With over a decade of experience in the financial sector, I began as a Data Engineer mastering Oracle, Talend, and ETL design. As the cloud era emerged, I transitioned into cloud technologies — now building smart, scalable systems powered by AWS, GCP, Databricks, and AI.
This interactive guide will help you prepare for common AWS Basic Interview questions when transitioning from a Data Engineering role to a Cloud Engineering position. Review these questions and answers to boost your confidence and technical knowledge.
Currently, the three basic types of cloud computing include the following:
The similarity between Availability Zones and Regions is that they both provide geographical redundancy and isolation for cloud infrastructure in the AWS cloud. Availability Zones are distinct locations within a given Region, while Regions are geographic areas with multiple Availability Zones.
Auto-scaling is a cloud computing feature that allows a system to automatically scale its resources up or down based on demand or predetermined conditions. This is typically used to ensure that there are enough resources to handle the load on a system, while also avoiding over-provisioning and keeping costs low.
AWS CloudFormation Solution helps you easily manage AWS resources. The steps are mentioned below:
This is one of the most common AWS basic interview questions. However, to answer this well, you must list down all the required steps for the procedure. Listed below are the steps to be followed to upgrade or downgrade a system ensuring near-zero downtime:
Following are four examples of AWS services that are not region-specific:
The Bandwidth of NAT Gateway is up to 45 Gbps and can automatically scale based on traffic requirements whereas, in NAT Instance, it depends on instance bandwidth.
Elastic Transcoder is an AWS service tool that supports multiple devices with various resolutions and formats of video, like laptops, tablets, and smartphones. It is a cloud-based media transcoding service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables you to convert video and audio files from one format to another. The service supports a wide range of input and output formats, codecs, and resolutions, making it easier to deliver content to various devices, including laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
EC2 is also called Elastic Compute Cloud. Amazon EC2 is used to launch virtual computing servers as needed, manage storage, and configure security and networking.
Amazon EC2 offers restricted access, allowing only trusted networks to access ports on an instance. In addition, Amazon EC2 allows you to access only those permissions you require and disable other password-based logins for instances launched from your AMI.
Some best practices are as follows:
Yes, Amazon S3 can be used with Amazon EC2. Here, Amazon S3 gives developers access to a highly reliable, fast and scalable data storage infrastructure.
AWS provides the following tools to get reliable data for making cost forecasts, optimizations, or for managing the costs.
T2 instances are low-cost instance types for general use. They provide base-level CPU performance but can provide bursts above the baseline. They work best where full CPU capacity is not needed constantly and is only needed to burst higher CPU performance.
There are various tools that can log into the cloud environment, in addition to the console. Some common ones include:
A centralized logging solution enables organizations to gather, analyze and display Amazon CloudWatch Logs in one central place. You can use Amazon CloudWatch Logs, Amazon ElasticSearch, and Amazon Kinesis to create a centralized logging solution.
Two popular AWS services that provide security log data to provide insight into how the service is operating are:
Besides this, AWS Security Hub and AWS GuardDuty can also be used for insights into your security.
DDoS is a cyber-attack. Here, the perpetrator accesses a website and creates numerous sessions so that the other fair users cannot access the service.
The following tools can be used to minimize DDoS attacks on AWS services:
Using Amazon CloudWatch, you can set up a system monitor to monitor state changes in scheduled events, Amazon EC2, Auto-scaling lifecycle events, AWS API calls and Console sign-in events.
Beside this, you can also use AWS Lambda and AWS Elasticsearch for real-time website metrics monitoring.
There are three types of virtualization in AWS. These include:
Stopping an EC2 instance means you are normally shutting it down and moving it to a stopped state. On the other hand, terminating the instance means you are permanently deleting the instance. When this happens, it's attached volumes are deleted and you cannot recover them.
The three types of EC2 instances based on their costs are as follows:
SSH agent forwarding is a process whereby a SSH server gets access to SSH client and can be enabled as follows:
Enable SSH agent
#starting up ssh-agent in the background
$ eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
Agent pid 6969
Now, we add SSH key to the SSH-agent
$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Connect to the host
ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa user@our_host_ip
No, both operating systems are not available with Amazon Web Service.
You can follow these steps to set the AWS CloudWatch to recover an EC2 instance:
The three most common types of AMI designs are as follows:
Key-pairs in AWS are secured login information for virtual machines. They are password protected login credentials to verify your identity while connecting the Amazon EC2 instances. AWS key-pairs are made up of private and public keys that connect to the instances.
S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. Amazon S3 is the best-supported storage platform available. It helps to supervise data for cost optimization, compliance, and access control.
The following steps can be followed to recover an EC2 instance whose key has been lost:
Some of the policies that can be set for a user's passwords, include:
When transitioning from Data Engineering to AWS Cloud Engineering, highlight these transferable skills: