Top 50 AWS Solution Architect Associate Interview Questions and Answers 2024

1. What is AWS?

Answer: AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a cloud computing platform that provides a wide range of services, including computing power, storage, databases, machine learning, and more, over the internet.

2. What are the key components of AWS?

Answer: The key components of AWS include:

• Compute: EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Lambda
• Storage: S3 (Simple Storage Service), EBS (Elastic Block Store)
• Database: RDS (Relational Database Service), DynamoDB
• Networking: VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), Route 53
• Management Tools: CloudWatch, CloudFormation

3. What is EC2?

Answer: EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a web service that provides resizable computing capacity in the cloud. It allows users to launch virtual servers (instances) on the AWS cloud.
Also Read: AWS Cloud Certification

4. What is S3?

Answer: S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an object storage service that offers scalable storage for data backup, archiving, and analytics. It is designed for durability, availability, and scalability.

5. What is a VPC?

Answer: VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is a virtual network dedicated to an AWS account. It allows users to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that they define.

6. What is IAM?

Answer: IAM (Identity and Access Management) is a service that enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. It allows you to create and manage users, groups, and roles to control who can access your AWS resources.
Also Read: Video Tutorial on AWS

7. What is the difference between IAM roles and IAM users?

Answer: IAM roles are used to delegate access to AWS resources to entities that are not IAM users, such as applications running on EC2 instances. IAM users, on the other hand, are individual users who can interact with AWS resources using their own credentials.

8. What is CloudFormation?

Answer: CloudFormation is a service that allows you to define and provision AWS infrastructure as code using templates. It enables you to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.

9. What is the difference between S3 and EBS?

Answer: S3 is an object storage service that is suitable for storing and retrieving large amounts of data, while EBS is a block storage service that is designed for use with EC2 instances, providing persistent block-level storage volumes for use with EC2 instances.

10. What is the difference between public and private subnets in a VPC?

Answer: Public subnets have their traffic routed to an internet gateway, allowing instances in the subnet to communicate with the internet, while private subnets do not have direct access to the internet and are used for instances that should not be publicly accessible.
Also Read: AWS Exam Dumps

11. How do you secure access to your EC2 instances?

Answer: Access to EC2 instances can be secured using IAM roles, security groups, and network ACLs. IAM roles can be used to control access to AWS resources, security groups act as virtual firewalls to control traffic to and from instances, and network ACLs control traffic at the subnet level.

12. What is an Auto Scaling group?

Answer: An Auto Scaling group is a collection of EC2 instances that are managed as a logical grouping for the purpose of automatic scaling. Auto Scaling groups automatically adjust the number of instances in response to changing demand.

13. How does CloudWatch help in monitoring AWS resources?

Answer: CloudWatch is a monitoring service that provides real-time monitoring and logging of AWS resources. It can be used to monitor metrics, set alarms, and automatically respond to changes in AWS resources.

14. What is the difference between horizontal and vertical scaling?

Answer: Horizontal scaling involves adding more instances to distribute the load across multiple machines, while vertical scaling involves increasing the capacity of a single machine, such as adding more CPU, memory, or storage to handle increased load.

15. What is AWS Lambda?

Answer: AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers. It automatically scales and manages the underlying infrastructure required to run your code in response to events.

16. What is the difference between Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB?

Answer: Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is a managed relational database service that supports multiple database engines, while Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service.

17. What is the AWS Shared Responsibility Model?

Answer: The AWS Shared Responsibility Model defines the division of responsibilities between AWS and the customer for security and compliance. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud infrastructure, while the customer is responsible for securing their data and applications in the cloud.

18. What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework?

Answer: The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of best practices for designing and operating secure, resilient, and efficient cloud infrastructure. It guides architecture design principles across five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.

19. What is the difference between AWS CodeCommit and AWS CodeBuild?

Answer: AWS CodeCommit is a source control service that hosts Git repositories, while AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages.

20. What is AWS CloudTrail?

Answer: AWS CloudTrail is a service that provides a record of actions taken by a user, role, or AWS service in your AWS account. It enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account.

21. What is an AWS CloudFormation stack?

Answer: An AWS CloudFormation stack is a collection of AWS resources that are created and managed as a single unit. It allows you to manage related resources together as a stack, enabling you to create, update, and delete them in a predictable and repeatable way.

22. What is Amazon VPC Peering?

Answer: Amazon VPC Peering is a networking connection between two VPCs that enables you to route traffic between them using private IP addresses.

23. How does AWS Direct Connect work?

Answer: AWS Direct Connect is a network service that provides a dedicated network connection between your on-premises data center and AWS. It allows you to bypass the public internet and establish a private, dedicated connection to AWS.

24. What is Amazon ECS?

Answer: Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) is a fully managed container orchestration service that allows you to run Docker containers on a managed cluster of EC2 instances.

25. What is Amazon EKS?

Answer: Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is a fully managed Kubernetes service that allows you to run Kubernetes clusters on AWS without needing to install, operate, and maintain your own Kubernetes control plane.

26. What is AWS Lambda Layers?

Answer: AWS Lambda Layers is a feature that allows you to centrally manage code and data that is shared across multiple Lambda functions.

27. What is AWS CloudFront?

Answer: AWS CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to users globally with low latency and high transfer speeds.

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

Answer: AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that allows you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data.

29. What is an AWS Systems Manager?

Answer: AWS Systems Manager is a management service that helps you automatically collect software inventory, apply OS patches, create system images, and configure Windows and Linux operating systems.

30. How many IP Address are reserved in each Subnet in VPC?

Answer: AWS reserves 1st Four IPs and the Last IP in each For example, Say 10.0.0.0/24 10.0.0.0 Network ID 10.0.0.1 VPC router 10.0.0.2 DNS Related 10.0.0.3 Future Use 10.0.0.255 Broadcast

31. What is Internet Gateway?

Answer:

• An Internet Gateway allows communication between your VPC and the Internet.
• VPC without an Internet gateway cannot communicate with the internet
• An internet gateway enables resources (like EC2 instances) in your subnets to access the internet
• Only one Internet Gateway per VPC
• An Internet Gateway is a Horizontally Scaled, Redundant, Highly available VPC component
• Internet Gateway supports both IPv4 & IPv6

32. What is Amazon S3 Glacier?

Answer: Amazon S3 Glacier is a low-cost storage service designed for long-term data archiving and backup.

33. What is a Security Group?

Answer: Security group is a virtual firewall, If you associate a security group with an EC2 instance, it controls the inbound and outbound traffic for the instance.

34. Difference between security group and N-ACL??

Answer:

Security Group	N-ACL
Operates at the instance level	Operates at the subnet level
Supports allow rules only	Supports allow rules and deny rules
Is stateful: Return traffic is automatically allowed, regardless of any rules	Is stateless: Return traffic must be explicitly allowed by rules
it evaluates all rules before deciding whether to allow traffic	it processes rules in number order when deciding whether to allow traffic
It Applies to an instance only if someone specifies the security group when launching the instance, or associates the security group with the instance later on	It Automatically applies to all instances in the subnets it’s associated with (therefore, you don’t have to rely on users to specify the security group)

35. What are the EC2 Families?

Answer:

• General Purpose
• Memory Optimized
• Compute Optimized
• Storage Optimized
• GPU Compute Instance

36. What is NAT Instance?

Answer: NAT instance allows private subnet EC2 instance to go to the internet

37. What are AWS Saving Plans?

Answer: Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model that offer lower prices on EC2 Usage (1 or 3 years) Savings Plans automatically apply to any applicable compute usage across regions, regardless of size, tenancy, and OS.

38. What are AWS Organizations?

Answer: AWS Organizations is a service that allows you to centrally manage and govern multiple AWS accounts as a single organization.

39. What is AWS Data Pipeline?

Answer: AWS Data Pipeline is a web service that helps you reliably process and move data between different AWS compute and storage services.

40. What are Amazon CloudWatch Logs?

Answer: Amazon CloudWatch Logs is a monitoring and log management service that allows you to collect, monitor, and store log data from your AWS resources.

41. What is Amazon Redshift?

Answer: Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehouse service that allows you to run complex queries on large datasets using SQL.

42. What is Amazon Kinesis?

Answer: Amazon Kinesis is a platform for streaming data on AWS, offering capabilities to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data.

43. What is AWS Directory Service?

Answer: AWS Directory Service is a managed service that allows you to connect your AWS resources to an existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory or to set up a new, standalone directory in the cloud.

44. What is Amazon SES?

Answer: Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a scalable and cost-effective email service that allows you to send and receive email using your own email addresses and domains.

45. What is EC2 Spot Instance?

Answer: AWS Spot Instances allow customers to use computer capacity without upfront commitments, at prices cheaper (80-90%) than on-demand instance pricing

46. What are the EBS Snapshots?

Answer: EBS Snapshots are point-in-time Images/copies of your EBS volume

47. What is SNS?

Answer: SNS is a fast, flexible, fully managed push notification service, Messages published to SNS topics will be delivered to the subscribers immediately (endpoint or clients)

48. What is Relational Database?

Answer: A Relational Database is a data structure that allows you to link information from tables or different types of tables It Normalizes data into Structures, Which means it requires schema that strictly defines tables, columns, indexes, and relations between tables

49. What is DynamoDB?

Answer: Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for any applications that need consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale

50. What is Amazon Route 53?

Answer: Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service