Interview Q&A / AWS & Cloud

INTERVIEW Q&A · 60 QUESTIONS

AWS & Cloud interview questions

EC2, S3, Lambda, IAM and VPC basics, with when to pick which service.

  1. What is the difference between Amazon EFS and Amazon EBS?

    EBS is a block disk attached to one EC2 instance in one AZ. EFS is a managed shared file system using NFS that many instances across multiple AZs can mount at the same time.

    BeginnerQuick answer1 min read
  2. How do EBS snapshots work and how can you use them to move data to another AZ or Region?

    A snapshot is a point-in-time backup of an EBS volume, stored in S3-managed storage. After the first full copy, later snapshots are incremental. You can create a new volume from a snapshot in any AZ of the Region, or copy the snapshot to another Region.

    IntermediateQuick answer1 min read
  3. What are the main Amazon EBS volume types and when do you use each?

    gp3 and gp2 are general-purpose SSDs for most workloads. io2 and io1 are provisioned-IOPS SSDs for databases needing high, steady IOPS. st1 is throughput-optimised HDD for big sequential data, and sc1 is cold HDD for rarely used data.

    IntermediateQuick answer1 min read
  4. What is EC2 instance store and how is it different from EBS?

    Instance store is disk physically attached to the host computer, giving very fast but temporary storage. Its data is lost when the instance stops, terminates or the hardware fails. EBS is network-attached and persists independently of the instance.

    IntermediateQuick answer1 min read