AWS Simulated Job Interviews by the AWS Coaches

Chad Smith introduces a mock AWS sysops interview, detailing his certifications in architecture, sysops, networking, databases, and security, plus cross-cloud insight from Google Cloud, and his decade of AWS experience.

Explore options for backing up RDS with cross-region copy and varying retention, comparing RDS built-in features, CLI scripts, AWS Lambda with CloudWatch events, and AWS Backup.

Identify the AWS VPC resource creation order: VPC, subnets, database route tables, internet gateway, public route tables, NAT gateways, and private route tables, and note private versus database subnet differences.

Explore implementing a CloudWatch alarm that forwards to Slack via an SNS topic and a Lambda function, using an EC2 CloudWatch agent to deliver metrics and optional Jira integration.

Explore secure connectivity options to EC2 for OS-based operations, including bastion hosts in a public subnet with SSH, AWS Systems Manager session manager, and SSM run command for automated workflows.

Analyze how to alert on cross-region CloudWatch metrics, noting that composite alarms don't support multi-region data and that Route 53 health checks with existing alarms can be a viable workaround.

Plan and implement an application load balancer with both http and https listeners, multiple tls certificates, and a http-to-https redirect using a shell script and a sequence of CLI commands.

Learn how to efficiently list and manage a billion-object s3 bucket using parallel cli prefixes and s3 batch operations, including generating an s3 inventory report.

When Systems Manager is unavailable, use the AWS CLI to loop through DNS entries via bastion host, SSH into instances, and install and restart the CloudWatch agent on 500 instances.

Learn to handle unfamiliar AWS services in interviews by seeking details and showing problem-solving. Consult AWS documentation, whitepapers, blog posts, premium support, and sandbox testing before deployment.

Learn to handle mispronounced AWS services in interviews with tact, avoid embarrassing the interviewer, and use the AWS language analogy to land a SysOps role.

Learn an AWS interview strategy featuring a 5–7 minute phone filter, a 50-question assessment with confidence marks (zero, slash, X), and honest, skill-aligned questioning.

Explore fast, scalable oltp options on AWS for a five terabyte dataset, comparing DynamoDB, MySQL RDS, Aurora, and EC2 deployments, concluding Aurora offers hands-off simplicity and scalability.

Assess migration options for a ten-node on-prem Hadoop and Spark cluster to AWS, balancing full control with scalable, hands-off operation. EMR offers API compatibility and ecosystem support.

Compare Redshift and Athena trade-offs for analytics, noting Redshift for olap queries with partitioning, and Athena for ad hoc queries on S3 with columnar formats; note Redshift Spectrum bonus.

Evaluate real-time, posix-level shared block storage for an EC2 cluster and justify using EFS with scalable, high-throughput NFS storage, while noting FSx for Lustre/Windows as alternatives.

Explore a DynamoDB hot key problem in a provisioned table and fix it by moving to on-demand mode with adaptive capacity, including read capacity concepts and table porting.

Leverage the AWS Glue data catalog metastore to create a Hive-compatible unified data catalog for Athena, Redshift, EMR, and QuickSight across S3, RDS, and EC2.

Explore how to implement end-to-end encryption in an emr pipeline, leveraging emr security configs and kms to encrypt data at rest and in transit between oltp, redshift, and s3.

Enable VPC endpoints to give the EC2 HPC cluster secure access to S3 data and DynamoDB, removing the internet gateway, reducing latency and preventing double bandwidth charges.

Meet Marcos Lugo as he guides you through a simulated AWS developer interview. The session focuses on AWS knowledge with questions about programming and DevOps skills.

Propose an AWS-based solution to move an e-commerce front end, using S3 for static content and a content delivery network to deliver images, videos, and product data globally.

Migrate the product catalog from MySQL to DynamoDB to handle 150,000 concurrent shoppers with consistent performance at scale, and deploy catalog logic in containers using ECS or EKS.

Differentiate by highlighting your programming experience and testing AWS solutions, use the 12-month free tier to experiment, and prove competence with an associate certificate, such as in databases.

Explore cost-effective and scalable solutions for a Python script on a Debian EC2 instance that indexes catalog entries, from scheduled reservations to containerization with ECS, AWS Batch, or AWS Lambda.

Discover how to implement AWS microservices by aligning with your skills, choosing serverless with AWS Lambda, or containerized paths like Elastic Beanstalk, or EC2 with spot pricing.

Use Cloud9 as an online IDE to host and edit code inside AWS, connecting EC2 instances to a CodeCommit repository so developers work entirely in Cloud9 without downloading code.

Explains how to exchange messages between microservices with redundancy and reliability. Compares common database, API gateway, SNS, SQS, and EventBridge, highlighting SQS and EventBridge as robust solutions.

Show off your coding skills by sharing past projects and ready-to-run code. Set up your favorite IDE with SDKs and CLI tools, and consider a Cloud9 instance to impress employers.

Explore flexible strategies to run a PHP backend on AWS, from EC2 auto scaling to ECS with Fargate or container-based Lambda under size and time limits.

Configure your EC2 test environment to access the code commit repository by attaching an IAM role to the instance, avoiding long-term credentials.

Explore AWS deployment tools for developers, including CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline, CodeCommit, Elastic Beanstalk, OpsWorks with Chef and Puppet, Systems Manager, ECS, EKS, and EC2.

Compare monoliths and microservices by examining single code bases, decoupled services, external complexity, and fast-paced development, then prepare arguments for monolith-to-microservices migration based on context.

discover monthly updates and an on-screen link to discounts on all of the AWS coaches' courses, including VMware and other offerings, with deep price cuts.