AWS Solution Architect interview questions & concepts
Please add questions as you see fit. Good luck! #amazon #aws #sa #interview Security IDS encryption at rest/in transit symmetric and asymmetric encryption. Web Application Firewall Vs Firewall? Where are customer encryption keys stored How would you mitigate a DOS? What is identity management? Storage Different types of storage NAS vs SAN RAID levels Can RAID1 be used for Gaming? IOPS TPH/latency EBS Dedupe vs WAN optimization Why hash a file Containerization- Docker object storage Vs file system Puppet & Chef If need to construct 3-tier layer of storage, how can you inline each tier? Discuss durability vs availability Discuss SSD vs traditional disk How would you analyze objects stored in S3 and share them with users Networking: Load balancing DNS TCP vs. UDP UDP Unicast vs Multicast When would DNS protocol use TCP vs. UDP transport protocol? hypervisor dns router & switch Hypervisor- distinguish multiple VMs running on it and isolate them from the underlying h/w? Virtualization content delivery network cluster IPSec VS SSL VPN MPLS How to speed up a high latency link/high speed link? CDN - How does a CDN make web sites faster? OSI Optimize data flow over a high bandwidth/high latency link Firewalls Route 53 Port numbers for (DNS, HTTP, Telnet) CIDR QOS and bandwidth control Bastion host Database Difference between SQL and No SQL hadoop - explain mapreduce differene between oltp / dw Describe how to best organize a data mart database cluster and mirroring database caching server db tuning Sharding JSON vs. XML How would you provide high availability for a database deployed on an instance in the cloud? Why is it hard to horizontally scale a SQL database? How can a database be scaled? What is database indexing and why is it important What ports do databases use Design - Build a web site - Desing a solution architecture for a web based small company? - Design fault tolerant, load balanced video stream service - Plan an e-commerce site for a small business - Describe how you would architect a very critical website on the cloud? - Given that you have a content rich E-commerce website, what kind of Storage Tier would you use to support the website? - Draw a hybrid solutions for an enterprise customer that needs to store files online in a private cloud with 99.95% SLA and specify which AWS component you will need to use and details about security, access control etc - There is a customer from the relevant domain (for me, it was public sector) that wants to create a site that shows some information, and also, push alerts for the end-users. Expecting Millions of end-users. Describe how to build this application. Consider - security, scalability and availability. - Describe a web application and all of its components. - What if Google decides to host youtube.com on AWS, how do you design your solution? Architecture SOA Java and C horizontal Vs vertical scaling LAMP stack HA Architecture Lambda Architecture Computer Science what does kernel do difference between java & C OOP continuous integration continuous development CI/CD tools Monolithic application loosely coupled application Command line interpreter vs compiler Java compilation JVM compatibility function of stacks? (POP(), PUSH() , TOP()) identify a circular linked list bubble sort vs merge sort Given n-million data elements, which would be the best,efficient, and faster sort method? What is the average, best, and worst case performance? BIG-O Notation Troubleshooting/MISC - What would you do if a web application could not talk to the database? - How to manage web application state between EC2 instances running in an auto scaling group? - What kind of Metrics would you monitor for the E-commerce website application front-end? - How do you use CIDR for Troubleshoot a webpage that can't access the DB - Troubleshoot why you can't access a webpage server - Explain how to scale from a single 5 user database to a 50 user, 500 user, 5000 user and then 5 million user database and explain how to overcome each hurdle. - Which algorithm does an Elastic Load Balancer use? - How do you architect a design that is fault tolerant? - Whats a three tier web page architect,and how do you monitor to see a bottleneck and how do you improve it - If you collected logs and wanted to store them for 14 days then move them over to permanent storage for a few years how would you do this - What is a web application firewall and how do you use it, what layer is it on? - How would you monitor utilization of equipment in a datacenter ? - What else would you do for a high volume distributed app web site
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Were you asked these for an Amazon SA role at Amazon ( ... or somewhere else)? Where can I learn more for the design questions
I would say google is your friend. I haven’t gone through all of them yet. I’m doing that as interview prep. I found good links before on blind for system design. This keeps coming up: https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer
I compiled a list from Glassdoor interview questions. I’m gonna interview soon, so I thought I’d share the list as I couldn’t find a more complete one on blind.
Thanks for the list? You had your interview ? How did that go?
IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS vs CaaS vs FaaS ect ect etc
Thoughts on " how to speed up a high latency link" ?
Using udp transfer software. Look up the after of latency on high bandwidth connections and transfer speeds, latency exponentially deteriorates throughout due to tcp receipt delay
Thanks for sharing - i have an interview scheduled too. How did your interview go?
Does anyone have any tips on the SA presentation for the onsite interview?
Nice list, have you guys had a coding interview?
Same question here. For SA role (Principal, Senior), is there a coding round? Any questions on Design Patterns?
This seems like a lot for someone new to an SA role. I am recently AWS SA Associate certified, and I can tell you I wouldn't know a lot of the answers to many of these things. Hell, the exam didn't even touch on some of these topics.
They won’t ask you AWS specific questions. If any, barely. Their questions would be really agnostic, but the main idea is for an SA, a person need to have knowledge about a really broad range of technical areas. Not only that, the interview really HEAVILY STRESSES in behavioral questions that aligns on the Leadership Principles. I had a total of 8 rounds of interview out of which the first phone interview was very technical and one loop interview was somewhat technical. Rest everything scenario based behavioral “tell me about a time....” type questions. The best idea is to prepare bunch of scenarios that aligns with the Leadership Principles before the interview. And note, you should diversify on the scenarios, i.e. you repeating the same scenario to ALL the interviewers is not going to work. This is basically where people get filtered in the interview. The interview expects you to have a large number of varied experiences throughout your career with medium scale or large systems. Unfortunately, examples where a person who made a three tier app that only had 6 internal users 5yrs ago, isn’t really a viable experience for them (or so, I was told). I had 3 certs, 2 PRO level and 1 Assoc level, and they didn’t seem to be interested in any of those at all :) Infact the recruiter didn’t even know until I specifically pointed it out in my resume. So flexing certs isn’t going to be helpful much at all unfortunately, a little bit of AWS knowledge might help but not a whole lot. Oh and by the way, there will also be either a Write up exercise or a presentation in the process.
How long ago was this and did you get/take the job?
Explain the process that starts when you type a web address in your browser and hit enter and ends in a webpage opening (or not).
Yes, that’s standard for all amazon positions. For technical positions, you need good stories demonstrating lps and technical depth and being able to get into the detailed technicalities ...
Fizzbuzz
But for real, this is a really good list of topics to know even a one or two sentence answer to.