AWS - 100 Essential Questions and Answers

1. What is AWS?
Answer: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a comprehensive cloud
computing platform provided by Amazon. It offers services such as
computing power, storage, networking, and databases, which help
businesses scale their applications globally.
2. What are Availability Zones (AZs) in AWS?
Answer: Availability Zones are isolated locations within a region
where AWS data centers are located. Each region contains multiple
AZs to provide redundancy, reducing the chance of downtime due to
outages in one data center.
3. What is an AWS Region?
Answer: An AWS Region is a geographic area that consists of multiple
Availability Zones. Each region operates independently and contains
its own set of data centers, allowing for data redundancy and
compliance with local regulations.
4. What is Amazon EC2?
Answer: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides resizable
compute capacity in the cloud. It allows users to deploy virtual
servers (instances) to run applications and manage traffic effectively
with scalability.
5. What are the types of EC2 instances?
Answer: AWS offers different EC2 instance types optimized for
various tasks:
 General Purpose: For balanced compute, memory, and
networking.
 Compute Optimized: For compute-intensive applications.
  Memory Optimized: For memory-intensive applications.
 Storage Optimized: For high-performance storage needs.
 Accelerated Computing: For hardware acceleration (e.g.,
GPUs).
6. What is S3 (Simple Storage Service) in AWS?
Answer: Amazon S3 is a scalable storage service for storing and
retrieving large amounts of data from anywhere on the web. S3 is
commonly used for data storage, backup, and archiving.
7. What is an S3 Bucket?
Answer: An S3 bucket is a storage container in Amazon S3 where you
store data as objects. Each bucket is globally unique and serves as a
namespace to organize and store files.
8. What is IAM in AWS?
Answer: Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a service that
enables you to control access to AWS resources securely. It allows
you to manage users, groups, permissions, and roles to ensure only
authorized individuals access specific resources.
9. Explain the concept of Security Groups in AWS.
Answer: Security Groups act as virtual firewalls for EC2 instances,
controlling inbound and outbound traffic. You can define rules to
allow or restrict specific IPs, protocols, or ports to increase security.
10. What is an Elastic IP in AWS?
Answer: An Elastic IP is a static, public IPv4 address designed for
dynamic cloud computing. It can be attached to an EC2 instance,
allowing it to have a persistent IP address even after stopping and
restarting the instance.
11. What is Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) in AWS?
Answer: ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic
across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances. It helps improve fault
tolerance and availability of your applications.
12. What are the types of load balancers in AWS?
Answer: AWS offers three types of load balancers:
 Application Load Balancer (ALB): For HTTP and HTTPS traffic.
 Network Load Balancer (NLB): For TCP/UDP traffic, providing
high performance.
 Classic Load Balancer (CLB): For legacy applications.
13. What is Amazon RDS?
Answer: Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed
relational database service supporting databases like MySQL,
PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server. It automates database setup,
patching, and backups.
14. What is Amazon VPC?
Answer: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) allows you to create a
private network in AWS, where you can launch resources in a logically
isolated environment, defining your own IP range, subnets, and
gateways.
15. What is the purpose of AWS CloudFormation?
Answer: AWS CloudFormation automates the process of setting up
and managing resources using templates. It allows you to define your
infrastructure as code (IaC) for repeatability and consistency.
16. What is AWS Lambda?
Answer: AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that allows you
to run code in response to events without provisioning or managing
servers. You only pay for the compute time you use.
17. What is Amazon CloudWatch?
Answer: Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability
service for AWS resources and applications. It provides real-time
insights, alerts, and logging for troubleshooting and optimizing
performance.
18. What is AWS CloudTrail?
Answer: AWS CloudTrail records and monitors AWS account activity,
logging API calls made within AWS services. It is essential for
auditing, compliance, and security monitoring.
19. What are AWS Auto Scaling and its benefits?
Answer: AWS Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the number of EC2
instances based on demand. This ensures high availability and cost
savings by scaling resources up or down as needed.
20. What is Amazon Route 53?
Answer: Amazon Route 53 is a scalable Domain Name System (DNS)
web service. It provides domain registration, DNS routing, and health
checking, allowing reliable routing of end-user requests.
21. What is Amazon EBS?
Answer: Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block storage for
EC2 instances. EBS volumes are automatically replicated within their
AZ for durability and are ideal for databases and file systems.
22. What are EBS Volume types?
Answer: EBS volume types include:
 General Purpose SSD (gp2, gp3): For balanced performance.
  Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1, io2): For high-performance needs.
 Throughput Optimized HDD (st1): For frequently accessed
data.
 Cold HDD (sc1): For infrequent access, lower-cost storage.
23. What is Amazon S3 Glacier?
Answer: Amazon S3 Glacier is a low-cost cloud storage service for
data archiving and long-term backup, offering retrieval times from
minutes to hours.
24. What is the AWS Shared Responsibility Model?
Answer: AWS is responsible for the security "of" the cloud
(infrastructure, hardware, and software), while customers are
responsible for security "in" the cloud (data, applications, access
management).
25. What is an Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance?
Answer: Reserved Instances allow you to reserve EC2 instances for a
set term (1-3 years), providing a significant discount compared to On-
Demand instances.
26. What is the difference between RDS and DynamoDB?
Answer: RDS is a relational database service, supporting SQL
databases, while DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service optimized
for scalability and low-latency performance.
27. What is Amazon CloudFront?
Answer: Amazon CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
that delivers data, videos, and applications globally with low latency
through a network of edge locations.
28. What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
Answer: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that
allows you to deploy applications easily. It automatically handles
infrastructure provisioning, load balancing, and scaling.
29. Explain Multi-AZ deployments in RDS.
Answer: Multi-AZ deployments provide high availability for RDS by
automatically replicating data to a standby instance in a different
Availability Zone.
30. What is the purpose of Amazon SNS?
Answer: Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a messaging
service that allows you to send notifications to subscribers or trigger
other AWS services through a publish/subscribe model.
31. What is Amazon SQS?
Answer: Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed
message queuing service for decoupling applications, allowing
reliable and scalable message storage and delivery.
32. What are the storage classes in Amazon S3?
Answer: S3 storage classes include:
 Standard: For frequently accessed data.
 Intelligent-Tiering: For automatic cost-optimization.
 Standard-IA: For infrequently accessed data.
 One Zone-IA: For infrequent access within a single AZ.
 Glacier: For long-term archiving.
 Glacier Deep Archive: For lowest-cost long-term archiving.
33. What is AWS Direct Connect?
Answer: AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated network
connection from your on-premises environment to AWS, enhancing
network performance and security for hybrid setups.
34. What is AWS Config?
Answer: AWS Config provides configuration monitoring for AWS
resources. It helps track changes, maintain compliance, and
troubleshoot configurations.
35. What are Spot Instances?
Answer: Spot Instances allow you to bid on unused EC2 capacity at
reduced rates, ideal for workloads that can handle interruptions.
36. What is Amazon Aurora?
Answer: Amazon Aurora is a fully managed MySQL- and PostgreSQL-
compatible relational database engine designed for performance and
availability, with up to five times the throughput of standard MySQL.
37. What is AWS CLI?
Answer: The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a tool that allows
you to manage AWS services directly from your command line,
offering automation and scripting capabilities.
38. What is a Lambda function timeout?
Answer: Lambda functions have a maximum timeout of 15 minutes,
after which the function execution is terminated automatically.
39. What is AWS Trusted Advisor?
Answer: AWS Trusted Advisor provides real-time best-practice
recommendations to optimize resources, improve performance, and
enhance security.
40. What is Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)?
Answer: Amazon EFS provides scalable, shared file storage for use
with EC2 instances, supporting multiple EC2 instances in different
AZs.
41. What is AWS Outposts?
Answer: AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS
infrastructure, APIs, and tools to on-premises environments for a
consistent hybrid experience.
42. What is AWS WAF?
Answer: AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects web
applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP and HTTPS requests,
helping to block common attacks like SQL injection.
43. What is AWS Global Accelerator?
Answer: AWS Global Accelerator improves the performance of your
applications by directing traffic through the AWS global network,
providing lower latency and redundancy.
44. What is CloudEndure Disaster Recovery?
Answer: CloudEndure provides continuous backup and disaster
recovery for applications, allowing fast recovery of resources in AWS.
45. What is Amazon WorkSpaces?
Answer: Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed desktop computing
service in the cloud, providing virtual desktops for remote work.
46. Explain Amazon EC2 Auto Recovery.
Answer: EC2 Auto Recovery enables automatic recovery of instances
due to hardware or software failures, ensuring high availability
without manual intervention.
47. What is AWS Glue?
Answer: AWS Glue is a managed ETL service that simplifies data
preparation, transformation, and loading for analytics.
48. What is a VPC Peering Connection?
Answer: A VPC peering connection allows you to connect two VPCs
so that they can communicate with each other as if they were on the
same network.
49. What is Amazon Elastic Transcoder?
Answer: Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a media transcoding service in
the cloud, allowing you to convert media files into formats for various
devices.
50. What is Amazon Cognito?
Answer: Amazon Cognito enables secure authentication for web and
mobile apps, allowing users to sign in directly or via social identity
providers

51. What is AWS IAM?

Answer: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables secure
control over access to AWS services. It lets you create and manage
users, groups, and permissions.
52. What are IAM Roles?
Answer: IAM roles are a way to grant permissions to entities (like
users or services) without using hard-coded credentials, allowing
temporary access with specified permissions.
53. What is AWS Elastic Transcoder?
Answer: Elastic Transcoder is a media transcoding service that
converts media files into formats suitable for playback on devices like
smartphones, tablets, and PCs.
54. What is AWS Data Pipeline?
Answer: AWS Data Pipeline automates data-driven workflows. It
helps you move and process data across AWS services and on-
premises sources on a scheduled basis.
55. What is AWS Glue Data Catalog?
Answer: Glue Data Catalog is a metadata repository that enables
data discovery and provides a centralized data catalog for managing
ETL jobs and data classification.
56. What is Amazon MQ?
Answer: Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for
Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, simplifying the setup and
operation of message brokers.
57. What is AWS X-Ray?
Answer: AWS X-Ray is a service that helps developers analyze and
debug distributed applications by tracing requests through
microservices.
58. What is Amazon Polly?
Answer: Amazon Polly is a service that converts text into lifelike
speech, useful for creating applications that can talk or for
accessibility purposes.
59. What is Amazon Rekognition?
Answer: Amazon Rekognition is a deep learning-based image and
video analysis service for facial recognition, object detection, and
activity tracking.
60. What is Amazon Lex?
Answer: Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational
interfaces, such as chatbots, using voice and text, powered by the
same deep learning as Alexa.
61. What is Amazon SageMaker?
Answer: Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed machine learning
service that enables data scientists and developers to build, train,
and deploy ML models at scale.
62. What is AWS KMS?
Answer: AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service
for creating and controlling encryption keys for data protection
across AWS services.
63. What is Amazon ECR?
Answer: Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a fully managed
Docker container registry for storing, managing, and deploying
container images.
64. What is AWS CodeBuild?
Answer: AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service for
compiling source code, running tests, and producing deployable
software packages.
65. What is AWS CodePipeline?
Answer: AWS CodePipeline is a continuous integration and delivery
(CI/CD) service that automates the release process, allowing for
frequent and reliable updates.
66. What is AWS Secrets Manager?
Answer: AWS Secrets Manager enables secure storage, management,
and retrieval of credentials, API keys, and other secrets.
67. What is Amazon Macie?
Answer: Amazon Macie is a data security service that uses machine
learning to detect, classify, and protect sensitive data like personally
identifiable information (PII).
68. What is AWS Organizations?
Answer: AWS Organizations enables central management of multiple
AWS accounts, providing consolidated billing and service control
policies for governance.
69. What is Amazon S3 Bucket Versioning?
Answer: S3 Bucket Versioning allows you to keep multiple versions of
an object in the same bucket, helping to restore data after accidental
deletion or overwriting.
70. What is AWS Cloud9?
Answer: AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development
environment (IDE) that supports code development, debugging, and
running directly within a browser.
71. What is Amazon RDS Read Replica?
Answer: RDS Read Replica allows you to create read-only copies of
your database instance, which can be used to improve performance
by distributing read traffic.
72. What is AWS DataSync?
Answer: AWS DataSync is a service to automate and accelerate data
transfer between on-premises storage and AWS, useful for backups
and migrations.
73. What is AWS Certificate Manager?
Answer: AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) allows you to provision,
manage, and deploy SSL/TLS certificates for securing web
applications.
74. What is Amazon Athena?
Answer: Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that allows
you to analyze data in S3 using standard SQL without managing any
servers.
75. What is AWS Batch?
Answer: AWS Batch enables the running of batch computing
workloads at any scale, automatically provisioning compute
resources based on the requirements.
76. What is Amazon EMR?
Answer: Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) is a managed service for
processing large datasets using big data frameworks like Apache
Spark and Hadoop.
77. What is AWS OpsWorks?
Answer: AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that
uses Chef and Puppet to automate operational tasks for
infrastructure.
78. What is AWS Transit Gateway?
Answer: AWS Transit Gateway connects VPCs and on-premises
networks through a central hub, simplifying network management.
79. What is AWS Artifact?
Answer: AWS Artifact provides on-demand access to compliance
reports and agreements for AWS, helping meet security and audit
requirements.
80. What is the AWS Snowball family?
Answer: The AWS Snowball family provides data migration and edge
computing devices (Snowball Edge) for physically transferring large
datasets to AWS.

81. What is Amazon WorkLink?

Answer: Amazon WorkLink is a service for securely accessing internal
corporate websites and applications from mobile devices without a
VPN.
82. What is AWS Fargate?
Answer: AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers,
letting you run containers without managing the underlying
infrastructure.
83. What is Amazon Redshift?
Answer: Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed data warehouse
service for big data analytics, supporting SQL-based queries.
84. What is AWS Service Catalog?
Answer: AWS Service Catalog enables organizations to create and
manage catalogs of approved products, ensuring consistency and
compliance.
85. What is AWS Elastic Inference?
Answer: AWS Elastic Inference provides on-demand GPU acceleration
to reduce inference costs for deep learning models.
86. What is Amazon FSx?
Answer: Amazon FSx is a managed file system service that provides
high-performance file storage for Windows File Server and Lustre.
87. What is AWS AppSync?
Answer: AWS AppSync is a managed GraphQL service for real-time
data synchronization and offline programming.
88. What is AWS Ground Station?
Answer: AWS Ground Station is a fully managed satellite
communications service that allows you to control satellites and
process satellite data.
89. What is AWS Elemental MediaConvert?
Answer: AWS Elemental MediaConvert is a service for transcoding
media files to various formats, used for on-demand video delivery.
90. What is AWS Lightsail?
Answer: AWS Lightsail provides simple virtual private servers for
developers who need a user-friendly way to manage cloud-based
resources.
91. What is Amazon EventBridge?
Answer: Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it
easy to connect applications using events and triggers.
92. What is AWS CloudHSM?
Answer: AWS CloudHSM provides hardware security modules for
secure cryptographic key management within AWS.
93. What is Amazon Detective?
Answer: Amazon Detective helps analyze and visualize security data,
making it easier to identify and investigate security issues.
94. What is AWS CodeArtifact?
Answer: AWS CodeArtifact is a managed artifact repository for
securely storing and sharing software packages within your
organization.
95. What is Amazon Managed Blockchain?
Answer: Amazon Managed Blockchain simplifies setting up and
managing scalable blockchain networks for applications like supply
chain management.
96. What is AWS IoT Core?
Answer: AWS IoT Core enables secure device connectivity to the
cloud, allowing applications to interact with connected devices and
analyze data.
97. What is AWS Savings Plans?
Answer: AWS Savings Plans provide flexible pricing options that offer
discounts in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of
usage.
98. What is AWS Amplify?
Answer: AWS Amplify provides a set of tools and services for building
full-stack web and mobile applications with a serverless backend.
99. What is Amazon QuickSight?
Answer: Amazon QuickSight is a business intelligence service that
provides data visualization and dashboarding with machine learning
insights.
100. What is AWS Lake Formation?
Answer: AWS Lake Formation is a service that makes it easy to set up,
manage, and secure a data lake for storing and analyzing data at
scale.