AWS Solution Architect Interview Questions and Answers

Introduction

Most businesses have at least a certain amount of their workload in the cloud since cloud computing is fastly becoming a standard amidst organizations that need more resilience, higher efficiencies, lower cost, and enhanced disaster recovery. The cloud computing courses will equip you with the requisite skills to work on various cloud platforms.

 

“More than 90% of organizations use the cloud, and 

Globally, the cloud computing market will surpass $1 trillion by 2028.”

 

AWS, Microsoft, and Google are a few leading companies that immediately rose to prominence. Out of them, AWS is definitely the main cloud service provider. This isn’t good news for Amazon, but for you also, if you’re planning to make a career as an AWS Solutions Architect, with 1050+ job openings are projected in the next three years in the USA alone and the average salary is $121,189. 

If this is your career move, this blog will help you prepare for your AWS training, certification, and interview, ensuring that you’ll be best prepared for both. Take the world by storm and showcase your knowledge of core concepts, including the latest trends and excellent practices, using the following AWS architect questions. 

But before that, let’s first discuss what AWS solutions architects do.

What Do AWS Solutions Architects Do?

AWS solutions architects are liable for developing and maintaining different applications on the AWS platform by working with system admins and developers to make sure that the applications are developed to perform flawlessly on the amazon web services platform.

The AWS solutions architects also work with clients to support them in understanding how to use the AWS platform in the best possible way in order to meet their business requirements.

Furthermore, along with their technical skills, solutions architects also need to be capable of efficiently communicating with technical and non-technical associates at

A Basic level skills: Covering basic concepts and skills needed to become an AWS-certified solution architect, including learning fundamentals of design patterns, data storage, security, and other relevant cloud technologies.

Intermediate level skills: Covers advanced topics related to designing applications for the AWS platform, learning how to scale an application between several regions, and designing for fault tolerance.

Advanced level skills: Covers advanced topics like developing high-availability applications. 

Scenario-based level skills: AWS-certified solution architects are the most in-demand professionals in the IT sector. They must be capable of solving complex problems and designing scalable business solutions; that’s why they must be agile and creative and deeply understand how all resources work together.

Top 50+ AWS Solution Architect Questions and Answers

As stated by Forbes report, AWS solution architect certification leads the 15 top-paying IT certifications. Today, AWS is considered one of the most sought-after IT jobs. We at JanBask Training are committed to providing you with a well-rounded knowledge of Amazon Web Services. This is why we created a list of top AWS architect questions and answers that can probably be asked during your interview.

We’ll start our discussion with the basics and move our way forward to more technical AWS architect questions and answers so that concepts can be understood in the sequence.

Let’s look at the top AWS Architecture questions and answers: 

Q1). What is Amazon EC2?

Ans:- EC2  stands for Elastic Compute Cloud, which offers scalable computing capacity. The Amazon EC2 excludes the need to put money into hardware, resulting in faster development and implementation of applications. Amazon EC2 can be used to launch as many or as few virtual servers as required, frame security and networking, and manage storage. You can scale it up or down to manage changes in needs, minimizing the need to forecast traffic. Amazon EC2 provides a virtual computing environment called “instances.”

Q2). What are some of the security best practices for Amazon EC2?

Ans:- The security best practices for Amazon EC2 include the use of identity and access management (IAM) to control access to AWS services, limiting access by allowing only the trusted hosts or networks to access the required ports on an instance; only allowing those permissions when required, and deactivating password-based logins for instances created using AMI.

Q3). What is Amazon S3? 

Ans:- S3 stands for Simple Storage Service, the most certified storage platform. It's an object storage that can save and retrieve data from anywhere. In spite of that versatility, it’s practically unlimited and cost-effective because its storage is available on demand. Aside from these benefits, it also offers an extraordinary level of durability and availability. Amazon S3 also helps the data in cost reduction, access control, etc. After all the hurdles, Amazon came up with a strong internet storage service Amazon S3; you shall learn about this service in detail using the AWS S3 tutorial.

Q4). Can Amazon S3 be used with Amazon EC2 instances, and if so, how?

Ans:- Amazon S3 could be utilized for EC2 instances with source devices supported by local instance storage. In such a manner, developers have access to the similar, highly flexible, reliable, fast, and cost-effective data storage framework used by Amazon for running its own global network of websites. To bring about systems in the EC2 instances, developers need to load Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) into S3 and then move them across Amazon S3 and EC2.

Amazon EC2 and S3 are the well-known web services that constitute AWS.

Q5). What is Identity and Access Management (IAM), and how is it used?

Ans:- IAM, i.e., Identity and Access Management, is a well-known web service for safely managing access to AWS services. It allows you to manage users, security credentials like access keys, and permissions that authorizes which AWS services users and applications can access.

Q6).  What is Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and why is it used?

Ans:- Amazon’s virtual private cloud is the best method for connecting to cloud resources from your own data center. Once your data center is connected to the VPC where EC2 instances are present, each instance is allotted a private IP address accessible from your data center. Thus you can access your public cloud solutions as if they’re on your private network.

Q7). What is Amazon Route 53?

Ans:- Amazon Route 53 is an extensible and highly accessible Domain Name System (DNS). The name specifies TCP or UDP port 53, where DNS server requests are handled.

Q8). What is Cloudtrail, and how do Cloudtrail and Route 53 work together? 

Ans:- CloudTrail is a web service that collects information about requests transmitted to the Amazon Route 53 API using an AWS account, together with requests that IAM users send. CloudTrail stores log files of these requests in an Amazon S3 bucket. It collects information about all requests. You can utilize this information to evaluate which requests were sent to Amazon Route 53, the IP address from which the request was sent, to whom it was sent, when it was sent, and more.

Q9). When would you prefer to use Provisioned IOPs over Standard RDS storage?

Ans:- You can prefer to use Provisioned IOPS when you’ve batch-oriented tasks. Provisioned IOPS gives high IO rates, but it’s also costly. Despite that, batch-processing tasks don’t need manual intervention. 

Q 10).  How do Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, and Redshift vary from each other?

Ans:- Amazon RDS is a DBMS for relational databases. It automatically controls patching, improving, and data backups. It’s a database management service for organized data only. So, what are DynamoDB and Redshift? DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service for working with unorganized data. Redshift is an enterprise data warehouse product utilized in data analysis.

Q11). What are the advantages of AWS’s Disaster Recovery?

Ans:- Organizations use cloud computing in some measure to allow faster disaster recovery of crucial IT systems at no cost of a second physical site. The AWS cloud helps several popular disaster recovery architectures differing from small consumer workload data center failures to ecosystems that facilitate fast failover at scale. Besides data centers worldwide, AWS offers a group of cloud computing disaster recovery services that allow fast recovery of your IT structure and data.

Q12).  How can you create an AMI?

Ans:- To develop an AMI, you must have a working instance of the Amazon Linux OS and then use the OS's tools to pack up your example in an AMI. moreover, you can also make use of third-party tools such as Packer or Terraform to automatize this process.

Q13). Explain what AWS VPC is?

Ans:- Amazon VPC stands for Virtual Private Cloud, which facilitates users to create a private and separate section of the AWS cloud. It is pragmatically segregated from other virtual networks in the AWS cloud. The user controls the virtual networking ecosystem, selecting the IP address range, developing subnets, and constructing route tables and network gateways. VPCs are kept in a particular territory and are logically isolated from other VPCs in a similar area.

Q14). What is AWS Auto Scaling and Load Balancer?

Ans:- AWS Auto Scaling and Load Balancer services are two tools that could be utilized together to help control the server traffic. These services also ensure that your website or application can handle sudden spikes or declines in traffic. 

AWS elastic load balancer (ELB) facilitates you to make apps highly available through constant health checks and even during the traffic distribution between multiple EC2 instances. 

Q15). What is AWS SQS?

Ans:- Amazon SQS stands for Simple Queue Service (SQS), a fast, reliable, expansible, completely managed message queuing service. Amazon SNS stands for Simple Notification Service, a quick, flexible, fully managed push notification service that allows you to send personal or fan-out messages to a huge number of recipients. Amazon SES stands for Simple Email Service, a cost-effective, resilient, and highly scalable email service that allows developers to send mail automatically from any application. Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-operate service for implementing and scaling web applications and services developed using Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go. Docker on common servers like Apache, Nginx, Passenger, IIS, etc.

Q16). What is AWS OpsWorks?

Ans:- AWS OpsWorks is a cloud orchestration or automation technology. It facilitates developers and system admins to control server implementations and applications with the help of DevOps methodology. OpsWorks automatizes functional tasks like software updates, instance scaling, and monitoring. It also offers a flexible architecture that allows you to use Chef and Puppet for configuration management.

Q17). What is AWS SNS?

Ans:- Amazon SNS stands for Simple Notification Service (SNS), a fast, fully managed push notification service that makes sending messages to mobile devices and other distributed systems easy. 

Q18). What is CloudFront?

Ans:- Amazon CloudFront has become one of the world's most acclaimed content delivery networks (CDN) thanks to its capability to accelerate the transference of static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, and .js files. 

Q19). What are the differences between 'Horizontal' and 'Vertical' scales?

Ans:- SNS, i.e., Simple Notification Service, can scale horizontally to help a huge number of subscribers and deliver high output by automatically inserting new Capacity Units as required. SNS can also scale vertically to help huge no. of messages with several retries.

Q20). Explain the advantages of AWS's Disaster Recovery (DR) solution.

Ans:- This is also a hugely popular AWS interview question asked in an AWS interview. 

AWS's Disaster Recovery (DR) solution offers the following advantages:

• AWS offers an affordable backup, storage, and disaster recovery solution, helping businesses to minimize their capital expenditure
• Quick setup time and more meaningful productivity outcomes
• AWS enables businesses to scale up even during seasonal fluctuating times
• It smoothly duplicates on-premise data onto the cloud.
• Assures speedy file retrievals

Q21). What are the different kinds of load balancers in EC2?

Ans:- Following are the three types of load balancers in EC2 – 

• Application Load Balancer: These are designed to make routing decisions at the application layer. 
• Network Load Balancer: These load balancers manage millions of requests per second and help in making routing decisions at the transport layer.    
• Classic Load Balancer: These are mainly used for applications developed inside the EC2-Classic network. It provides necessary load balancing at varying Amazon EC2 instances.

Amazon EC2 offers secure, scalable computing in the cloud, including a broad range of processors, storage, networking, OS, etc. You must learn how to create Amazon EC2 instance.

22) What is DynamoDB?

Ans:- It is a NoSQL database, which is very compliant, works quite reliably, and can be easily integrated with AWS. DynamoDB provides quick and anticipated performance together with consistent scalability. Using DynamoDB, you don’t need to take care of hardware provisioning, configuration, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling.

Q23).  What is AWS CloudFormation?

Ans:- It is an Amazon service intended to solve the need to normalize and clone the architectures to make their execution easy and enhance resources and costs in the distribution of applications or according to the needs of the business. AWS CloudFormation authorizes the creation of an entire library of instance templates or architectures suitable for getting delivered at any time and systematically using programming.

Q24). What are the advantages of using AWS CloudFormation?

Ans:- AWS CloudFormation offers many advantages, including

1. Reduction in infrastructure implementation time
2. Boosts confidence in deployments
3. Duplicates complex environments, 
4. Recycles the definitions between various products
5. Minimizes environment patching time

Q25). What is Elastic Beanstalk?

Ans:- Elastic Beanstalk is a system administrated by AWS, used in different AWS applications, for instance, EC2, S3, etc.

Q26).  How will you compare two popular cloud service providers – AWS and Azure?

Refer to the following table to understand the difference between the two most prominent cloud service providers, i.e., AWS and Azure.

Parameters	AWS	Azure
Initiation	2006	2010
Market Share	4X	X
Implementation	Less Options	More Experimentation Possible
Features	Widest Range of Options	Good Range of Options
App Hosting	AWS Not as Good as Azure	Azure is Better
Development	Varied & Great Features	Varied & Great Features
IaaS Offerings	Good Market Hold	Better Offering Than AWS

Q27).  I have a few private servers. I also distributed some of the workloads on the public cloud. Which type of architecture is this?

Ans:- When both services, like private and public clouds, are used together, it’s referred to as a hybrid cloud. It's easier to understand a hybrid architecture when private or public clouds are hosted on the same network virtually.

Q28). There is a cloud video transcoding app to process videos in a queue. If the video processing is interrupted abruptly, it is resumed by another instance. Currently, a huge backlog of videos requires to be processed, and we need more instances for the same. But we also require the corresponding instances until the backlog isn't cleared. So, what could be the most effective way to achieve the purpose?

Ans:- You must utilize on-demand instances to accomplish this purpose. Wondering why? Firstly, you require instances instantly to process the videos. Secondly, you don’t require them when the backlog is cleared. Reserved instances are not involved anymore because instances are needed for a certain period. Spot instances are also unsuitable because work is urgent, and you cannot stop the work just because the spot price has increased. Hence, on-demand instances are the best choice in this case.

Q29). How are stopping and terminating an instance two different processes?

Ans:-

• Stopping Instance: When an instance is stopped, it conducts a normal shutdown. But having said that, its Amazon EBS volume stays attached, and you can start a similar instance later when required. The advantage of stopping an instance is that you aren't charged anything for that particular instance once it is stopped.
• Terminating Instance: When an instance is terminated, it normally shuts down, and all Amazon EBS volumes connected to the instance get deleted at the same time once an instance is terminated, you cannot start it over again.

Q30).  If I want to run my instance on single-tenant hardware, which option do I have to set for the instance tenancy attribute?

Ans:- 

The instance tenancy attribute must be assigned to the "Dedicated Instance" here to run the instance on single-tenant hardware. The rest of the options are invalid.

Q31). What are the costs related to an EIP (Elastic IP address)? 

Ans:- You aren't required to pay anything when only one IP address is attached to your working instance. But you're required to pay under the following conditions:

• When more than one EIPs are related to your working instance.
• When EIP is connected to the stopped instance.
• When EIP isn't attached to any instance.

Q32). Can we use reserved instances for multi-AZ deployments in AWS?

Ans:- Reserved Instances are the estimation models available for all Amazon EC2 Instances.

Q33). How is a Spot Instance different from a Reserved or On-demand Instance?

Ans:- Spot instances, Reserved instances, and On-demand instances are estimation models. Spot instance offers the flexibility to the users to buy compute capacity with no upfront investment, but at the same time, you have to pay hourly, which is lower than the on-demand instance rate in every part.

Spot instances are the same as bidding; the bidding price for these instances is known as the Spot Price. As mentioned, the price may fluctuate depending on the supply and demand curve, but you never pay more than the highest price. When spot prices go higher than the maximum price, the EC2 instances shut down automatically. But the reverse isn't true; if spot prices fall, EC2 instances aren't launched automatically. It needs to be performed by hand.

For Spot and On-demand instances, there's no commitment from the user side. However, in the case of Reserved Instances, one has to stick to the time period that was chosen earlier.

Q34). What are the network performance parameters when you launch an instance in the cluster placement group?

Ans:- The network performance parameters are based on the instance type and network specifications. Suppose an instance is launched in a cluster placement group. In that case, you can expect the following performance parameters:

• For a single flow, 10 GBPS speed
• For multi-flow, 20 GBPS speed
• For the network traffic outside the placement group, speed is limited to 5GBPS

Q35). Which instance type can be used to deploy a 4-node Hadoop cluster in AWS?

Ans:- Each Hadoop cluster is dependent on the master-slave concept, where the master machine processes the data, and the slave machine saves the data like data nodes. As all the processing is carried out at the master machine, a high-capacity CPU and RAM are needed here, and as all the storage is done at the slave machine, a high-capacity hard disk is required.

You are free to choose the configuration of the machine depending on the workload. If you aren’t interested in constructing the machine manually, then you can right away launch an Amazon EMR instance that constructs the server automatically for you. You dump the data to be treated in S3, and EMR picks the data from there, processes it, and dumps it back into the S3. As you know what is Hadoop cluster, for getting maximum execution from a Hadoop group, it must be designed perfectly.

Q36). When designing an architecture for a solution, where do you think AMI fits?

Ans:- AMIs i.e., Amazon Machine Images are the same as the templates for VM or an instance acquired from an AMI. AWS offers pre-ready AMIs that you can select to launch an instance. A few of them aren't free, and you can also purchase them from the Amazon Web Services marketplace.

You are free to create your own customized AMI that helps you to save space on AWS as it is more cost-effective and suitable for your project.

Q37). What to consider when choosing the finest availability zone?

Ans:- For selecting the best availability zone, you should first compare the prices for different regions. But the price is not a single factor in making the final decision; you also need to evaluate the performance. Let's look at the latency also, which is the time taken by a server to respond to your requests. Depending on these factors, it is easier to decide on the best availability zone from different regions.

Q38). Is one Elastic IP address enough for every running instance?

Ans:- Every instance holds its own private and public IP address. A private IP address is related exclusively to an instance, and it's returned when any instance is stopped or terminated abruptly. Likewise, a public IP address is also exclusively related to an instance unless and until it's stopped or terminated. However, you can allocate an Elastic IP address to an instance that stays longer till the time the user doesn't disconnect it manually. Suppose you are hosting multiple websites on your EC2 server, then you need multiple EIP addresses in that scenario.

Q39). How to manage the security for an Amazon EC2 instance?

Ans:- There're several best practices to secure an Amazon EC2 instance. They are given below.

• To control access to AWS resources, you must use IAM protocol.
• To grant access to trusted users or networks, you must restrict untrusted access by allocating a few security rules.
• To manage secure access, review the rules of security groups regularly and only open up required permissions.
• To maintain the security risks, disable the password-based logins, for instance, launched from an AMI.

Q40). Can we use an S3 bucket with EC2 Instances too?

Ans:- Yes, S3 bucket can be used with the original devices supported by local instance storage. Using Amazon S3, developers have access to reliable and expensive data storage infrastructure that is used by Amazon to run its global websites.

Q41). What makes EBS and Instance Store different from one another?

Ans:- EBS is a kind of persistent storage that enables subsequent data recovery. Data that is saved to the EBS is accessible long after the EC2 instance has been shut down. On the other hand, an instance store is a temporary storage that is connected to a host system physically.

Q42). How Does the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Work?

Ans:- The most effective way to access your cloud services from your own data center is through a VPC. Each instance is given a private IP address that can be accessed from your data center once you join your data center to the VPC that houses your instances. You can therefore use public cloud services just like you would if they were on your own private network.

Q43). In a VPC, how many subnets are permitted?

Ans:- There are 200 Subnets that each Amazon Virtual Private Cloud may support (VPC). They allow you to launch AWS resources through a logically isolated virtual network defined by you. Amazon VPC tutorial will help you understand all the components in it.

Q44). Is it possible for me to connect my company's data center to the Amazon Cloud?

Ans:- Yes, you can create a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection between the network of your business and your VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). It will let you interact with your EC2 instances as if they were under your present network.

Q45). What are your understandings of private and public addresses?

Ans:- The private address is really associated with the instance directly and is only communicated back to EC2 if the instance is halted or terminated. On the other hand, the public address is similarly connected with the instance until it is halted or terminated. Elastic IP can take the place of the public address. This is done when a user requests that it remain with the instance as needed.

Q46). If you start the instances in Amazon VPC, what would happen?

Ans:- This is a typical strategy that is considered while launching EC2 instances. If the instances are started in an Amazon VPC, each one will have a default IP address. When you need to link cloud resources with data centers, this strategy is also considered.

Q47).  What do you know about AMI?

Ans:- AMI is typically regarded as the virtual machine template. It is possible to choose pre-baked AMIs that AMI frequently includes when launching an instance. However, not all AMIs can be used for nothing. It is also possible to create a customized AMI, and the main justification for doing so is to save up space on Amazon Web Service. This is done if a collection of software is not necessary, and AMI may instead be modified.

Q48). What is the root device volume for Amazon EC2?

Ans:- When an Amazon AMI launches a new EC2 case, the root device slice stores the image used to boot the instance. EBS or instance storage both support this root device volume. In general, the root device data stored on Amazon EBS is unaffected by an EC2 instance's lifetime.

Q49). What Are the Benefits of AWS’s Disaster Recovery?

Ans:- Businesses employ cloud computing to facilitate quicker IT system recovery after a disaster without incurring additional costs for a second physical location. The AWS cloud provides a wide range of well-liked disaster recovery architectures, from settings that permit rapid failover at scale to environments that handle minor client workload data center outages. AWS offers a suite of cloud-based disaster recovery services that enable quick recovery of your IT infrastructure and data, and it has data centers worldwide.

Q50). What is Cloudtrail, and how does it integrate with Route?

Ans:- Every request made to the Amazon Route 53 API by an AWS account, including those made by IAM users, is recorded by the service CloudTrail. CloudTrail saves these requests' log files to an Amazon S3 bucket. CloudTrail records all requested information. To find out which requests were sent to Amazon Route 53, the IP address from which they were sent, who sent them, when they were sent, and other details, use the CloudTrail log files.

Q51).What is Geo Restriction in CloudFront?

Ans:- Geo restriction in CloudFront is also referred to as geoblocking, which avoids users in particular geographic locations from accessing content you're transmitting using a CloudFront web distribution.

Q52). What is a T2 instance?

Ans:- T2 instance is designed to deliver balanced baseline performance and the ability to burst to higher performance as needed by the workload.

Q53). What is AWS Lambda?

Ans:- AWS Lambda is a computing service that 

allows you to run code in the AWS Cloud without making any provisions or management for servers.

Q54).  What is a Serverless Application in AWS?

Ans:- The AWS SAM, i.e., AWS Serverless Application Model enhances AWS CloudFormation in order to provide a  straightforward way for defining the Amazon API Gateway APIs, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon DynamoDB tables required by the serverless applications.

Q55). What is the use of Amazon ElastiCache?

Ans:- Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that helps make it easy to implement, operate, and scale an in-memory data store or cache in the cloud.

Conclusion

I hope these AWS cloud architect interview questions and answers have unriddled the questions that could be asked in your AWS solutions architect interview. AWS is an all-around cloud computing solution composed of several web services having a number of benefits. Moreover, it's a continuously changing and growing solution, for better serving the businesses that use it. 

Before your interview, if you’re planning to do additional training or a certification program that offers in-depth hands-on experience, join the aws training course. This training program will help you gain an in-depth understanding of AWS architectural principles and services and learn how to design, plan, and scale AWS cloud deployments. 

At the time of an interview, avoid giving Yes/No type answers, but you have to be creative while answering AWS architecture interview questions. Preferably, a descriptive answer can help you show you're familiar with concepts and capable of identifying the best solution as an AWS solution architect. 

At times, interviewers give you a scenario to check your behavior against the situation; the purpose of this guide on AWS architecture questions and answers is the same. Prepare yourself and get AWS solution architect certification today to be hired by the best companies!