs offer centralized control over
the maximum available permissions for all accounts in your organization, ensuring that your
accounts stay within your organization's access control guidelines. SCPs don't grant
permissions but instead define guardrails that restrict what services and actions users and roles
in member accounts can use5.

161. What is AWS Cost Explorer?

AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to view and analyze your AWS costs and usage. It
provides a set of default reports for common cost breakdowns like monthly costs by service or
hourly costs for specific services. Cost Explorer also offers forecasting functionality to estimate
your future costs based on historical trends. It allows you to filter and group data by various
dimensions like service, region, and tag, helping you identify cost optimization opportunities5.

162. What is AWS Budgets?

AWS Budgets allows you to set custom budgets to track your costs and usage and respond
quickly to alerts if costs exceed your budgeted amount. You can create budgets for costs,
usage, Savings Plans utilization, and Savings Plans coverage. AWS Budgets supports
notifications via email and SNS and can trigger automated actions in response to budget
thresholds being crossed, helping proactively manage costs5.

163. What are AWS Cost and Usage Reports?

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AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) provide the most comprehensive set of cost and usage
data available for AWS. These reports include additional metadata about AWS services, pricing,
reservations, and Savings Plans to help you analyze costs. CUR can be delivered to S3 buckets
and integrated with tools like Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon QuickSight for
deeper analysis and visualization5.

164. What is AWS Trusted Advisor Cost Optimization

checks?
AWS Trusted Advisor Cost Optimization checks analyze your AWS usage and provide
recommendations to help save money by eliminating unused or idle resources or committing to
reserved capacity. These checks identify idle EC2 instances, underutilized EBS volumes,
unassociated Elastic IP addresses, idle load balancers, and opportunities to save by using
Reserved Instances or Savings Plans, helping reduce unnecessary expenses5.

165. What is a Reserved Instance?

A Reserved Instance (RI) is a billing discount applied to the use of On-Demand instances in
your account. RIs provide a significant discount (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand pricing in
exchange for a commitment to use a specific instance configuration (instance type, region,
tenancy, and OS) for a 1 or 3-year term. RIs are available for EC2, RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache,
and OpenSearch, helping reduce costs for predictable workloads5.

166. What is a Savings Plan?

Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model that offers lower prices than On-Demand pricing in
exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1 or
3-year term. AWS offers two types of Savings Plans: Compute Savings Plans (apply to EC2,
Lambda, and Fargate usage regardless of instance family, size, OS, or region) and EC2
Instance Savings Plans (apply to specific instance families in a region). Savings Plans provide
flexibility while offering discounts of up to 72%5.

167. What is AWS Cost Categories?

AWS Cost Categories allow you to group cost and usage information into meaningful categories
based on your business needs. You can create custom categories like projects, departments, or
environments, and map your costs and usage to these categories using rules. Cost Categories
help organize and track costs at scale, supporting complex organizational structures and
custom reporting needs. They integrate with AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and AWS Cost
and Usage Reports5.

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168. What is AWS Cost Anomaly Detection?
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is a service that uses machine learning to continuously monitor
your cost and usage to detect unusual spends. It evaluates your historical costs, identifies
spending patterns, and alerts you when anomalies occur. You can configure alerts for individual
AWS services, member accounts, cost categories, or cost allocation tags. The service helps
prevent unexpected charges by providing early detection of unusual spending patterns5.

169. What is AWS Purchase Orders?

AWS Purchase Orders feature allows you to match your AWS invoices with your internal
purchase order (PO) management system. You can create purchase orders in the AWS Billing
console, configure them with contacts, billing address, and effective dates, and associate them
with specific invoices. This helps streamline the invoice approval and payment processes by
ensuring that AWS invoices properly reference your internal purchase orders5.

170. What is AWS Billing Conductor?

AWS Billing Conductor is a service that helps AWS Solutions Providers and enterprises with
multiple business units create custom billing groups, apply pricing plans, and generate pro
forma cost and usage data. It allows you to model your AWS costs to align with your business
model without affecting actual AWS charges. Billing Conductor creates separate billing views for
groups of accounts while maintaining a consolidated view across all accounts5.

171. What is AWS Key Management Service (KMS)?

AWS KMS is a managed service that makes it easy to create and control cryptographic keys
used to encrypt your data. It integrates with AWS services like S3, EBS, and RDS for data
encryption and provides a centralized key management solution. KMS uses hardware security
modules (HSMs) to protect key security and offers features for key rotation, access control, and
usage auditing. It helps you meet compliance requirements for encryption and key
management5.

172. What is AWS Secrets Manager?

AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services,
and IT resources. It enables you to rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys,
and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. Secrets Manager offers automatic rotation of
secrets with built-in integration for Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DocumentDB,
helping meet compliance requirements for secret rotation5.

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173. What is AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)?
AWS Certificate Manager is a service that lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy public
and private SSL/TLS certificates for use with AWS services and your internal connected
resources. It removes the time-consuming manual process of purchasing, uploading, and
renewing SSL/TLS certificates. ACM certificates are used with Elastic Load Balancing,
CloudFront, API Gateway, and other integrated services, providing in-transit encryption for your
applications5.

174. What is AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)?

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common
web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume
excessive resources. WAF lets you control access to your content by defining customizable
security rules that block common attack patterns like SQL injection or cross-site scripting. It
integrates with CloudFront, API Gateway, Application Load Balancer, and AppSync5.

175. What is Amazon Inspector?

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security
and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. It automatically assesses applications for
exposure, vulnerabilities, and deviations from best practices. Inspector provides detailed reports
with security findings prioritized by level of severity, helping you identify and remediate security
issues in your EC2 instances and the applications running on them5.

176. What is Amazon Detective?

Amazon Detective makes it easy to analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of
security findings or suspicious activities. It automatically collects log data from your AWS
resources and uses machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to build a linked set
of data that enables you to easily conduct security investigations. Detective helps security
teams conduct faster and more effective investigations5.

177. What is AWS Shield?

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that
safeguards applications running on AWS. Shield Standard is automatically included for all AWS
customers at no additional cost. Shield Advanced provides enhanced DDoS attack protection
for applications running on Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, Global
Accelerator, and Route 53. It offers near real-time visibility into attacks and access to the AWS
DDoS Response Team5.

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178. What is AWS Firewall Manager?
AWS Firewall Manager is a security management service that allows you to centrally configure
and manage firewall rules across your accounts and applications in AWS Organizations. It
simplifies firewall management tasks like creating firewall rules, applying them to all accounts,
and ensuring all new resources are automatically protected. Firewall Manager works with AWS
WAF, AWS Shield Advanced, and VPC Security Groups to provide unified security
management5.

179. What is AWS Single Sign-On (AWS IAM Identity

Center)?
AWS IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS Single Sign-On) is a cloud SSO service that makes it
easy to centrally manage SSO access to multiple AWS accounts and business applications. It
helps you manage SSO access and user permissions across all your AWS accounts in AWS
Organizations. Identity Center integrates with on-premises Active Directory, built-in directories in
Identity Center, and external identity providers via SAML 2.0, providing unified user
management5.

180. What is Amazon Cognito?

Amazon Cognito provides authentication, authorization, and user management for web and
mobile applications. It offers two main components: User Pools (a user directory with sign-up
and sign-in functionality) and Identity Pools (which provide AWS credentials to grant users
access to AWS services). Cognito supports social identity providers (Google, Facebook),
enterprise identity providers through SAML and OpenID Connect, and guest access5.

181. What is AWS IoT Core?

AWS IoT Core is a managed cloud service that lets connected devices easily and securely
interact with cloud applications and other devices. It can support billions of devices and trillions
of messages, and can process and route those messages to AWS endpoints and other devices
reliably and securely. IoT Core provides secure communication using certificates and device
authorization, making it easy to connect and manage IoT devices at scale5.

182. What is AWS IoT Greengrass?

AWS IoT Greengrass seamlessly extends AWS to edge devices, allowing them to act locally on
the data they generate while still using the cloud for management, analytics, and durable
storage. It enables edge devices to run AWS Lambda functions, execute predictions based on
machine learning models, keep device data in sync, and communicate securely with other

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devices-even without internet connectivity. Greengrass helps create more responsive and
cost-effective IoT applications5.

183. What is AWS IoT Analytics?

AWS IoT Analytics is a fully managed service that makes it easy to run sophisticated analytics
on massive volumes of IoT data. It filters, transforms, and enriches IoT data before storing it in a
time-series data store for analysis. IoT Analytics includes pre-built analytical functions
specifically designed for IoT data analysis, and integrates with Amazon QuickSight for
visualization and Jupyter Notebooks for advanced analytics5.

184. What is AWS IoT Events?

AWS IoT Events is a managed service that makes it easy to detect events from IoT sensors and
applications, and trigger actions when these events occur. It continuously monitors data from
multiple IoT sensors and applications, and provides built-in event detection and management
features. IoT Events enables easy creation of complex event detection and response systems
without having to build and maintain the underlying infrastructure5.

185. What is AWS IoT Button?

AWS IoT Button is a programmable button based on the Amazon Dash Button hardware. It's a
Wi-Fi device that can be configured to trigger AWS Lambda functions for various use cases.
The button can be programmed to count items, call services, track work, provide feedback,
order products, or even control home devices. It serves as a simple way to start using AWS IoT
services without complex device setup5.

186. What is AWS IoT Device Management?

AWS IoT Device Management makes it easy to securely onboard, organize, monitor, and
remotely manage IoT devices at scale throughout their lifecycle. It allows you to register,
organize, and track your devices, and remotely manage devices with over-the-air (OTA)
updates. IoT Device Management provides secure tunneling to access devices behind firewalls
and automated provisioning of device certificates for secure connections5.

187. What is AWS IoT SiteWise?

AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize, and
monitor data from industrial equipment at scale. It provides software running on an edge
gateway device that collects data from industrial equipment and transfers it to the AWS Cloud.

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SiteWise helps industrial customers analyze equipment data, reduce gaps in industrial
operations, and improve production performance and availability5.

188. What is AWS Snow Family for IoT?

The AWS Snow Family devices support IoT and edge computing workloads. Snowcone,
Snowball Edge, and Snowmobile provide options for running compute workloads in
environments with limited or no connectivity. These devices can run AWS IoT Greengrass,
Amazon EC2 instances, and AWS Lambda functions locally, allowing data processing and
analysis at the edge. They're ideal for IoT data collection and processing in remote industrial
sites, transportation, or disaster response scenarios5.

189. What is AWS IoT 1-Click?

AWS IoT 1-Click is a service that enables simple devices to trigger AWS Lambda functions that
execute a specific action. It makes it easy to incorporate simple ready-to-use buttons into IoT
applications without writing firmware or configuring devices. The service helps create simple
workflows like service desk tickets, equipment monitoring notifications, or reordering supplies
with the push of a button5.

190. What is AWS IoT TwinMaker?

AWS IoT TwinMaker is a service that makes it easier to create digital twins of real-world
systems like buildings, factories, industrial equipment, and production lines. It connects
real-world data sources to create virtual representations that update as conditions change.
TwinMaker helps optimize operations by visualizing current conditions, analyzing historical data,
and developing "what-if" scenarios without disrupting existing operations5.

191. What is Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)?

Amazon SES is a cloud-based email sending service designed to help digital marketers and
application developers send marketing, notification, and transactional emails. It provides a
reliable, cost-effective way to send and receive emails using your own email addresses and
domains. SES includes features for deliverability optimization, reputation management, and
email analytics, making it suitable for both high-volume senders and applications that send
emails5.

192. What is Amazon Route 53?

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.
It provides domain registration, DNS routing, and health checking functionality. Route 53

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connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS and also outside of AWS, and can
route users to the optimal endpoint based on geographic location, latency, or health checks. It
supports various routing policies including simple, weighted, latency-based, geolocation, and
failover5.

193. What is AWS AppSync?

AWS AppSync is a managed service that uses GraphQL to make it easy for applications to get
exactly the data they need. It simplifies application development by letting you create a flexible
API to securely access, manipulate, and combine data from one or more data sources.
AppSync manages the heavy lifting of securely connecting to data sources, providing
authorization mechanisms, real-time updates, offline data synchronization, and data
manipulation across multiple sources5.

194. What is AWS Amplify?

AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services that enables mobile and web developers to build
full-stack applications. Amplify provides a development framework for building applications with
JavaScript, iOS, and Android, along with a hosting service for deploying and hosting static web
applications. It includes ready-to-use components for authentication, storage, APIs, analytics,
and more, accelerating development while leveraging AWS services5.

195. What is Amazon WorkSpaces?

Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution that allows
you to provision virtual, cloud-based Windows or Linux desktops for your users. It eliminates the
need to procure and deploy hardware or install complex software, allowing users to access their
desktops from any supported device. WorkSpaces provides persistent desktops that are
available instantly from anywhere with an internet connection5.

196. What is AWS Marketplace?

AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent
software vendors that makes it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS. It
includes various categories of products such as security, networking, storage, machine learning,
business intelligence, database, and DevOps. Marketplace simplifies software licensing and
procurement with flexible pricing options including free trials, hourly, monthly, annual, and
multi-year contracts5.

197. What is AWS Ground Station?

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AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications,
downlink and process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations. It eliminates the need to
build or manage your own ground station infrastructure, reducing the cost and complexity of
satellite communications. Ground Station provides direct access to AWS services for storage,
compute, and analytics, enabling faster data processing and analysis5.

198. What is Amazon Honeycode?

Amazon Honeycode is a fully managed service that allows you to quickly build mobile and web
applications without programming. It provides a visual application builder and an integrated
spreadsheet-like interface where you can define your data, business logic, and application
behavior. Honeycode makes app development accessible to business users with no coding
required, helping teams build custom applications for task management, project tracking, and
business processes5.

199. What is AWS Health Dashboard?

AWS Health Dashboard provides personalized information about events that might affect your
AWS infrastructure, guides you through scheduled changes, and accelerates troubleshooting. It
gives you a personalized view into the performance and availability of the AWS services
underlying your AWS resources, showing relevant and timely information to help manage events
in progress and provides proactive notifications about scheduled activities5.

200. What is AWS Wavelength?

AWS Wavelength embeds AWS compute and storage services within 5G networks, providing
ultra-low-latency applications for mobile devices and users. By deploying AWS services to the
edge of 5G networks, applications can deliver single-digit millisecond latencies to mobile
devices and users. Wavelength is ideal for applications requiring ultra-low latency such as game
streaming, AR/VR, machine learning inference at the edge, and IoT applications5.

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Conclusion
This comprehensive collection of 200 AWS interview questions with expert answers covers the
fundamental aspects of AWS services and concepts that beginners should understand. By
studying these questions, you'll develop a solid foundation of AWS knowledge that will help you
succeed in interviews and in practical cloud computing scenarios.

The questions span across all major AWS service categories including compute, storage,
databases, networking, security, serverless, management, and specialized services. Each
answer provides concise yet detailed explanations to help you understand not just what each
service does, but how it fits into the broader AWS ecosystem.

Remember that AWS constantly evolves with new services and features, so it's important to stay
updated with the latest developments. Good luck with your AWS interview preparation!

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50 Intermediate-Level AWS Interview Questions with
Expert Answers

1. What is the difference between EC2 Spot Instances and

Spot Fleets?
Spot Instances allow bidding on unused EC2 capacity at up to 90% discount but can be
interrupted with a 2-minute warning. Spot Fleets automate the procurement of multiple Spot
Instance pools and On-Demand Instances to meet target capacity while optimizing costs. Fleets
use allocation strategies like lowestPrice or capacityOptimized to balance cost and
availability14.

2. How does EC2 Enhanced Networking improve

performance?
Enhanced Networking uses Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) or Intel 82599 Virtual Function (VF)
interfaces to provide higher packet-per-second (PPS), lower latency, and reduced jitter. It
achieves up to 100 Gbps throughput for supported instance types (e.g., C5n, M5n) by
bypassing the hypervisor and leveraging SR-IOV13.

3. When would you use a Placement Group?

Placement Groups optimize instance placement for:

●​ Cluster: Low-latency HPC or big data workloads (all instances in the same AZ).​

●​ Partition: Distributed systems like Hadoop, where instances are split into partitions
across racks.​

●​ Spread: Critical applications requiring isolation (each instance on distinct hardware)14.​

4. How do you troubleshoot EC2 instance connectivity

issues?
1.​ Check security group inbound/outbound rules.​

2.​ Verify NACL rules allow ephemeral ports (1024-65535).​

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 3.​ Use VPC Flow Logs to analyze traffic.​

4.​ Test SSH access via Session Manager.​

5.​ Validate IAM instance profile permissions16.​

5. What is EC2 Hibernation and its use cases?

Hibernation preserves the instance’s RAM state to disk (root EBS volume) when stopped. Use
cases include long-running processes (e.g., financial modeling) requiring rapid resumption.
Supported on instances with ≤150 GB RAM and enabled at launch13.

6. How does S3 Intelligent-Tiering reduce costs?

It automatically moves objects between Frequent and Infrequent Access tiers based on access
patterns. No retrieval fees or lifecycle policies needed. Ideal for unpredictable access patterns
with savings up to 68% vs Standard14.

7. What is S3 Batch Operations?

A managed service for bulk operations (copy, restore, Lambda invocations) on billions of
objects. Use cases: migrating storage classes, applying object tags, or triggering compliance
workflows13.

8. How do S3 Pre-signed URLs differ from AWS STS

temporary credentials?
Pre-signed URLs grant time-limited access to specific S3 objects via URL parameters. STS
credentials provide temporary IAM credentials for broader AWS API access. Use URLs for
direct object access; STS for cross-service operations16.

9. What is S3 Object Lock Governance Mode?

Governance Mode prevents object deletion/overwrite unless users have special permissions
(e.g., s3:BypassGovernanceRetention). Unlike Compliance Mode, it allows retention
period adjustments by authorized roles14.

10. When would you use S3 Transfer Acceleration?

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For large file uploads over long distances. It routes traffic through CloudFront edge locations,
improving throughput by 50-500%. Enable via bucket setting and use the s3-accelerate
endpoint13.

11. How does Transit Gateway differ from VPC Peering?

Transit Gateway acts as a hub for connecting multiple VPCs and on-premises networks,
supporting route tables and cross-region peering. VPC Peering is 1:1, non-transitive, and limited
to same-region connections14.

12. What is a VPC Endpoint Policy?

A resource policy attached to Gateway (S3, DynamoDB) or Interface Endpoints to restrict
access to specific IAM principals, source IPs, or S3 buckets. Example: Allow only IAM role
AnalyticsTeam to access s3://data-lake/*16.

13. How do you analyze VPC Flow Logs?

Use Athena to query logs stored in S3:

sql
SELECT sourceaddr, action, count(*)
FROM vpc_flow_logs
WHERE dstport=443 AND action='REJECT'
GROUP BY sourceaddr, action;

Or visualize with CloudWatch Logs Insights13.

14. What is AWS PrivateLink?

A private connectivity service enabling secure access to services (e.g., SaaS) via Interface VPC
Endpoints. Traffic stays within AWS network, avoiding public internet exposure14.

15. How does Direct Connect differ from VPN?

Direct Connect provides dedicated 1/10/100 Gbps network links to AWS with consistent latency.
VPN uses IPSec over public internet, suitable for lower bandwidth needs. Use Direct Connect
for compliance or hybrid cloud with >50 Mbps requirements16.

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16. What are IAM Permission Boundaries?
Policies defining the maximum permissions a user/role can have. They prevent privilege
escalation by limiting even if identity-based policies grant broader access14.

17. How do you enforce MFA for AWS Console access?

Create an IAM policy with Condition: BoolIfExists on
aws:MultiFactorAuthPresent:

json
{
"Effect": "Deny",
"Action": "*",
"Resource": "*",
"Condition": {"BoolIfExists": {"aws:MultiFactorAuthPresent":
"false"}}
}

Apply to users/groups16.

18. What is a Service-Linked Role?

An IAM role tied to an AWS service (e.g., AWS Support, Redshift) for automated resource
management. Predefined permissions; cannot be modified. Created via AWS CLI or service
console13.

19. How does AWS Config enforce compliance?

By evaluating resource configurations against rules (e.g.,
s3-bucket-server-side-encryption-enabled). Remediate non-compliant resources
using AWS Systems Manager Automation or Lambda14.

20. What is GuardDuty’s EC2 finding types?

●​ CryptoCurrency:EC2/: Mining activity.​

●​ Backdoor:EC2/: Unauthorized SSH/RDP access.​

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 ●​ Behavior:EC2/NetworkPortUnusual: Uncommon port traffic16.​

21. How do you mitigate Lambda cold starts?

●​ Use Provisioned Concurrency (pre-warms execution environments).​

●​ Reduce deployment package size.​

●​ Use ARM/Graviton2 processors (cheaper, faster init).​

●​ Avoid VPCs unless necessary18.​

22. What are Lambda Destinations?

Configurable targets (SQS, SNS, EventBridge, other Lambdas) for async invocation results
(success/failure). Replace custom Dead Letter Queues (DLQs) with native retries and routing18.

23. How do Lambda Layers reduce duplication?

Layers centralize shared code (libraries, custom runtimes) across functions. Example: A layer
with NumPy for multiple ML inference functions. Layers count toward deployment package size
limits18.

24. What is Lambda@Edge?

Lambda functions running at CloudFront edge locations to modify HTTP requests/responses.
Use cases: A/B testing, origin request redirects, or security header injection13.

25. How do you monitor Lambda throttling?

Enable CloudWatch Metrics (Throttles, ConcurrentExecutions) and set alarms. Use
SNS or EventBridge to trigger scaling actions (e.g., increase reserved concurrency)18.

26. What are CloudFormation Macros?

Custom processing of template sections during stack creation. Example: Dynamically generate
IAM policies based on parameters using a Lambda macro14.

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27. How do Nested Stacks improve reusability?
Break templates into child stacks (e.g., network, database, app layers) referenced by a root
stack. Enables modularity and cross-team collaboration13.

28. What is CloudFormation Drift Detection?

Identifies configuration differences between stack template and actual resources. Resolve via
stack updates or manual adjustments. Critical for compliance audits14.

29. How do you handle sensitive data in CloudFormation?

Use Dynamic References (e.g., {{resolve:ssm-secure:/path/to/param}}) or Secrets
Manager. Avoid plaintext parameters; enable encryption for Parameter Store SecureString16.

30. What is a Custom Resource?

A Lambda-backed resource for provisioning non-AWS components (e.g., external DNS
updates). Returns success/failure signals to CloudFormation18.

31. How does Aurora Serverless v2 differ from v1?

v2 scales instantly (vs 5-50 sec in v1) with sub-second storage scaling. Supports Multi-AZ
deployments and RDS Proxy. Billed per ACU (Aurora Capacity Unit) second13.

32. What is RDS Performance Insights?

A dashboard showing database load (wait events, SQL queries) with 1-second granularity.
Identify bottlenecks like CPU contention or lock waits16.

33. How do you migrate from RDS MySQL to Aurora?

1.​ Create Aurora Read Replica from MySQL.​

2.​ Monitor replication lag.​

3.​ Promote replica to standalone.​

4.​ Redirect apps to Aurora endpoint14.​

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

34. What is RDS Blue/Green Deployments?
A zero-downtime upgrade method:

●​ Create a synced “Green” environment.​

●​ Test upgrades on Green.​

●​ Switchover using DNS.​

Supports major version upgrades16.​

35. How does Aurora Global Database handle DR?

Deploys cross-region read replicas with <1 sec replication lag. Promote secondary region to
primary during outages. Supports up to 16 read replicas13.

36. What is DynamoDB Adaptive Capacity?

Automatically redistributes throughput capacity to hot partitions. Mitigates throttling by isolating
frequently accessed items to dedicated partitions14.

37. How do Global Tables differ from Cross-Region

Replication?
Global Tables provide multi-master writes across regions with sub-second latency. Cross-region
replication is one-way (master → replica) with Streams16.

38. What is DynamoDB DAX?

A fully managed in-memory cache (microsecond latency) for read-heavy workloads. Reduces
RCU consumption by caching GetItem/Query results13.

39. How do you handle large items (>400 KB) in

DynamoDB?
Compress attributes (e.g., gzip), store large binaries in S3 (with metadata in DynamoDB), or
split into multiple items using composite keys14.

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

40. When would you use DynamoDB On-Demand vs
Provisioned?
On-Demand suits unpredictable traffic with pay-per-request pricing. Provisioned is cheaper for
steady, predictable traffic (reserve capacity)16.

41. What is EKS Pod Identity?

Assigns IAM roles to pods via annotations, replacing kiam/kube2iam. Uses IAM Roles for
Service Accounts (IRSA) with OIDC federation13.

42. How do Managed Node Groups simplify EKS?

Automates provisioning/updating of worker nodes. Supports custom AMIs, Spot Instances, and
ARM/Graviton2. Handles node draining during updates14.

43. What is EKS Fargate Profiles?

Runs pods on serverless Fargate infrastructure. Specify namespaces/labels to match pods. No
node management; billed per vCPU/memory16.

44. How do you troubleshoot EKS networking issues?

1.​ Verify CNI plugin (e.g., aws-node DaemonSet).​

2.​ Check security group tags on worker nodes.​

3.​ Validate kube-dns resolution.​

4.​ Inspect VPC quotas (ENIs per instance)13.​

45. What is EKS Blueprints?

Predefined Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates for add-ons (Prometheus, Fluent Bit).
Accelerates cluster setup using CDK or Terraform18.

46. How do you implement cross-region deployment with

CodePipeline?
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Use CloudFormation StackSets in the pipeline to deploy resources across regions. Alternatively,
create regional actions in the pipeline stages16.

47. What is CodeBuild’s Local Cache?

Caches dependencies (e.g., node_modules, .m2) between builds using S3 or local storage.
Reduces build times by avoiding re-downloads13.

48. How do you secure CodeCommit repositories?

Enable MFA for Git operations, use IAM policies with aws:MultiFactorAuthPresent, and
configure SSH keys via IAM user settings14.

49. What is CodeDeploy’s Blue/Green Deployment?

Redirects traffic from original environment (Blue) to new replacement (Green). Supports EC2,
Lambda, and ECS. Rollback via rerouting to Blue16.

50. How do you integrate CodePipeline with GitHub

Enterprise?
Use a custom action with a webhook (via API Gateway/Lambda) or OAuth token. Alternatively,
use AWS CodeStar Connections13.

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

points** in VPCs to forward on-premises DNS queries to Route 53. Use Outbound Endpoints
to resolve custom domains from AWS to on-premises DNS. Encrypt traffic with DNSSEC.

11. Enforce KMS key policies with conditional IAM

policies.
Attach a policy to a KMS key requiring kms:ViaService condition for services like S3 or EBS:

json
{
"Effect": "Deny",
"Principal": "*",
"Action": "kms:*",
"Resource": "*",
"Condition": {"StringNotEquals": {"kms:ViaService":
"[Link]"}}
}

12. Rotate Secrets Manager secrets with Lambda and

custom logic.
1.​ Trigger a Lambda function via RotationSchedule.​

2.​ Generate new credentials (e.g., database password).​

3.​ Update secrets using secretsmanager:PutSecretValue.​

4.​ Test new credentials before setting AWSPENDING stage.​

13. Detect credential exfiltration with GuardDuty.

GuardDuty findings like
UnauthorizedAccess:IAMUser/InstanceCredentialExfiltration indicate stolen
EC2 metadata credentials. Mitigate by:

●​ Revoking compromised roles via aws iam update-assume-role-policy.​

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

 ●​ Enforcing IMDSv2 with aws ec2 modify-instance-metadata-options.​

14. Configure AWS Config aggregator for multi-account

compliance.
1.​ Deploy an Aggregator in the management account.​

2.​ Authorize member accounts via aws config put-aggregation-authorization.​

3.​ Create custom Config rules using AWS Lambda (e.g., check EBS encryption).​

15. Implement VPC Flow Logs analytics with Athena.

Partition Flow Logs in S3 by region and date:

sql
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE vpc_flow_logs (
version int,
account string,
interface_id string,
srcaddr string,
dstaddr string
) PARTITIONED BY (region string, date string)
STORED AS PARQUET
LOCATION 's3://bucket/AWSLogs/';

Query with MSCK REPAIR TABLE to load partitions.

16. Harden SSM Session Manager access.

●​ Restrict sessions to specific IAM roles with ssm:SessionDocumentAccess.​

●​ Enable CloudWatch Logs for audit trails.​

●​ Use aws ssm start-session --document-name

AWS-StartPortForwardingSession for port forwarding.​

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

17. Audit cross-account S3 access with Access Analyzer.
S3 Access Analyzer identifies buckets shared externally via ACLs or policies. Use findings to
refine bucket policies with aws accessanalyzer validate-policy.

18. Mitigate SSRF vulnerabilities in Lambda.

●​ Use AWS_NODEJS_CONNECTION_REUSE_ENABLED=1 to reuse HTTP connections.​

●​ Restrict outbound traffic with Security Groups.​

●​ Validate user inputs to prevent malicious URL fetches.​

19. Enforce TLS 1.2+ for API Gateway using WAF.

Create a WAF rule with String Match Condition on tls_protocol and block requests below
TLS 1.2. Associate with API Gateway via aws wafv2 associate-web-acl.

20. Secure EKS Pods with IMDSv2 and IAM Roles for
Service Accounts.
1.​ Annotate pods with [Link]/role-arn.​

2.​ Set automountServiceAccountToken: false.​

3.​ Configure kubelet to enforce IMDSv2:​

text
spec:
template:
metadata:
annotations:
[Link]/metadata-v2: "enabled"

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

21. Optimize Lambda Provisioned Concurrency for spiky
traffic.
Use Application Auto Scaling to adjust Provisioned Concurrency based on
ConcurrentExecutions metric. Set target tracking at 70% utilization.

22. Debug Step Functions state machine timeouts.

Enable CloudWatch Logs for X-Ray tracing. Check ExecutionTimedOut events and adjust
TimeoutSeconds in task states. Use aws stepfunctions get-execution-history for
granular logs.

23. Implement canary deployments for App Runner.

1.​ Create two App Runner services (v1 and v2).​

2.​ Use Route 53 weighted routing to shift traffic gradually.​

3.​ Roll back by adjusting weights if CloudWatch alarms trigger.​

24. Secure ECS Fargate tasks with ephemeral storage

encryption.
Enable enableEphemeralStorageEncryption in task definition. Uses AWS-managed keys.
Audit via ecs describe-task-definition.

25. Automate container patching in ECR with Inspector.

Enable ECR Image Scanning and integrate findings with Systems Manager Patch Manager.
Use aws ecr start-image-scan to trigger on push.

26. Orchestrate Lambda with SQS FIFO for ordered

processing.
Set Lambda event source mapping BatchSize: 1 and enable Function Response to delete
messages. Use MessageGroupId to ensure ordering.

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

27. Reduce Cold Starts in Lambda with SnapStart.
Enable SnapStart for Java 11+ functions. After publishing a version, call aws lambda
publish-version followed by aws lambda create-function-url-config to activate.

28. Migrate Docker Compose workloads to ECS.

Use docker compose convert to generate ECS task definitions. Deploy via ecs-cli
compose service up or Copilot CLI.

29. Troubleshoot EventBridge schema discovery failures.

Enable Schema Discovery in EventBridge and check CloudWatch Logs for
discovery-failures. Common issues: invalid JSON payloads or oversized events (>256
KB).

30. Enforce container immutability in EKS.

Set readOnlyRootFilesystem: true in pod specs. Use Pod Security Policies (PSP) or
Kyverno to block privileged containers.

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

160 Advanced-Level AWS Interview Questions With
Expert Answers

1. How does AWS Transit Gateway Connect simplify

SD-WAN integration?
Transit Gateway Connect uses Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to integrate third-party SD-WAN
appliances (e.g., Cisco, Palo Alto) with AWS. It establishes GRE or IPsec tunnels, enabling
dynamic routing between on-premises networks and multiple VPCs. Use aws ec2
create-transit-gateway-connect to configure attachments.

2. What is VPC Sharing and its security implications?

VPC Sharing allows multiple AWS accounts to provision resources into a shared VPC owned by
a centralized account. Use RAM (Resource Access Manager) to delegate subnets. Security:

●​ Apply SCPs to restrict participant accounts.​

●​ Use VPC Endpoint Policies to limit cross-account access.​

●​ Enable Flow Logs for traffic monitoring.​

3. How do you implement cross-region VPC peering with

overlapping CIDRs?
Use Transit Gateway inter-region peering with NAT Gateway in each VPC to translate
overlapping IPs. Alternatively, deploy AWS PrivateLink endpoints to expose services without
routing conflicts.

4. What is Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall?

A managed DNS firewall that blocks domain queries based on rule groups (e.g., malware
domains). Integrates with Route 53 Resolver via aws route53resolver
create-firewall-rule-group. Use Domain Lists from AWS Managed Rules or custom
lists.

5. How does AWS Network Firewall differ from NACLs?

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep
Network Firewall provides stateful, application-layer inspection (Layer 7) with Suricata rulesets.
NACLs are stateless and limited to IP/port rules. Use Network Firewall for deep packet
inspection (e.g., blocking SQLi patterns in HTTP payloads).

6. Configure Direct Connect Gateway for multi-account

access.
1.​ Create a Direct Connect Gateway in the hub account.​

2.​ Associate Virtual Private Gateways (VGWs) from spoke accounts via RAM sharing.​

3.​ Use aws directconnect create-direct-connect-gateway-association to

link DX connections.​

7. Optimize Global Accelerator for multi-region

latency-sensitive apps.
Enable Client Affinity to route requests from the same client to the same endpoint. Use Traffic
Dials to weight endpoints and deploy Health Checks to failover unhealthy regions.

8. Troubleshoot asymmetric routing in a Transit Gateway

setup.
Asymmetric routes occur when ingress/egress paths differ. Mitigate by:

●​ Ensuring Transit Gateway Route Tables propagate routes consistently.​

●​ Disabling Propagations for unintended VPCs.​

●​ Using VPC Flow Logs and TG Attachments Flow Logs (aws ec2
create-flow-logs).​

9. Implement AWS Client VPN with MFA using SAML.

1.​ Integrate AWS Client VPN with Okta/Azure AD via SAML.​

2.​ Configure Authentication Options in the VPN endpoint to require SAML.​

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

 3.​ Use aws ec2 apply-security-groups-to-client-vpn-target-network to
enforce security groups.​

10. Secure hybrid DNS with Route 53 Resolver Endpoints.

Deploy Inbound Resolver Endpoints in VPCs to forward on-premises DNS queries to Route
53. Use Outbound Endpoints to resolve custom domains from AWS to on-premises DNS.
Encrypt traffic with DNSSEC.

11. Enforce KMS key policies with conditional IAM

policies.
Attach a policy to a KMS key requiring kms:ViaService condition for services like S3 or EBS:

json
{
"Effect": "Deny",
"Principal": "*",
"Action": "kms:*",
"Resource": "*",
"Condition": {"StringNotEquals": {"kms:ViaService":
"[Link]"}}
}

12. Rotate Secrets Manager secrets with Lambda and

custom logic.
1.​ Trigger a Lambda function via RotationSchedule.​

2.​ Generate new credentials (e.g., database password).​

3.​ Update secrets using secretsmanager:PutSecretValue.​

4.​ Test new credentials before setting AWSPENDING stage.​

13. Detect credential exfiltration with GuardDuty.

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep
GuardDuty findings like
UnauthorizedAccess:IAMUser/InstanceCredentialExfiltration indicate stolen
EC2 metadata credentials. Mitigate by:

●​ Revoking compromised roles via aws iam update-assume-role-policy.​

●​ Enforcing IMDSv2 with aws ec2 modify-instance-metadata-options.​

14. Configure AWS Config aggregator for multi-account

compliance.
1.​ Deploy an Aggregator in the management account.​

2.​ Authorize member accounts via aws config put-aggregation-authorization.​

3.​ Create custom Config rules using AWS Lambda (e.g., check EBS encryption).​

15. Implement VPC Flow Logs analytics with Athena.

Partition Flow Logs in S3 by region and date:

sql
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE vpc_flow_logs (
version int,
account string,
interface_id string,
srcaddr string,
dstaddr string
) PARTITIONED BY (region string, date string)
STORED AS PARQUET
LOCATION 's3://bucket/AWSLogs/';

Query with MSCK REPAIR TABLE to load partitions.

16. Harden SSM Session Manager access.

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

 ●​ Restrict sessions to specific IAM roles with ssm:SessionDocumentAccess.​

●​ Enable CloudWatch Logs for audit trails.​

●​ Use aws ssm start-session --document-name

AWS-StartPortForwardingSession for port forwarding.​

17. Audit cross-account S3 access with Access Analyzer.

S3 Access Analyzer identifies buckets shared externally via ACLs or policies. Use findings to
refine bucket policies with aws accessanalyzer validate-policy.

18. Mitigate SSRF vulnerabilities in Lambda.

●​ Use AWS_NODEJS_CONNECTION_REUSE_ENABLED=1 to reuse HTTP connections.​

●​ Restrict outbound traffic with Security Groups.​

●​ Validate user inputs to prevent malicious URL fetches.​

19. Enforce TLS 1.2+ for API Gateway using WAF.

Create a WAF rule with String Match Condition on tls_protocol and block requests below
TLS 1.2. Associate with API Gateway via aws wafv2 associate-web-acl.

20. Secure EKS Pods with IMDSv2 and IAM Roles for
Service Accounts.
1.​ Annotate pods with [Link]/role-arn.​

2.​ Set automountServiceAccountToken: false.​

3.​ Configure kubelet to enforce IMDSv2:​

text
spec:
template:

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

 metadata:
annotations:
[Link]/metadata-v2: "enabled"

21. Optimize Lambda Provisioned Concurrency for spiky

traffic.
Use Application Auto Scaling to adjust Provisioned Concurrency based on
ConcurrentExecutions metric. Set target tracking at 70% utilization.

22. Debug Step Functions state machine timeouts.

Enable CloudWatch Logs for X-Ray tracing. Check ExecutionTimedOut events and adjust
TimeoutSeconds in task states. Use aws stepfunctions get-execution-history for
granular logs.

23. Implement canary deployments for App Runner.

1.​ Create two App Runner services (v1 and v2).​

2.​ Use Route 53 weighted routing to shift traffic gradually.​

3.​ Roll back by adjusting weights if CloudWatch alarms trigger.​

24. Secure ECS Fargate tasks with ephemeral storage

encryption.
Enable enableEphemeralStorageEncryption in task definition. Uses AWS-managed keys.
Audit via ecs describe-task-definition.

25. Automate container patching in ECR with Inspector.

Enable ECR Image Scanning and integrate findings with Systems Manager Patch Manager.
Use aws ecr start-image-scan to trigger on push.

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

26. Orchestrate Lambda with SQS FIFO for ordered
processing.
Set Lambda event source mapping BatchSize: 1 and enable Function Response to delete
messages. Use MessageGroupId to ensure ordering.

27. Reduce Cold Starts in Lambda with SnapStart.

Enable SnapStart for Java 11+ functions. After publishing a version, call aws lambda
publish-version followed by aws lambda create-function-url-config to activate.

28. Migrate Docker Compose workloads to ECS.

Use docker compose convert to generate ECS task definitions. Deploy via ecs-cli
compose service up or Copilot CLI.

29. Troubleshoot EventBridge schema discovery failures.

Enable Schema Discovery in EventBridge and check CloudWatch Logs for
discovery-failures. Common issues: invalid JSON payloads or oversized events (>256
KB).

30. Enforce container immutability in EKS.

Set readOnlyRootFilesystem: true in pod specs. Use Pod Security Policies (PSP) or
Kyverno to block privileged containers.

31. How can you achieve cross-region RDS failover with

minimal downtime?
To achieve cross-region RDS failover, use Amazon RDS cross-region read replicas (for MySQL,
MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and Aurora). Promote a read replica to primary in case of failure.
Automate DNS updates and use Route 53 health checks for seamless failover. Aurora Global
Database offers even lower recovery times.

32. How does AWS Nitro Enclaves enhance EC2 instance

security?
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AWS Nitro Enclaves create isolated compute environments within EC2 instances for processing
highly sensitive data. They use hardware isolation, no persistent storage, and no external
networking, ensuring data confidentiality even from the instance OS.

33. What is the purpose of S3 Object Lock, and how does

it support regulatory compliance?
S3 Object Lock enables write-once-read-many (WORM) protection for objects, preventing
deletion or modification for a set retention period. This helps meet regulatory requirements such
as SEC Rule 17a-4(f) and FINRA.

34. How would you implement a multi-account,

multi-region logging strategy in AWS?
Centralize logs in a dedicated account using S3 buckets and CloudWatch Logs cross-account
subscriptions. Use KMS for encryption, enforce bucket policies, and automate log aggregation
with Lambda or Firehose. Enable AWS Organizations for governance.

35. How does Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall

work?
Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall lets you filter and block DNS queries for domains known to be
malicious. You can define rule groups and associate them with VPCs to control outbound DNS
traffic.

36. Explain the use of AWS Resource Access Manager

(RAM) in a multi-account architecture.
AWS RAM allows you to securely share resources (like subnets, Transit Gateways, License
Manager configurations) across AWS accounts and Organizations, improving resource
utilization and simplifying management.

37. How do you implement custom encryption logic for

S3 objects?
Use client-side encryption libraries (e.g., AWS Encryption SDK) before uploading to S3, or use
S3’s server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C) for custom key management.

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

38. What is the difference between AWS Transit Gateway
and AWS Cloud WAN?
Transit Gateway connects VPCs and on-premises networks within a region, while AWS Cloud
WAN provides a managed wide area network across multiple regions and locations, automating
global network management.

39. How can you enforce network-level isolation for

Lambda functions?
Place Lambda functions in private VPC subnets without NAT or Internet Gateways. Use VPC
endpoints for AWS service access and restrict outbound traffic with security groups and NACLs.

40. Describe how to use AWS Step Functions for error

handling and retries in workflows.
Step Functions allow you to define retry policies and catch blocks for each state, enabling
granular error handling, exponential backoff, and custom failure logic within serverless
workflows.

41. How does Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 improve

upon v1?
Aurora Serverless v2 offers instant, fine-grained scaling in response to load, supports more
Aurora features (like Global Database), and eliminates capacity planning, providing lower
latency and better cost efficiency.

42. What is the role of AWS Glue Data Catalog in a data

lake architecture?
AWS Glue Data Catalog acts as a central metadata repository, enabling schema discovery, data
classification, and integration with Athena, Redshift Spectrum, and EMR for unified analytics.

43. How do you implement a secure, automated golden

AMI pipeline?

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Automate AMI creation with EC2 Image Builder or Packer, integrate with vulnerability scanning
(Inspector), apply patches via SSM, and use signed AMIs for deployment. Store AMIs in a
dedicated, access-controlled account.

44. What is the advantage of using AWS Elastic File

System (EFS) One Zone?
EFS One Zone stores data in a single AZ, offering lower cost and higher performance for
workloads that don’t require multi-AZ durability, such as temporary storage or non-critical data.

45. How does Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering optimize

storage costs?
S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves objects between frequent and infrequent access tiers
based on access patterns, reducing storage costs without operational overhead.

46. Explain how Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache

Kafka (MSK) handles high availability.
MSK provisions Kafka brokers across multiple AZs, replicates data, and manages broker
replacements and patching. It also integrates with IAM and VPC for secure, highly available
streaming.

47. What are the benefits of using AWS Gateway Load

Balancer?
Gateway Load Balancer simplifies deployment of third-party virtual appliances (firewalls,
IDS/IPS) by distributing traffic and scaling appliances transparently, integrating with VPC traffic
flows.

48. How can you enforce encryption in transit for all AWS
services in your organization?
Use AWS Organizations Service Control Policies (SCPs) to deny unencrypted connections,
enforce TLS for APIs, and configure resource policies (S3, RDS, etc.) to require HTTPS or
encrypted endpoints.

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

49. What is AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry, and how
does it help with application governance?
AppRegistry enables tracking and managing AWS resources as logical applications, associating
metadata, and integrating with Service Catalog for improved governance and compliance.

50. How do you implement cross-region DynamoDB

backups and restores?
Use DynamoDB’s on-demand backup and restore feature, copy backups to another region, and
restore tables as needed. For active-active replication, use DynamoDB Global Tables.

51. What is the significance of Amazon S3 Access Points

for large-scale data sharing?
S3 Access Points simplify managing access for shared datasets by creating unique access
policies and network controls for each application or user, improving security and scalability.

52. How does AWS Network Firewall support advanced

traffic inspection?
AWS Network Firewall provides stateful inspection, intrusion prevention, deep packet
inspection, and custom rules for VPC traffic, integrating with Suricata rulesets.

53. How can you automate security group management

across multiple accounts?
Use AWS Firewall Manager to create and enforce security group policies across accounts and
resources, ensuring consistent security posture and compliance.

54. What is the benefit of using Amazon Redshift RA3

nodes?
RA3 nodes separate compute and storage, enabling independent scaling and cost optimization.
Data is stored on managed Redshift Managed Storage, reducing local SSD dependency.

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

55. How does AWS Glue Elastic Views enable data
integration?
Elastic Views uses materialized views to combine and replicate data across multiple AWS data
stores (DynamoDB, S3, Redshift, etc.), supporting near real-time data integration and
transformation.

56. How do you implement a secure API gateway for

private VPC endpoints?
Deploy API Gateway with a VPC endpoint (Private API), restrict access with resource policies
and IAM, and use VPC endpoint policies for granular control.

57. How does Amazon S3 Batch Operations improve data

management?
S3 Batch Operations allows you to perform actions (copy, tag, restore, ACL changes, Lambda
invocation) on billions of objects with a single request, improving efficiency for large-scale data
management.

58. What is the use case for AWS Outposts servers?

Outposts servers bring AWS compute and storage to edge or on-premises locations with limited
space, extending AWS services for low-latency or data residency requirements.

59. How can you secure cross-region VPC peering

traffic?
Enable VPC peering with private IP addressing, enforce security group and NACL rules, and
use VPC Flow Logs for monitoring. For encryption, use application-layer protocols or VPN
overlays.

60. How does Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

support multi-cluster management?
EKS integrates with AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) and EKS Connector for managing
clusters across regions and accounts, supporting centralized policy and visibility.

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

61. What is the benefit of using Amazon S3 Select?
S3 Select enables retrieval of subsets of data from S3 objects using SQL expressions, reducing
data transfer and processing costs for analytics workloads.

62. How do you implement automated compliance drift

detection in AWS?
Use AWS Config rules and conformance packs to detect drift, automate remediation with
Lambda, and integrate with Security Hub for centralized reporting.

63. How does AWS App Runner simplify container

deployment?
App Runner abstracts infrastructure, allowing you to deploy containerized web applications
directly from source code or image repositories with automatic scaling and HTTPS.

64. What is the purpose of Amazon CloudWatch

Contributor Insights?
Contributor Insights analyzes log data to identify top contributors to system load or errors,
helping diagnose hotspots and optimize resource usage.

65. How do you enforce S3 bucket-level public access

prevention at scale?
Use AWS Organizations SCPs to deny public S3 actions, enable S3 Block Public Access at the
account or organization level, and monitor with AWS Config.

66. How does AWS Lake Formation support row-level

security?
Lake Formation provides fine-grained access control by granting permissions at the table,
column, and row level, integrating with Glue Data Catalog and IAM.

67. What is the advantage of using Amazon EC2 Spot

Fleet with capacity-optimized allocation?
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Capacity-optimized allocation selects Spot capacity pools with the lowest risk of interruption,
improving workload reliability for large-scale, cost-sensitive applications.

68. How can you implement cross-region, cross-account

S3 replication securely?
Enable S3 Cross-Region Replication with destination buckets in another account, use bucket
policies and IAM roles for secure replication, and enable KMS for encrypted objects.

69. What is AWS Fault Injection Simulator, and how does

it help with resilience engineering?
Fault Injection Simulator injects faults (latency, errors, resource failures) into AWS workloads,
enabling chaos engineering to test and improve system resilience.

70. How does AWS Wavelength enable ultra-low latency

applications?
Wavelength embeds AWS compute and storage at telecom edge locations, reducing network
hops and latency for applications like gaming, IoT, and AR/VR.

71. What is the benefit of using AWS Step Functions

Distributed Map state?
Distributed Map enables parallel execution of large-scale, distributed workloads (up to millions
of items) within Step Functions, improving scalability for ETL and data processing.

72. How do you implement secure, auditable

cross-account Lambda invocations?
Use resource-based policies on Lambda functions, invoke with IAM roles from the source
account, and enable CloudTrail for auditing cross-account access.

73. How does Amazon S3 Object Lambda transform data

on the fly?

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S3 Object Lambda invokes Lambda functions to process and transform S3 object data in
real-time as it’s retrieved, enabling custom views and redaction.

74. What is the role of AWS Direct Connect Gateway?

Direct Connect Gateway enables you to connect Direct Connect links to multiple VPCs across
regions, simplifying hybrid network management and routing.

75. How do you implement centralized certificate

management in AWS?
Use AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for issuing, deploying, and renewing certificates. Integrate
with ACM Private CA for internal certificates and automate distribution with Lambda or SSM.

76. What is the use case for Amazon S3 Multi-Region

Access Points?
Multi-Region Access Points provide a global endpoint that routes S3 requests to the optimal
region, improving latency and availability for global applications.

77. How does AWS Control Tower Account Factory

streamline account provisioning?
Account Factory automates creation of new accounts with pre-configured guardrails, network
baselines, and integrations, ensuring governance and compliance from day one.

78. What is the benefit of using AWS Glue streaming

ETL?
Glue streaming ETL processes real-time data streams (Kinesis, Kafka), enabling near real-time
analytics, transformation, and loading into data lakes or warehouses.

79. How do you implement cross-account, cross-region

SNS topic subscriptions?
Use SNS topic policies to allow cross-account subscriptions, and configure SNS with Lambda or
SQS endpoints in other regions, leveraging IAM for secure access.

Copyright © 2025 by SkillForgePrep

80. How does Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) lifecycle
management reduce costs?
EFS lifecycle management automatically moves infrequently accessed files to a lower-cost
storage class, optimizing cost for file-based workloads.

81. What is the purpose of AWS Systems Manager

Change Manager?
Change Manager automates, tracks, and approves operational changes across AWS
environments, integrating with SSM Automation and providing audit trails.

82. How do you implement secure, scalable bastion hosts

in AWS?
Use EC2 with SSM Session Manager to eliminate the need for public bastion hosts, or deploy
hardened, auto-scaled bastion hosts with access logging and automated patching.

83. What is the benefit of using Amazon S3 Glacier

Instant Retrieval?
Glacier Instant Retrieval provides low-cost, milliseconds-access storage for rarely accessed
data that still requires immediate retrieval, bridging the gap between S3 Standard-IA and
Glacier.

84. How does AWS Identity Center (formerly SSO)

support fine-grained access?
Identity Center integrates with external identity providers, supports attribute-based access
control (ABAC), and enables assignment of granular permissions to users and groups across
accounts.

85. How do you automate cross-region CloudFormation

stack deployments?
Use StackSets to deploy and manage CloudFormation stacks across multiple accounts and
regions, automating updates and drift detection.

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86. What is the advantage of using Amazon EC2 Mac
instances?
EC2 Mac instances allow you to build, test, and sign Apple macOS and iOS applications in the
cloud, supporting scalable, automated CI/CD pipelines for Apple platforms.

87. How does AWS DMS (Database Migration Service)

handle schema conversion for heterogeneous
migrations?
DMS integrates with AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) to convert source database schema
and code to the target engine, automating migration between different database platforms.

88. What is the benefit of using AWS Lambda

Powertools?
Lambda Powertools is an open-source library that provides utilities for logging, metrics, tracing,
and structured event handling, improving observability and maintainability of Lambda functions.

89. How does Amazon Redshift data sharing work?

Data sharing allows Redshift clusters to share live data across clusters and accounts without
data duplication, enabling real-time analytics and collaboration.

90. How do you implement secure, automated patch

management for container images?
Integrate ECR image scanning, automate vulnerability remediation with CI/CD pipelines, and
use AWS Inspector for continuous monitoring of running containers.

91. What is the purpose of AWS CloudFormation Stack

Policies?
Stack Policies restrict update actions on specific resources within a stack, preventing accidental
modification or deletion during stack updates.

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92. How does AWS Service Quotas API help with
automation and governance?
Service Quotas API allows you to programmatically retrieve and request quota increases,
automate monitoring, and enforce limits across accounts.

93. How do you implement event-driven security

automation in AWS?
Use EventBridge to trigger Lambda functions or SSM Automation in response to security events
(e.g., GuardDuty findings), enabling automated remediation and notification.

94. What is the role of AWS Private Certificate Authority

(CA)?
ACM Private CA issues and manages private SSL/TLS certificates for internal applications,
supporting secure communication and compliance within organizations.

95. How does Amazon FSx for ONTAP support hybrid

cloud storage?
FSx for ONTAP provides NetApp ONTAP file systems with features like SnapMirror replication,
SMB/NFS support, and integration with on-premises NetApp environments.

96. What is the benefit of using Amazon Aurora Global

Database for disaster recovery?
Aurora Global Database replicates data with sub-second latency across regions, enabling fast
failover and minimizing data loss in disaster recovery scenarios.

97. How do you implement secure, scalable webhooks in

AWS?
Use API Gateway with Lambda authorizers, validate signatures, and integrate with EventBridge
for scalable, event-driven webhook processing.

98. What is the use case for AWS Lambda Extensions?

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Lambda Extensions enable integration with monitoring, security, and governance tools by
running additional processes alongside Lambda function invocations.

99. How does AWS App Mesh support multi-cluster

service discovery?
App Mesh integrates with Cloud Map and supports cross-cluster service discovery and traffic
routing, enabling consistent networking across multiple EKS or ECS clusters.

100. What is the benefit of using Amazon S3 Replication

Time Control (RTC)?
RTC guarantees that S3 objects are replicated to another region within 15 minutes, providing
predictable RTO for compliance and disaster recovery.

101. How does AWS Glue DataBrew support data quality

and profiling?
DataBrew provides visual data profiling, transformation, and validation, enabling users to clean
and prepare data with built-in quality checks and profiling reports.

102. How do you implement secure, auditable access to

AWS Management Console for contractors?
Use temporary IAM roles with limited permissions, enforce MFA, set session duration, and audit
access with CloudTrail and CloudWatch alarms.

103. What is the purpose of Amazon Route 53 Application

Recovery Controller?
It monitors application health and automates failover between AWS regions or Availability
Zones, providing routing controls and readiness checks for DR scenarios.

104. How does AWS Backup Vault Lock support

compliance requirements?

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Vault Lock enforces write-once, read-many (WORM) retention for backup data, preventing
deletion or modification for a defined period to meet regulatory requirements.

105. What is the benefit of using Amazon Elasticache

Global Datastore?
Global Datastore enables cross-region replication for Redis, supporting disaster recovery and
low-latency global reads for distributed applications.

106. How do you implement secure, scalable API rate

limiting in AWS?
Use API Gateway usage plans and throttling, integrate with Lambda authorizers for custom
limits, and monitor with CloudWatch metrics and alarms.

107. What is the role of AWS Network Manager?

Network Manager provides centralized visibility and management of global networks, including
Transit Gateways, VPNs, Direct Connect, and Cloud WAN.

108. How does Amazon SageMaker Feature Store support

ML workflows?
Feature Store centralizes, manages, and serves ML features for training and inference,
supporting feature versioning, lineage, and real-time access.

109. What is the advantage of using AWS CloudFormation

Change Sets?
Change Sets preview the impact of stack updates before execution, reducing the risk of
unintended changes and enabling safer deployments.

110. How do you implement secure, automated secrets

rotation in AWS?
Use AWS Secrets Manager with rotation Lambda functions, integrate with target services, and
automate rotation schedules and auditing.

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111. What is the benefit of using Amazon Kinesis Data
Firehose?
Firehose provides fully managed, real-time data delivery to S3, Redshift, OpenSearch, and
Splunk, supporting transformation and compression on the fly.

112. How does AWS Resource Explorer help with

large-scale cloud environments?
Resource Explorer enables fast, cross-account, cross-region search and discovery of AWS
resources, improving visibility and management.

113. How do you implement secure, scalable multi-tenant

SaaS on AWS?
Use tenant isolation patterns (VPC, IAM, or data partitioning), enforce fine-grained access
control, and monitor usage with CloudWatch and billing tags.

114. What is the purpose of Amazon S3 Event

Notifications?
S3 Event Notifications trigger Lambda, SQS, or SNS when specific object events occur,
enabling serverless data processing and automation.

115. How does AWS CloudTrail Lake enable advanced

security analytics?
CloudTrail Lake ingests, stores, and analyzes CloudTrail events at scale, supporting complex
queries and integration with SIEM tools.

116. How do you implement secure, automated user

provisioning in AWS Identity Center?
Integrate with external IdPs (SAML, OIDC), use SCIM for automated user and group
provisioning, and assign permissions via permission sets.

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117. What is the benefit of using AWS Step Functions
Callback Patterns?
Callback Patterns support long-running, asynchronous tasks by pausing workflow execution
until an external process signals completion, improving orchestration flexibility.

118. How does Amazon S3 Inventory help with

compliance and auditing?
S3 Inventory generates CSV or ORC reports of object metadata and encryption status,
supporting auditing, cost optimization, and compliance verification.

119. How do you implement secure, scalable data

ingestion pipelines in AWS?
Use Kinesis Data Streams or Firehose with VPC endpoints, encrypt data at rest and in transit,
and automate data validation and transformation with Lambda or Glue.

120. What is the role of AWS CodeBuild report groups?

Report groups aggregate and visualize test reports from CodeBuild runs, supporting integration
with CodePipeline and improving CI/CD feedback.

121. How does AWS Security Hub support automated

security posture management?
Security Hub aggregates findings from AWS and partner services, applies CIS/AWS best
practices, and enables automated response with EventBridge.

122. How do you implement secure, scalable file transfers

with AWS Transfer Family?
Transfer Family supports SFTP, FTPS, and FTP to S3 or EFS, integrates with IAM or custom
identity providers, and supports VPC endpoints for private transfers.

123. What is the benefit of using Amazon EC2 Hibernate?

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Hibernate preserves in-memory data and instance state, enabling fast startup and cost savings
for workloads with long initialization times.

124. How does AWS Application Load Balancer support

advanced routing?
ALB supports host-based, path-based, and header-based routing, WebSockets, and
authentication integration, enabling complex traffic management for microservices.

125. How do you implement secure, automated

compliance reporting in AWS?
Use AWS Config conformance packs, integrate with Security Hub and Audit Manager, and
automate report generation and delivery with Lambda.

126. What is the advantage of using AWS Glue partition

indexing?
Partition indexing accelerates query performance in Glue ETL and Athena by reducing
metadata scanning overhead for large, partitioned datasets.

127. How does Amazon S3 Storage Lens provide storage

insights?
S3 Storage Lens analyzes usage and activity metrics across all buckets, offering
recommendations for cost optimization, security, and data protection.

128. How do you implement secure, scalable container

image distribution in AWS?
Use ECR with cross-region replication, enable image scanning, enforce repository policies, and
use VPC endpoints for private access.

129. What is the benefit of using Amazon CloudFront

Signed URLs and Cookies?

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Signed URLs and cookies restrict access to private content by requiring authentication and
expiration, supporting secure content delivery.

130. How does AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter

improve incident management?
OpsCenter centralizes operational issues, integrates with CloudWatch and Config, and supports
automated remediation workflows.

131. How do you implement secure, scalable audit trails

for data access in AWS?
Enable CloudTrail Data Events for S3, Lambda, and DynamoDB, aggregate logs in a central
account, and analyze with Athena or OpenSearch.

132. What is the role of AWS AppConfig deployment

strategies?
AppConfig supports deployment strategies like canary, linear, and all-at-once, enabling safe,
gradual rollout and automated rollback of configuration changes.

133. How does AWS Glue job bookmarking work?

Job bookmarking tracks processed data in ETL jobs, enabling incremental data processing and
preventing duplicate records.

134. What is the benefit of using AWS Global Accelerator

with endpoint groups?
Global Accelerator routes traffic to healthy endpoints in multiple regions, improving performance
and availability for global applications.

135. How do you implement secure, scalable email

receipt processing in AWS?
Use Amazon SES with S3, Lambda, and SNS for automated email receipt, filtering, and
processing, ensuring encryption and access control.

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136. How does AWS CloudFormation StackSets support
drift detection?
StackSets detects configuration drift across all managed stacks, enabling centralized
remediation and compliance enforcement.

137. What is the purpose of Amazon EC2 Instance

Metadata Service v2 (IMDSv2)?
IMDSv2 enhances security by requiring session-based authentication for metadata requests,
mitigating SSRF vulnerabilities.

138. How do you implement secure, scalable ML model

deployment in AWS?
Use SageMaker endpoints with VPC isolation, enable encryption, integrate with Model Monitor,
and automate deployment with CI/CD pipelines.

139. What is the benefit of using AWS Direct Connect

MACsec encryption?
MACsec encrypts Direct Connect traffic at Layer 2, providing high-performance, low-latency
encryption for hybrid cloud connectivity.

140. How does Amazon OpenSearch Service support

fine-grained access control?
OpenSearch integrates with IAM and Cognito, supports document- and field-level security, and
enables audit logging for compliance.

141. How do you implement secure, automated

infrastructure drift remediation in AWS?
Use AWS Config rules with auto-remediation Lambda functions, integrate with CloudFormation
drift detection, and automate notifications.

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142. What is the advantage of using AWS Lambda
Destinations?
Lambda Destinations route invocation results (success or failure) to SQS, SNS, Lambda, or
EventBridge, enabling event-driven error handling and chaining.

143. How does Amazon S3 Object Ownership simplify

access management?
Object Ownership allows bucket owners to automatically assume ownership of all objects,
simplifying access control and cross-account data sharing.

144. How do you implement secure, scalable DNS

resolution for hybrid environments?
Use Route 53 Resolver endpoints for on-premises DNS integration, enable DNS Firewall, and
manage rules with Resource Access Manager.

145. What is the benefit of using Amazon SageMaker Data

Wrangler?
Data Wrangler streamlines data preparation and feature engineering for ML, integrating with S3,
Redshift, and third-party sources.

146. How does AWS CloudFormation macros support

custom resource logic?
Macros process CloudFormation templates at runtime, enabling custom logic, transformations,
and reusable patterns for infrastructure as code.

147. How do you implement secure, scalable API

authentication with Amazon Cognito?
Cognito provides user pools for authentication, federated IdP integration, and OAuth2/JWT
tokens for API Gateway and Lambda authorization.

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148. What is the purpose of AWS License Manager
automated discovery?
License Manager discovers and tracks software usage across AWS and on-premises,
automating compliance and reducing licensing costs.

149. How does Amazon Redshift Spectrum support

federated query?
Redshift Spectrum enables Redshift to query data in S3 and join with local tables, supporting
federated analytics across data lakes and warehouses.

150. How do you implement secure, automated resource

tagging in AWS?
Enforce tagging with Organizations tag policies, automate tag application with Lambda or
CloudFormation, and monitor compliance with Config rules.

151. What is the benefit of using Amazon EC2 Capacity

Reservations?
Capacity Reservations guarantee EC2 instance availability in specific AZs, supporting critical
workloads and compliance requirements.

152. How does AWS CloudTrail Insights detect unusual

activity?
CloudTrail Insights analyzes management events for anomalies, such as spikes in resource
creation or API calls, and generates findings for investigation.

153. How do you implement secure, scalable real-time

analytics with Amazon Kinesis Analytics?
Use Kinesis Data Analytics for SQL-based stream processing, integrate with VPC endpoints,
and automate scaling and monitoring with CloudWatch.

154. What is the purpose of AWS Glue Schema Registry?

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Glue Schema Registry manages and enforces data schemas for streaming data (Kinesis,
Kafka), supporting schema evolution and compatibility checks.

155. How does AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store

support secure configuration management?
Parameter Store stores encrypted configuration values, supports versioning, access control,
and automated rotation for application secrets.

156. How do you implement secure, scalable serverless

ETL pipelines in AWS?
Use Glue or Lambda with VPC endpoints, encrypt data at rest and in transit, and automate
orchestration with Step Functions.

157. What is the benefit of using AWS CloudWatch Metric

Streams?
Metric Streams deliver near real-time metrics to third-party observability platforms, supporting
OpenTelemetry and custom analytics.

158. How does Amazon S3 Object Expiration support data

lifecycle management?
Object Expiration automatically deletes objects after a defined period, supporting retention
policies and cost optimization.

159. How do you implement secure, automated data

redaction in AWS data lakes?
Use Glue ETL or Lambda to redact sensitive fields, enforce access control with Lake Formation,
and audit access with CloudTrail.

160. What is the advantage of using Amazon RDS Proxy?

RDS Proxy pools and manages database connections, improving scalability and failover for
serverless and containerized applications.

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161. How does AWS CodeDeploy Blue/Green deployment
work for ECS?
CodeDeploy orchestrates traffic shifting between old and new ECS task sets, supports
automated rollback, and integrates with Lambda hooks for validation.

162. How do you implement secure, scalable data sharing

with AWS Data Exchange?
Data Exchange enables secure subscription, entitlement, and delivery of third-party data sets,
supporting S3 integration and audit logging.

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