AWS Interview Guide - Get Ready for AWS Interview

Learn why cloud enables on-demand resource provisioning, avoids undifferentiated heavy lifting, and enables global deployment with economies of scale, focusing on AWS compute, storage, databases, security, identity, and DevOps.

Explore how regions and availability zones enable high availability, low latency, and a global footprint, while aligning data location and regulatory needs across AWS services like EC2 and S3.

Explore infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, contrasting vm deployments with managed platforms, serverless, and containers, while noting who handles OS and runtime in each model.

Explore how microservices use containers and Docker images to run anywhere, and learn container orchestration with auto scaling, service discovery, load balancing, and zero-downtime deployments with Kubernetes.

Explore serverless and focus on your code while the platform auto-scales, handles infrastructure, and bills you by pay-per-use across functions, containers, and databases.

Explore elastic compute cloud (ec2) to provision and manage ec2 instances, choose instance types, attach storage, and configure amis, security groups, vpcs, subnets, and key pairs for secure deployments.

Explore ec2 pricing models—on demand, spot, reserved instances, and savings plans—and learn how spot's two-minute notice, spot block, and spot fleet, plus standard and convertible reservations, shape cost and flexibility.

Explore how to scale EC2 instances with horizontal auto scaling and elastic load balancing, including ASG configuration, health checks, launch templates, across multiple availability zones and regions.

Apply EC2 and ELB best practices by securing traffic with security groups, placing instances in private subnets, and selecting the right load balancer.

Explore Elastic Beanstalk, ECS, and EKS as platform as a service compute options for deploying web and batch apps with Docker containers; auto scaling, load balancing, and CloudWatch monitoring.

Explore serverless compute with aws lambda, paying for requests and duration while automatically scaling. Understand memory, 15-minute max runtime, supported languages, and lambda execution roles.

Explore relational databases for OLTP and OLAP in AWS, comparing RDS and Aurora for transactional workloads with multi-AZ and read replicas, and Redshift for petabyte-scale analytics.

Explore semi-structured data in NoSQL databases with flexible schemas that evolve over time, covering document, key-value, graph, and column family models, and their cloud services like DynamoDB and Cosmos DB.

Understand how DynamoDB scales automatically and offers serverless mode for fast NoSQL workloads. Learn how primary keys and secondary indexes enable flexible queries while items stay schema-less and region-specific.

Explore block, file, and object storage in aws, comparing instance store and elastic block store for boot volumes and databases, with file shares and s3 object storage.

Explore Amazon S3 object storage: buckets and key-value objects, versioning, durability 11/9 and 99.99% availability, storage classes, lifecycle rules, static websites, events, and pre-signed URLs.

Explore AWS storage gateway for hybrid cloud and on premise storage, offering file, tape, or volume gateways with encrypted data and cached or stored options.

Explore IAM concepts, authentication, authorization, identities (users, groups, roles) and permissions (policies) to control access to resources such as S3 buckets and databases via roles and instance profiles across accounts.

Compare identity based and resource based IAM policies, and adopt best practices like least privilege, MFA, auditing via CloudTrail, password policies, role usage, credential rotation, and avoiding root accounts.

Explore how CMS and Cloud HSM manage encryption keys, including envelope encryption with data keys for S3, rotation, and the server-side versus client-side encryption distinction.

Learn how AWS VPCs provide isolated networks with public and private subnets and route tables to control traffic. Discover NAT devices and NAT gateways for secure internet access.

Explore aws networking, including vpc acl vs security groups, subnet-level controls, and stateless vs stateful rules; cover vpc peering, vpc endpoints, and on-premises connectivity via vpn or direct connect.

Explore infrastructure as code in AWS, comparing CloudFormation, SAM, and CDK for provisioning and configuration management, with automation, version control, and environment repeatability.

Explore Amazon CloudWatch and X-Ray to monitor, log, and trace cloud resources, configure metrics, alarms, CloudWatch Logs Insights, and distributed tracing across microservices with trace IDs.

Explore release management in AWS using code deploy, outline deployment strategies like recreate, canary, rolling, rolling with additional batch, and blue-green, and emphasize automation and rollback best practices.

Externalize environment-specific configuration from code with app config, parameter store, and secrets manager, validate via json schema or lambda, and enable Kennedy rollout with monitoring.

Explore asynchronous communication in AWS using SQS and SNS to decouple applications, compare synchronous and asynchronous models, and learn about queues, topics, and message lifecycle.

Use AWS CloudFront to deliver static content globally from edge locations, with S3 as origin and caching for low latency and high availability, and route with Route 53.

Explore AWS management and governance services like CloudTrail, Config, AWS Organizations, Firewall Manager, and Trusted Advisor for cross-account governance, cost optimization, security, and performance.

Understand how cloud costs depend on resource type, region, and data transfer, and use cost management tools to estimate charges. Apply best practices like right sizing and reserved instances.

Explore Cognito for authentication, user pools and identity pools, MFA, and social sign-in, then learn to protect apps with Shield, WAF, Macie, GuardDuty, Detective, certificate manager, and penetration testing.

Understand how digital transformation uses cloud to enable omnichannel experiences, data-driven insights from big data, ai and ml, and rapid automated deployments.

Explore cloud migration options for applications and data, from lift-and-shift to serverless, and learn AWS tools like migration hub, application discovery service, control tower, and data transfer services.

Explore big data on aws by comparing data warehouses and data lakes and the three v's: volume, variety, velocity, with tools like redshift, s3, and athena.

Explore aws machine learning services, including pre-trained models like Amazon Comprehend, Rekognition, Transcribe, Translate, Polly, Personalize, and Fraud Detector; use SageMaker with AutoML or custom models.

Explore the AWS well-architected framework and its six pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability—plus practical best practices for design, automation, monitoring, and cost control.

Review key AWS services across compute, storage, databases, DevOps, analytics, networking, security, and governance to refresh concepts for interviews or exams.