51 AWS Interview Questions For Senior Developer

General and scenario-based AWS interview questions for senior developers can help them confidently clear an interview at the company of their choice.

These days, tech jobs are all the rage and AWS knowledge makes it easier to pass an interview.

Understanding the public cloud services and on-demand features offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) can open up many opportunities in the tech world for an AWS developer.

Here are some AWS interview questions for senior developers to help them confidently appear for an interview.

Contents show

AWS Interview Questions For Senior Developer

1. Suppose an EC2 Instance Is Terminated or Stopped. What Would Happen?

When an EC2 instance is stopped, it halts in a normal manner. The standard procedure of shutdown leads to a stopped state of the instance.

Due to the standard shutdown, EBS volumes remain in the instance, and we can restart the instance anytime.

When an EC2 instance is terminated, it also shuts down in a usual way. Only this time, the EBS volumes are deleted.

If we do not want to delete the EBS volumes after the termination of EC2, we can use the attribute deleteOnTermination and set it to ‘false.’

2. How Would You Use a Buffer in AWS?

We can synchronize various components to manage load with the help of buffer in AWS.

It makes the system fault-tolerant. In case the buffer is absent from the system, the components use no balanced method to process requests.

3. What Methods Can Be Used in Amazon S3 to Send a Request?

We can use two ways to send a request to Amazon S3: Rest API and AWS SDK Wrapper Libraries. Also, read more on AWS S3 Interview Questions.

4. How Do We Use EFA in EC2 Interfacing?

EFA is Elastic Fabric Advisor, used in the form of devices to boost High-Performance Computing (HPC).

EFA devices are the new OS that sidesteps hardware limitations by interfacing with EC2 instances to increase HPC. EFA has the following features:

Supports ML applications
High Throughput
Better Inter-instance communication
Consistent latency

5. When Do We Use a Classic Load Balancer and Application Load Balancer?

A Classic Load Balancer is perfect when we need to load balance for multiple instances of EC2.

And we use an Application Load Balancer when we have more than one port to load balance on a single EC2 instance. The latter can also be used when more than one service needs traffic routing.

6. Spot Instance and On-Demand Instance: How Are They Different?

Spot instance and an On-Demand instance is a purchase of computing capacity.

There are no upfront commitments in these pricing models except for the hourly rate difference. Spot instance rates are a bit lower than on-demand instance rates.

If the spot instance’s bidding price increases more than the customer’s specified price, the instance of EC2 with automatically shut down.

7. How Would You Deploy a 4-node Hadoop cluster in an instance of AWS?

We can use an Amazon EMR instance to configure servers automatically, so there will not be a need to configure instances manually.

If we use this method, there won’t be a need to install the Hadoop cluster manually. We can simply use S3 for data processing; EMR can pick it up from there and return it once it’s done.

Another method to deploy a 4-node Hadoop cluster would be to use a Master-Slave machine model. C4.8xlarge EC2 instance can be the master machine, and i2.large can be the slave machine.

8. How Would You Use EC2 Instances with Amazon S3?

S3 can be used with EC2 instances that have root devices with local instance storage.

Amazon provides tools to load and move AMIs from Amazon S3 to EC2 instances and return them when needed. Using s3 for EC2 is highly reliable with fast and inexpensive data storage.

9. What’s the Difference between AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config.

AWS Config	AWS CloudTrail
It records details of point-in-time configurations for AWS resources.	It records API activity on user accounts and enables information access.
It uses Configuration Items (CIs) to record the details.	The identity of the caller, request parameters, call time, and other elements can be identified using CloudTrail.
CI can be used to determine the status of AWS resources at any given time.	The details can be used to modify the AWS resources.

10. Explain the Enhancement of Data Transfer in Amazon Snowball.

We can speed up the data transfer process in Amazon Snowball by using the following methods:

Using data from multiple workstations to copy to the same Snowball.
Transferring large files or initializing many small files to reduce encryption overhead.
Reducing hops that are useless.
Performing Copy operation multiple times concurrently.

11. Differentiate Between Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon RDS.

Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database management service that works well with unstructured data.

In contract, Amazon RDS is best for relational databases. It automates operations like patching, upgrading, and backup relational DB operations.

12. Suppose a DB Instance Has Been Deleted. What Would Happen to the DB Snapshots and Backups?

When the DB instance is being deleted, an option to create a final DB Snapshot appears. We can use that snapshot later to restore the database.

The final snapshot remains in the Amazon RDS with other manually-created snapshots after the deletion of the instance. However, the automated backups are deleted with the instance.

13. Differentiate Between Scalability and Elasticity.

When demand increases, there is a need for the hardware resources to increase. When a system is capable of meeting that need, it’s called Scalability. It can be achieved by increasing the processing nodes or changing hardware specifications.

On the other hand, when a system can add hardware resources when demand increases and remove them when there is no extra workload is called Elasticity.

14. If an Auto Scaling Group Has Been Set Up by a User, but Does Not Create an Instance for More Than 24 Hours, What Would be the Next Step for Auto-Scaling?

When this scenario occurs, Auto-scaling suspends the scaling process. This feature has the power to control the state of many processes within an Auto Scaling group. It can resume or stop them based on the situation.

The Auto-scaling feature helps investigate issues related to configuration and other things within a web application.

15. Geo DNS and Latency-Based Routing: How Are They Different?

Geo Based DND	Latency Based Routing
It takes geographic location-based decisions.	It measures the latency b/w AWS data centers and networks to make decisions.
It is used to redirect customers to multiple websites based on location.	It is used to give customers the lowest latency.

16. Suppose You Have an Existing Domain Name Registration, and You Are to Transfer It to Amazon Route 53; How Would You Do It Without Disturbing the Existing Web Traffic?

The following steps will achieve the desired results:

Access extant DNS provider to acquire the DNS record data list for the existing domain name.
Access Route 53 Management Console (we can also use the simple web services interface instead).
Create a hosted zone to store the records and continue the transfer.
Update nameservers for the existing domain name and associate them with the hosted zone.
Contact the registrar of the domain name.
The DNS queries will get answered as soon as the registrar broadcasts the new name server allocations.

17. What Are the Ways to Load Data from Different Sources to Amazon Redshift?

We can use two methods to load data to Amazon Redshift from sources like DynamoDB, EC2 instance, Amazon RDS, and more:

By using COPY command to accomplish parallel loading of data from data sources like Amazon EMR, Amazon DynamoDB, and other SSH-enabled hosts.
By using AWS Data Pipeline which allows data source specification, data transformation and execution of prepared import scripts.

18. If an Application Does Not Respond to an AWS Elastic Beanstalk Request Anymore, What Would Happen?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk can determine if an application is unresponsive to a custom link. If that happens, it logs it as an environmental event which can later be investigated in detail.

Beanstalk apps can avoid underlying infrastructure failures even if it appears healthy. It utilizes the Auto Scaling function to start a new EC2 instance if a running one fails.

19. If You Are Using AWS OpsWorks and Are Unable to Create a Resource in a Stack, What Would Happen?

When a resource is unable to create in AWS OpsWorks, an automatic rollback is enabled on the error feature. It deletes all the successful AWS resources to the point of error origin.

It’s a practice that eliminates any chance of error-causing data getting left behind.

Also, find below the AWS Interview questions guide.

Conclusion

These are the top AWS interview questions for experienced developers in the field.

When you have an interview where you will be asked AWS scenario-based questions, you can use this guide to prepare for it. It provides an extensive understanding of AWS and its cloud computing service.

These AWS questions will help you answer any advanced-level questions about Amazon’s cloud computing services.

If you want to get more information about AWS and its features, you can check out our other guides with in-depth interview questions that tackle different Amazon services!

Steve

I am an Amazon Web Services Professional, having more than 11 years of experience in AWS and other technologies. Extensively working in various AWS tools like S3, Lambda, API, Kinesis, Load Balancers, EKS, ECS, and many more. Working as a Solution Architect and Technology Lead for Architecting and implementing the same for different clients. He provides expert solutions around the world and especially in countries like the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, etc. Check out the complete profile on About us.

51 AWS Interview Questions For Senior Developers