Approaching An AWS Interview! – Crack It With Confidence

Planning to build a career in AWS? Come let’s explore, understand, and make it simple. AWS provides 12 certifications that are divided into 4 major categories.

AWS Training Certifications

• Foundational level
• 3 associate level
• 2 professional level
• 6 Specialty level

AWS training and certifications will help you grab a crucial role in the sphere of AWS. The different levels of training provide a variety of options that suits your particular needs. The professionals who at the basic and intermediate level can opt for the next AWS training to boost up the cloud architecture skills. Here is a briefing that can be productive in learning the AWS concepts.

AWS - what and how

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is an extensive cloud computing platform provided by Amazon. The services comprise of tools for computing, storage, database, network, and content delivery. They offer more than 212 services which are a combination of infrastructure, platform, and software.

Computing Models

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Software as a Service (SaaS)

These services can be used by various individuals and businesses. These users can be direct, indirect, or hybrid. 

Here are some topics that will help improve your proficiency.

• AMI and its types - Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a virtual appliance that provides information required to launch an instance. A single AMI can launch multiple instances with the same configuration. AMI can be chosen based on Region, Architecture, Launch permissions, operating system, and root device storage.

• Instances, types and purchase options - An instance is a virtual server in the AWS Elastic Compute cloud or Relational Database Service. EC2 is used to set up and configure the operating system and applications.

Types

• General Purpose Instances – T2, M5, M4, M3.
• Storage based – I3, D2
• Compute Optimized – C3, C4, C5
• Accelerated Computing – F1, P2, P3, G3
• Memory-Optimized – R3, R4, X1

Purchase options

• Spot instance – Customers can purchase without prior commitment as it is the available unused capacity.

• On-Demand instance –can be purchased as per the demand and will not terminate automatically

• Reserved instance – purchase is subjected to the availability of capacity in the specific region.

Simple Storage Device (S3), S3 bucket

S3 is a high speed and scalable storage in which the user can store and retrieve a large amount of data at any time from anywhere on the internet. The files are stored in the buckets in the S3. Users can create a maximum of 100 buckets and control the access.

AMI (Amazon Machine Language)

AMI is stored in the Elastic Cloud (EC2). It allows the user to create and register an AMI that provides information to launch instances.

Glacier

The glacier is one of the storage services provided by AWS. It is a long – term online web storage available at a low cost. User does not have frequent access like S3.

SQS, MQ, SNS

SQS (Simple Queue Service) is a message queue used to integrate and exchange information among distributed software applications. The two types of SQS are standard queues and FIFO queues. It is secured, reliable durable, and provides control over the messages.

MQ is a managed message broker service that enables communication among the software systems that use different languages and platforms.

SNS (Simple Notification Service) is a durable and secure managed pub/sub messaging service that manages the messages sent to the users.

CloudFront and CloudWatch

CloudFront is CDN (Content Delivery Network) that secures and expedites the distribution of static and dynamic content globally across the data centers.

CloudWatch service is used to monitor the AWS resources and applications of the user. It collects, monitors, track the metrics, and set alarms for changes in the resources. CloudWatch also provides Data and reactions to the changes.

Policies and types

Policies are created by the user to manage access to AWS resources. The policies attached to the AWS resources are the IAM identities that define the permission. It allows or denies the requests based on the policies.

Types - Resource-based, Permission boundaries, identity-based, Organization SCPs, Session Policies, Access control lists (ACLs).

• Routing policies - Policies that determine the routing of traffic when the user has resources in multiple AWS Regions. Amazon Route 53 is a cloud DNS service that routes traffic to the websites.

Types of policies used by Route 53

• Simple Routing Policy
• Weighted Routing Policy
• Latency Routing Policy
• Failover Routing Policy
• Geolocation Routing Policy
• Geoproximity Routing Policy
• Multivalue answer Routing Policy

• VPC - VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is an AWS service that allows the user to manage resources in the virtual network.  Interfaces used to create, access, and manipulate the VPCs are AWS Manage Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS SDKs, Query API.
• Region and Availability Zones - 

  Regions are physically spread geographical locations where the data centers are available. Availability Zones are the logical part of the regions specifically built to overcome failures affecting the availability zones.

• Subnet - It is a part of the Availability zone that is dedicated only to a specific zone and cannot cross zones.

• AWS security Logging - AWS services provide security log data that consists of audit logs for billing processes, configuration changes, and access to resources. AWS Security Logging Capabilities include AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, AWS Detailed Billing Reports, Amazon S3 Access Logs, Elastic Load Balancing Access Log, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, etc. These options enhance the ability of the companies to scale and secure the infrastructure.