Question 1

What is cloud computing?

Accepted Answer

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources (compute, storage, databases, networking) over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of owning physical hardware, you rent resources from a cloud provider like AWS.

Question 2

What are the 6 advantages of cloud computing (AWS)?

Accepted Answer

1. Trade capital expense for variable expense. 2. Benefit from massive economies of scale. 3. Stop guessing capacity. 4. Increase speed and agility. 5. Stop spending money on running data centers. 6. Go global in minutes.

Question 3

What is the difference between CapEx and OpEx in cloud?

Accepted Answer

CapEx (Capital Expenditure) is upfront spending on physical infrastructure you own. OpEx (Operational Expenditure) is paying for services as you consume them. Cloud computing shifts IT spending from CapEx to OpEx, improving cash flow and flexibility.

Question 4

What are the three cloud computing deployment models?

Accepted Answer

1. Public Cloud resources owned and operated by a provider (e.g., AWS) and shared over the internet. 2. Private Cloud resources used exclusively by one organization, on-premises or hosted. 3. Hybrid Cloud a mix of public and private cloud connected together.

Question 5

What are the three main cloud service models?

Accepted Answer

1. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provides raw compute, storage, and networking. You manage the OS and up. Example: EC2. 2. PaaS (Platform as a Service) provides a managed platform to deploy apps. Example: Elastic Beanstalk. 3. SaaS (Software as a Service) fully managed software delivered over the internet. Example: Gmail, Salesforce.

Question 6

What is the AWS Global Infrastructure?

Accepted Answer

AWS Global Infrastructure consists of Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations. It is designed to deliver low latency, high availability, and fault tolerance worldwide.

Question 7

What is an AWS Region?

Accepted Answer

An AWS Region is a physical geographic location in the world that contains multiple, isolated Availability Zones. Each Region is independent, and you choose which Region to deploy resources in based on latency, compliance, and pricing.

Question 8

What is an Availability Zone (AZ)?

Accepted Answer

An Availability Zone is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity within a Region. Deploying across multiple AZs protects workloads from single data center failures.

Question 9

What is an AWS Edge Location?

Accepted Answer

An Edge Location is a site used by Amazon CloudFront to cache content closer to end users. There are many more Edge Locations than Regions, enabling low-latency content delivery globally.

Question 10

What is the AWS Shared Responsibility Model?

Accepted Answer

The Shared Responsibility Model defines what AWS secures vs. what the customer secures. AWS is responsible for security OF the cloud (hardware, infrastructure, physical facilities). The customer is responsible for security IN the cloud (data, IAM, OS configuration, network settings).

Question 11

What does AWS manage under the Shared Responsibility Model?

Accepted Answer

AWS manages the physical security of data centers, hardware, networking, hypervisors, and the global infrastructure. This is often summarized as "security of the cloud."

Question 12

What does the customer manage under the Shared Responsibility Model?

Accepted Answer

Customers manage their data, identity and access management, OS patching, network and firewall configuration, client-side encryption, and application security. This is summarized as "security in the cloud."

Question 13

What is elasticity in cloud computing?

Accepted Answer

Elasticity is the ability to automatically acquire resources when needed and release them when they are no longer needed. It allows systems to scale with demand without over-provisioning or under-provisioning.

Question 14

What is high availability in AWS?

Accepted Answer

High availability means designing systems to remain operational despite failures, typically by eliminating single points of failure. In AWS this is achieved by deploying across multiple Availability Zones and using services like ELB and Auto Scaling.

Question 15

What is fault tolerance?

Accepted Answer

Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to continue operating correctly even when one or more of its components fail. It goes beyond high availability by ensuring zero disruption during a failure, often using redundant components.

Question 16

What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework?

Accepted Answer

The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides best practices across six pillars: 1. Operational Excellence 2. Security 3. Reliability 4. Performance Efficiency 5. Cost Optimization 6. Sustainability

Question 17

What is the Reliability pillar of the Well-Architected Framework?

Accepted Answer

The Reliability pillar focuses on a workload's ability to perform its intended function correctly and consistently, recover from failures, and dynamically acquire resources to meet demand. Key practices include Multi-AZ deployments and automated recovery.

Question 18

What is the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF)?

Accepted Answer

The AWS CAF provides guidance and best practices to help organizations migrate to the cloud. It organizes guidance into six perspectives Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations.

Question 19

What is AWS IAM?

Accepted Answer

AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) lets you manage access to AWS services and resources. You create users, groups, and roles, then attach policies that allow or deny actions. IAM is global and free to use.

Question 20

What is an IAM User?

Accepted Answer

An IAM User is an identity that represents a person or application interacting with AWS. Each user has long-term credentials (password or access keys) and can be assigned permissions via policies.

Question 21

What is an IAM Group?

Accepted Answer

An IAM Group is a collection of IAM users. Permissions attached to a group apply to all users in that group, making it easier to manage permissions at scale instead of assigning policies individually.

Question 22

What is an IAM Role?

Accepted Answer

An IAM Role is an identity with permission policies that AWS services, applications, or external identities can temporarily assume. Roles use short-lived credentials and are preferred over long-term access keys.

Question 23

What is an IAM Policy?

Accepted Answer

An IAM Policy is a JSON document that defines permissions. It specifies which actions are allowed or denied on which AWS resources, and can be attached to users, groups, or roles.

Question 24

What is the principle of least privilege?

Accepted Answer

Granting only the minimum permissions necessary to perform a task. It limits the blast radius of accidental or malicious actions. AWS recommends always starting with no permissions and adding only what is needed.

Question 25

What is AWS MFA?

Accepted Answer

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) requires a second form of verification such as a one-time code from an authenticator app in addition to a password. AWS strongly recommends MFA on the root account and all privileged users.

Question 26

What is the AWS root account?

Accepted Answer

The root account is created when you first sign up for AWS and has unrestricted access to all resources and billing. AWS recommends not using it for daily tasks create IAM users instead, and protect the root account with MFA.

Question 27

What is AWS Organizations?

Accepted Answer

AWS Organizations lets you centrally manage and govern multiple AWS accounts. You can apply Service Control Policies (SCPs) to restrict what actions accounts can perform, consolidate billing, and group accounts into Organizational Units (OUs).

Question 28

What is a Service Control Policy (SCP)?

Accepted Answer

An SCP is a policy in AWS Organizations that sets the maximum permissions for member accounts in an OU or the entire organization. SCPs do not grant permissions they only restrict what can be granted within accounts.

Question 29

What is AWS Shield?

Accepted Answer

AWS Shield is a managed DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection service. Shield Standard is automatically included for all AWS customers at no cost. Shield Advanced provides enhanced detection and 24/7 support for an additional fee.

Question 30

What is AWS WAF?

Accepted Answer

AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) helps protect web applications from common exploits like SQL injection and cross-site scripting. You define rules to allow, block, or monitor HTTP(S) requests to CloudFront, API Gateway, or ALB.

Question 31

What is Amazon GuardDuty?

Accepted Answer

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity using machine learning and threat intelligence. It analyzes CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs.

Question 32

What is AWS CloudTrail?

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudTrail records all API calls and user activity in your AWS account, providing a complete audit trail. It is used for security analysis, compliance auditing, and troubleshooting operational issues.

Question 33

What is Amazon Inspector?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that checks EC2 instances and container images for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure, then provides a prioritized list of findings.

Question 34

What is AWS Artifact?

Accepted Answer

AWS Artifact is a self-service portal that provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports (e.g., SOC, ISO, PCI) and security agreements. It helps customers meet regulatory and compliance requirements.

Question 35

What is AWS Key Management Service (KMS)?

Accepted Answer

AWS KMS is a managed service for creating and controlling encryption keys used to encrypt data across AWS services. It integrates with S3, EBS, RDS, and many other services to provide easy, centralized key management.

Question 36

What is data encryption at rest vs in transit?

Accepted Answer

Encryption at rest protects stored data (e.g., files on S3 or EBS volumes) when it is not moving. Encryption in transit protects data as it travels over a network using protocols like TLS/HTTPS. Both are important layers of data security.

Question 37

What is Amazon Cognito?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Cognito provides authentication, authorization, and user management for web and mobile applications. It lets users sign in with a username/password or via social identity providers like Google and Facebook.

Question 38

What is Amazon EC2?

Accepted Answer

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides resizable virtual servers in the cloud. You choose the instance type (CPU, memory), OS, and storage. You pay for running instances by the second or hour.

Question 39

What are EC2 purchasing options?

Accepted Answer

1. On-Demand pay by the second, no commitment. 2. Reserved Instances 1 or 3-year commitment for up to 72% discount. 3. Spot Instances bid for unused capacity, up to 90% discount, can be interrupted. 4. Savings Plans flexible commitment to a spend level for discounts. 5. Dedicated Hosts physical servers dedicated to your use.

Question 40

What is AWS Lambda?

Accepted Answer

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs code in response to events (e.g., an S3 upload or API call). You do not manage servers; AWS handles scaling automatically. You are billed only for execution time in milliseconds.

Question 41

What is Amazon ECS?

Accepted Answer

Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) is a fully managed container orchestration service for running Docker containers. You can run containers on EC2 instances or with AWS Fargate for a fully serverless experience.

Question 42

What is AWS Fargate?

Accepted Answer

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers. It works with ECS and EKS, letting you run containers without provisioning or managing EC2 instances. You pay only for the vCPU and memory your containers use.

Question 43

What is Amazon S3?

Accepted Answer

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data. Objects are stored in buckets. S3 offers 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability and is used for backups, static websites, data lakes, and more.

Question 44

What are S3 storage classes?

Accepted Answer

1. S3 Standard frequent access, high availability. 2. S3 Intelligent-Tiering auto-moves data between tiers based on access. 3. S3 Standard-IA infrequent access, lower cost. 4. S3 One Zone-IA infrequent access, single AZ. 5. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval archive, milliseconds retrieval. 6. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval archive, minutes to hours retrieval. 7. S3 Glacier Deep Archive lowest cost, 12-hour retrieval.

Question 45

What is Amazon EBS?

Accepted Answer

Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) provides persistent block storage volumes attached to EC2 instances. Volumes exist independently of the instance, support snapshots for backup, and are replicated within their Availability Zone.

Question 46

What is Amazon EFS?

Accepted Answer

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is a scalable, managed NFS file system for Linux workloads. Multiple EC2 instances can mount the same EFS file system simultaneously, and it scales automatically as files are added or removed.

Question 47

What is a VPC?

Accepted Answer

A VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is a logically isolated virtual network in AWS where you launch resources. You define IP address ranges, subnets, route tables, and gateways, giving you full control over your network environment.

Question 48

What is Amazon CloudFront?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudFront is AWS's global CDN (Content Delivery Network). It caches content at hundreds of Edge Locations worldwide, reducing latency for users and offloading traffic from origin servers.

Question 49

What is Amazon Route 53?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Route 53 is a scalable and highly available DNS service. It routes end users to applications by translating domain names to IP addresses and supports health checks, failover, and geolocation routing policies.

Question 50

What is Amazon RDS?

Accepted Answer

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is a managed relational database service supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server. AWS handles provisioning, patching, backups, and Multi-AZ failover.

Question 51

What is Amazon DynamoDB?

Accepted Answer

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless NoSQL key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It automatically replicates data across multiple AZs.

Question 52

What is Amazon Aurora?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. It is up to 5x faster than standard MySQL and 3x faster than PostgreSQL, with automatic replication across 3 AZs and up to 15 read replicas.

Question 53

What is Amazon ElastiCache?

Accepted Answer

Amazon ElastiCache is a managed in-memory caching service supporting Redis and Memcached. It reduces database load by caching frequently accessed data, enabling microsecond response times.

Question 54

What is the difference between SQS and SNS?

Accepted Answer

SQS (Simple Queue Service) is a pull-based message queue for decoupling services one consumer processes each message. SNS (Simple Notification Service) is a push-based pub/sub system that fans messages out to multiple subscribers simultaneously.

Question 55

What is Amazon API Gateway?

Accepted Answer

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service for creating, securing, and scaling REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs. It is the common front door for serverless applications built with AWS Lambda.

Question 56

What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Accepted Answer

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS that lets you deploy and manage web applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. You upload your code, and Beanstalk handles provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and monitoring.

Question 57

What is AWS CloudFormation?

Accepted Answer

AWS CloudFormation is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) service that lets you model and provision AWS resources using JSON or YAML templates. It automates the creation and management of entire stacks of AWS resources.

Question 58

What is the AWS CDK?

Accepted Answer

The AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) is an open-source framework for defining cloud infrastructure using familiar programming languages like TypeScript, Python, or Java. It synthesizes CloudFormation templates under the hood.

Question 59

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch is AWS's monitoring and observability service. It collects metrics, logs, and events from AWS resources, lets you set alarms on thresholds, create dashboards, and trigger automated responses.

Question 60

What is AWS Auto Scaling?

Accepted Answer

AWS Auto Scaling monitors applications and automatically adjusts capacity (e.g., EC2 instances) to maintain performance at the lowest possible cost. It scales out during demand spikes and scales in when demand drops.

Question 61

What is Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)?

Accepted Answer

Elastic Load Balancing distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets (EC2, Lambda, containers) in one or more AZs. It has three types ALB (HTTP/HTTPS), NLB (TCP/UDP), and CLB (legacy). It integrates with Auto Scaling for high availability.

Question 62

What is the difference between ALB and NLB?

Accepted Answer

ALB (Application Load Balancer) operates at Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) and supports path-based and host-based routing. NLB (Network Load Balancer) operates at Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) and is designed for ultra-high performance and static IP addresses.

Question 63

What is AWS Trusted Advisor?

Accepted Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that analyzes your AWS environment and provides real-time recommendations across five categories Cost Optimization, Performance, Security, Fault Tolerance, and Service Limits. Some checks are free; more advanced checks require Business or Enterprise Support.

Question 64

What is Amazon SNS?

Accepted Answer

Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service. Publishers send messages to a topic, and SNS delivers them to all subscribers which can be Lambda, SQS, email, SMS, or HTTP endpoints.

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