10 Essential AWS Interview Questions *

EC2 instance metadata is a service accessible from within EC2 instances, which allows querying or managing data about a given running instance.

It is possible to retrieve an instance’s IAM access key by accessing the iam/security-credentials/role-name metadata category. This returns a temporary set of credentials that the EC2 instance automatically uses for communicating with AWS services.

SQS is Amazon’s fully managed distributed queue service. Queues are useful for handling communication between different services or other components in distributed systems.

A DLQ is a special queue for messages that could not be processed properly. These queues are specially used for debugging and troubleshooting applications.

AWS CodeCommit is essentially a managed service—i.e. Amazon manages and scales it behind the scenes for you, just like S3—for Git-based source control.

AWS CodeBuild is used to build, test, and generate artifacts—files that are generated from successful build steps—for deployment. This, too, is a managed service, doing provisioning and scaling automatically.

AWS CodeDeploy automates application deployments to several types of compute resources such as EC2 instances or ECS clusters.

AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery service that allows automating and integrating build, test, and deploy processes.

EKS, or Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, is Amazon’s managed Kubernetes service. This service provides a managed Kubernetes control plane that’s highly available, i.e. they run multiple master nodes for you.

ECS, or Elastic Container Service, is Amazon’s container orchestration service. This service is used to manage containers and their lifecycle within clusters.

Fargate is an ECS launch type which allows you to run containers in serverless clusters. In other words, it allows you to run containers without needing to manage the underlying cluster infrastructure.

You should delete only the user accounts from the developers, and keep the IAM group. It is possible that, in the future, you will want to hire more DevOps freelancers to change your infrastructure.

Keeping the IAM group will mean you kept the underlying set of policies, and therefore, future users can reuse those policies.

This CloudFormation template contains a Mappings section, which is useful for defining key-value pairs to be used in other parts of the template. In this case, the RegionMap is defining a mapping between region names and the respective AMI IDs of a virtual machine image in each of those regions.

In the Resources section, the RegionMap is then used to create an EC2 instance using the correct ImageId. However, the InstanceType property tries to use a parameter called InstanceType, which is missing. Parameters are useful for reusing templates, by allowing for those to be customized during stack updates or creations.

To fix this template, you could add the following section. It would allow entering an instance type and provide a default one:

Parameters: 
  InstanceType: 
    Type: String
    Default: t2.micro

There are currently three types of managed load balancers offered by AWS.

Application Load Balancer: This load balancer operates at Layer 7 of the OSI model. It can be used to load-balance HTTP and HTTPS applications and can invoke Lambda functions, among several other features.

Network Load Balancer: Used for extreme performance, this load balancer operates at Layer 4 of the OSI model. It can, therefore, load-balance any kind of TCP traffic and can handle large amounts of requests with low latency.

Classic Load Balancer: This load balancer operates at Layer 4 or Layer 7 of the OSI model. It is now mostly used for legacy applications that run on EC2-Classic since application load balancers provide more features.

All at once: This is the fastest mode. In this case, Elastic Beanstalk will simply stop all the running instances and then will deploy the new version to these instances.

Immutable: In this mode, Elastic Beanstalk will create a new Auto Scaling Group and deploy the new instances there. Then, if the deployment succeeds, it will replace the old Auto Scaling Group with the newly created one.

Rolling: During the deployment, Elastic Beanstalk will deploy the new application version to some of the currently running instances, and repeat that process until all instances are running the same version. Using this mode, the application will run below capacity, but with zero downtime and no additional costs.

Rolling with additional batches: In this mode, Elastic Beanstalk will make sure there is no capacity reduction. It does so by first starting new instances with the new version of the application, and only then deploying the new version to the old instances.

The AWS S3 service provides read-after-write consistency for PUTs of new objects, meaning that as soon as an object is written to an S3 bucket, it can be retrieved.

However, suppose we tried retrieving an object and received a “Not Found” response. Because it’s not found, we immediately add it. For a small period of time, we’ll be unable to retrieve it because the Not Found response will be cached. Therefore, in this case, S3 is only eventually consistent. Deleting or updating existing objects are also eventually consistent operations.

This IAM policy allows any IAM identity or AWS resource that has it attached to list all objects from the company-data bucket.

It also allows running any revision of the update-tables task definition on the prod ECS cluster.