Question 1

What is a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in AWS?

Accepted Answer

A VPC is a logically isolated network in AWS where you can launch AWS resources. You can define IP ranges, subnets, route tables, and gateways.

Question 2

What is the difference between EC2 Spot, On-Demand, and Reserved Instances?

Accepted Answer

On-Demand: Pay per use; Reserved: Discounted long-term; Spot: Bid-based, used for cost-saving but can be interrupted.

Question 3

What is the durability and availability of Amazon S3?

Accepted Answer

S3 offers 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability over a given year, storing data redundantly across multiple AZs.

Question 4

What is the difference between IAM roles and users?

Accepted Answer

IAM users are for individual access; IAM roles are assumed by trusted entities and used for temporary access to AWS services.

Question 5

How do you design a highly available and fault-tolerant system in AWS?

Accepted Answer

Use multi-AZ and multi-region deployments, ELB, Auto Scaling, S3 for storage, RDS with replication, and Route 53 for DNS failover.

Question 6

Explain the difference between a public subnet and a private subnet.

Accepted Answer

A public subnet has a route to an Internet Gateway, allowing instances to communicate with the internet. A private subnet does not; it may use a NAT Gateway for outbound internet access.

Question 7

What is a VPC peering connection?

Accepted Answer

VPC peering connects two VPCs privately using AWS network, allowing instances in them to communicate as if they were in the same network. No transitive peering.

Question 8

What is an EC2 placement group?

Accepted Answer

Placement groups control instance placement. Cluster (low latency), Spread (distinct hardware), Partition (logical groups) for high availability or performance.

Question 9

What is the difference between an AMI and an instance store-backed AMI?

Accepted Answer

An AMI is a template for launching instances. EBS-backed AMIs have root volume persistent, while instance-store-backed root volumes are ephemeral (lost on stop).

Question 10

How do you migrate data from on-premises to AWS S3?

Accepted Answer

Options: AWS Storage Gateway (file/gateway), AWS DataSync, AWS Snowball (physical transfer), or using AWS CLI/API over network.

AWS Architect Interview Questions & Answers

What is a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in AWS?

What is the difference between EC2 Spot, On-Demand, and Reserved Instances?

What is the durability and availability of Amazon S3?

What is the difference between IAM roles and users?

How do you design a highly available and fault-tolerant system in AWS?

Explain the difference between a public subnet and a private subnet.

What is a VPC peering connection?

What is an EC2 placement group?

What is the difference between an AMI and an instance store-backed AMI?

How do you migrate data from on-premises to AWS S3?

What is a resource-based policy vs. an identity-based policy?

What is the purpose of IAM roles for EC2?

How would you design a disaster recovery (DR) strategy on AWS?

Explain the difference between horizontal and vertical scaling in AWS.

What is the well-architected framework?

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