How to prepare for AWS interview

Going for an interview for an AWS cloud computing job ? This quick review can save your time and help in a quick recap. AWS or any cloud platform (Google or Microsoft) have a plethora of features which you use as per your business requirements. The key is how much you need to know for your role. What is important for any interview is knowing the key concepts and features which you need for your business. It is also equally important for a technical sales person or a technical manager to understand these concepts.

Pick a scenario and you should be able to explain the complete lifecycle: (1) A company is planning to migrate its technologies to cloud (2) A new company wants to launch an online business on cloud. Learning using a case study will make it easy to leave an impression in your mind

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1. Core basics of Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2): Computers or servers are the first thing where the business logic and data reside. So make sure you have a clear understanding of various options when it comes to EC2. When would you need on demand or dedicated or spot instances and which will be economical considering the use case. Are their alternatives to go Serverless?
2. Setting up storage: Data is the key for any business. This can be files like pictures of products, videos, sensitive user data or backup data. What will be the most suited storage option? (i) Simple Storage Solution (S3) which are objects like files. Explore the most economical solution based on how frequently data is accessed. Would it be wise to use S3 Infrequent Access or Glacier or any other option. You need to understand other storage solutions like Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Elastic File System (EFS).
3. Development cycle for IT team : It is important to understand set up of development environment for IT team. This would involve setting up of DevOps. Amazon gives AWS Pipeline to orchestrate the services of DevOps. You need to understand AWS CodeStar to quickly develop and deploy the applications. You can manage the source code repository using AWS CodeCommit, develop in your favorite tool like Visual Studio Code and deploy using AWS CodeDeploy service. There are other services like Beanstalk which can help to deploy web applications quickly. Understand the benefit of creating and managing applications using these services in cloud.
4. Transactions and Databases — Corporations either have existing data stored in Oracle (RDBMS) and some in NoSQL(especially where the data is not structured and is flat). You may prefer using AWS managed service like DynamoDB for NoSQL and Aurora DB for structured data with complex queries involving joins. However depending upon the constraints you can always host the same database on the cloud.
5. Keeping it secure: At the offset, it sounds scary for business to migrate the critical data on external servers or cloud especially across geographical regions. Understand the details of how security is setup and managed. Understands the basics from groups, policies, roles to data encryption and security tools provided by Amazon like Security Groups, AWS Macie, AWS Shield, AWS Inspector, AWS Guard Duty, Cognito, Cloud HSM for cryptography to name a few. Understand the CloudWatch monitoring service and CloudTrail for logging and compliance
6. Networking: Remember it is the ‘spinal cord’ of cloud. You need to thoroughly understand the basics of VPN, Subnets, Route 53 or DNS, Certificate Manager, the internet gateway and firewalls.
7. Cost — You should be able to calculate the approximate cost of cloud hosting using Pricing Calculator. Understand usage reports of your Amazon account to check the monthly cost and trends of expenses. For large organization with different departments, understand the use of AWS Organization
8. Best practices of AWS architectural pillars: These are important principles and practices you need to be aware of. You can refer them on AWS web site — (1) Operational Excellence (2) Security (3) Reliability (4) Performance Efficiency (5) Cost Optimization. You can easily relate different services you have learnt and used to these pillars.
9. Going Global: Scalability and Availability are one of the biggest advantages of moving to cloud. You need to understand the concepts of use of Autoscaling service, Load balancers(for availability)and Cloud Front(to distribute content and cache at content locations).
10. Key technology services on the cloud: Every year numerous new services are added. You need to know at least the most commonly used services in industry like ECS(Elastic Container Service), Sagemaker for Machine Learning, Rekognition(for image recognition), Simple Notification Service(SNS) and Simple Queue Service(SQS), CloudFormation(infrastructure as code to save the template of architecture in JSON or YAML), Lambda service as a function).
11. Specialty areas: If you are getting interviewed for a specialty like big data or data analytics(Redshift, Kinesis, Quicksight, Athena) or machine learning you need to understand the use cases of the service. AWS website has a variety of use cases specific to industry and technology stack.

aws services from aws.amazon.com

The 5 minutes speak out revision

Go to your room and speak out aloud whatever you know about the AWS services and how they are related to setup a small business. Try to explain using all the concepts you have been using or you have used. Using a whiteboard or a rough notebook is a great idea. This will give you confidence of speaking what you know.

Note: Please refer the AWS website for services as new services are added every year or more often.