20 Best AWS Interview Tips With Practice Questions and Answers

If you are scheduled or planning to take the AWS job interview with Amazon, this post provides you with valuable tips and practice questions and answers to help you prepare effectively and succeed at the interview.

Please, read on:

Landing a job in technology companies is never easy, especially in a multi-billion dollar company like Amazon.

You have to be well prepared to even have a chance at it.

Amazon has a definite culture and vision. It will take more than certificates to land a job there.

They have to know that you will fit into the company.

20 Best AWS Interview Tips

Here are tips to help you perform excellently at an AWS interview:

1. Prepare for behavioral-based interview questions

Expect questions directed towards your past experiences, challenges and how you have been able to deal with them.

2. Prepare stories to answer behavioral questions

The behavioral questions are guided by Amazon’s leadership principles. To answer the behavioral questions well, try to link up stories and examples to the job description.

3. Use the STAR method to answer behavioral questions

STAR stands for specific situation, task, actions and results. The strategy is simple to use. Simply answer, illustrate, or talk about the specific situation, task, action, and result of any experience you are asked to talk about.

4. Study Amazon leadership principles

Some of the interview questions will be guided by Amazon leadership principles. You have to know them to answer the questions perfectly.

5. Research Amazon’s culture

They want to know how you fit into their culture.

6. Don’t be shallow

AWS interview questions might not look simple and straight forward, but they want you to go deep. This is very important. Go deep with your answers; give a lot of details.

7. Sell yourself

This is not the time to talk about team game. Talk about your roles and impact as an individual instead of team accomplishments.

8. Don’t hide from your failures, talk about them too.

Don’t try to paint a perfect picture for the interviewers. They want to know the challenges you have faced and how you were able to go through them.

9. Show them why Amazon fits into your life

Amazon wants to know why you want to work for them, and how they will fit into your life, and what you will give them back. Find a way to make all your answers reflect this.

10. Ask for clarification when you need one

They are ready to help you as much as possible, freely ask for clarity when you don’t understand a question.

11. Dust your writing skills

Amazon prefers structured memos to slides and power points in meetings. Be prepared to write when you are called on to do so.

12. Keep track of your stories and key details

You will undergo multiple interview and your stories need to be consistent.

13. Always have outcomes and results for your stories

Ending your stories with an outcome will make your progress and skills more obvious. It helps to keep track of your success and progress.

14. Prepare for different types of Interactions

You will go through an online assessment, a phone screening, then multiple physical meetings. Prepare differently for them.

15. Show curiosity

Amazon wants employees that will raise the bars in the company. This makes curiosity a key trait in the company. They look to see if they will find this trait in candidates too.

16. Study interviewers and ask thoughtful questions

Get to know your interviewers personally. It will help you engage them better during the interview and feel more comfortable answering their questions.

17. Be composed and relaxed

Amazon wants to employ confident people. Look and act confident all through the interview, it will earn you points.

18. Don’t claim you know the answer to a question when you don’t

There are a lot of things you don’t know, they are aware of that. Rather than making terrible errors in an attempt to answer questions you know nothing about, show that you are willing to learn by asking questions.

19. Research the most frequently asked questions

Get conversant with the kind of questions they ask to know what to expect and where to tighten up before the interview.

20. Avoid long monologues

Long monologues during interviews are a bad sign. They want you to engage them, in order to know what it is like to relate with you or work with you.

20 AWS Interview Practice Questions and Answers

Here are carefully selected practice interview questions and answers to get you familiar with the AWS interview format:

1. What is AWS?
   AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. It is a collection of remote computing services.
2. What are the key components of AWS?
   The key components are route 53, simple E-mail services, identity and access management, simple storage devices, elastic compute cloud, elastic cloud store, and cloudwatch.
3. What is S3?
   S3 stands for simple storage service. It is used to store and retrieve data.
4. What is AMI?
   AMI means Amazon machine image. It provides the information needed to launch an instance.
5. How are requests sent to Amazon S3?
   You can send request to Amazon S3 by using REST API and AWS SDK wrapper libraries.
6. What’s the limit of buckets you can create in AWS by default?
   You can create 100 buckets in each AWS account.
7. Can Amazon instance be vertically scaled?
   Yes.
8. What are the different types of instances?
   There are five different types of instance; general purpose, computer optimized, memory optimized, storage optimized, and accelerated computing.
9. How many elastic IPs can you create in AWS?
   A maximum of 5 VPC Elastic IP addresses are allowed for each AWS account.
10. Explain default storage class in S3
    The default storage class is a standard frequently accessed.
11. What is a redshift?
    It is a fully managed data warehouse in the clouds.
12. What are the advantages of auto scaling?
    It is cheaper, more available, and fault tolerant.
13. What is subnet?
    Subnet is a large section of IP address divided into chunks.
14. How many subnets can you have per VPC in AWS?
    You can have about 200 subnets in a VPC.
15. What is SQS?
    It stands for Simple queue service. It is a distributed queuing service that mediates between two controllers.
16. When was EC2 launched?
    EC2 was officially launched in 2006.
17. What role does AWS cloudTrail play?
    CloudTrail is created for logging and tracking of API calls. It is also helpful in auditing S3 bucket accesses.
18. What types of AMI is provided by AWS?
    Two major types of AMI are provided; instance store backed and EBS backed AMI.
19. Explain GEO restriction in CloudfFront
    The Geo restriction feature in AWS is used to hide content from a specific geographic location or region.
20. Do you need internet gateway to use peering connections?
    Yes, it is highly needed to use VPC (virtual private cloud peering).

Conclusion

To have a better chance of landing an AWS job, you need to prepare vigorously for the interview.

Amazon doesn’t put much stake on academic qualifications and certificates; neither do they throw tricky questions at the interview.

This post provides useful ideas and sample interview questions and answers that you can apply to make your AWS interview a success.