Top 20 Interview Asked Questions of AWS Architect Associate Exam 2021

11-Nov-2020

In this article, we have given updated questions for the AWS Architect Associate exam. These questions are very important for any aspiring aws architect associate.

Introduction -

Cloud computing is rapidly climbing to become a norm amongst businesses and organizations that desire greater flexibility, more efficiency, reduced costs, and greater disaster recovery – to mention only some of the benefits. Cloud computing providers exist to help the migrations go through, and make for high competition in the cloud computing space.

If you are planning to change your career and you desire to clear an AWS Solution Architect job interview, you should refer to the information below. There are many other candidates also vying for the same AWS position, so you should ensure that you have undertaken the best preparation before appearing for the job interview. You should be prepared to display your understanding of the main concepts as well as the major best practices and latest trends for operating the AWS architecture.

1: What Is Amazon EC2?

EC2 is the short form of Elastic Compute Cloud, and it helps to provide the most scalable computing capacity. If one uses the Amazon EC2, it eliminates the requirement to make investments into hardware, which in turn leads to more rapid development and deployment of programs and applications. One can use the Amazon EC2 to start as many virtual servers as one needs, whether more or less. An AWS solution architect associate must be familiar with all this information. One can also set security configurations and network configurations, and manage storage. One can scale up or down to manage changes in the requirements, eliminating the need to make traffic forecasts. Virtual computing environments called ‘instances’ are also provided by EC2.

2: List all of the Security Best Practices for Amazon EC2?

There are many security best practices for Amazon EC2 which include utilizing Identity and Access Management (IAM) to put some controls on the access to AWS resources; access is restricted because only trusted hosts or networks are allowed to access ports of an instance, only turning on the permissions that are required, and by making password-based logins for AMI instances disabled, even if they are launched. The knowledge of this mechanism is very important for an AWS certified solutions architect associate.

3: What Is Amazon S3? 

S3 is the short form of Simple Storage Service, and Amazon S3 has the widest support in all of the storage platforms available. S3 provides storage of objects and can store and recover any quantity of data, even if it is very great, from anywhere. Even after that versatility, it is almost unlimited as well as cost-efficient because the storage that it provides is available on demand. Apart from these additional benefits, they offer incredible levels of availability and durability. Amazon S3 lets the users manage data for optimizing costs, assign control, and comply with the regulations. This technique is an essential part of an AWS certified solutions architect associate.

4: Can S3 Be Used with EC2 Instances? How if the answer is yes?

Amazon S3 can be used in the case of instances with root devices that are given backups by instances of local storage. To execute systems in the Amazon EC2 environment, developers load Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) into Amazon S3 and then move them between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.

Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 are two very popular web services that comprise AWS.

Amazon S3 may be used with instances of root devices that have a backup of local instance storage. In this way, developers will be able to gain access to similar extremely reliable, quick, scalable,  and cheap data storage infrastructure that Amazon requires to make its own global network of websites run. In running the websites, the organization must provide AWS solution architect associate training to its professionals. So that systems in the Amazon EC2 environment run properly, architects run the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) into the web servers of Amazon S3 and then help them shift from Amazon S3 to Amazon EC2.

5: What Is Identity Access Management and how should one use it?

Identity Access Management (IAM) is a service of the web that is used to control access and security to AWS services. IAM helps one to manage users, other security credentials such as access keys, and permissions that hold the control to the AWS resources users and application access. IAM in enterprise IT is all about managing and defining the access privileges and roles of individual network users and also shapes the modes in which users may be given (or denied) the very same privileges. Those users can comprise of customers (customer identity management) or employees (employee identity management). The main objective of IAM systems is that there should be one digital identity for each individual. Only after establishing that digital identity does the maintenance, modification, and monitoring of each individual identity begin. We can use it by taking advantage of Amazon’s web platform and operating the IAM. All these functions are performed by the AWS architect associate.

6: What Is Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)? Do you think it should be used at all?

A VPC comprises the best way that exists to connect to the resources in the cloud from a data center that you own. Once your data center is connected to the VPC which contains your running instances, the internet assigns each instance a private IP address that you are able to access from any data center. That way, you can gain access to your cloud resources in the public in the same way as you would access cloud resources on your private network. One can learn about these concepts in a much deeper and more holistic way by enrolling in an AWS solution architect associate course.

A VPC endpoint enables the user to connect a VPC privately to the AWS supported services and VPC endpoint services run by PrivateLink without the need for a NAT device, VPN connection, internet gateway, or AWS Direct Connect connection. The VPC instances do not require IP addresses that are public to communicate with other resources also attached to the service. The traffic between the other service and the VPC stays in the Amazon network and does not leave it.

7: What Is Cloudtrail and How Do Cloudtrail and Route 53 Work Together? 

CloudTrail is a service that stores information about all the requests sent to the Amazon Route 53 API through an AWS account, which includes requests that are sent by IAM users. An Amazon S3 bucket is used to save log files of these requests. Information about all requests is captured by CloudTrail. One can use the information in the CloudTrail log file to trace which requests were through the Amazon Route 53 and what was the IP address of the request.

8: Should the provisioned IOPS be preferred over the Standard Rds Storage? When and why? 

When one has batch-oriented workloads, they should use Provisioned IOPS. Provisioned IOPS can deliver high IO rates, but it is the most expensive. The plus point or bright side is that batch processing workloads can run without manual intervention.

9: How Do Amazon Dynamodb, Rds, and Redshift Differ from Each Other?

The database management service for relational databases is called by the name of Amazon RDS. It manages upgrading, patching, and data backups without any manual intervention. It handles and is compatible with structured data only. On the completely opposite end of the spectrum, DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service for helping with unstructured data. Redshift is used in data analysis as a data warehouse product.

10: How does AWS’s Disaster Recovery benefit the users?

Cloud computing is used by businesses for enabling speedier disaster recovery of IT systems that are critical while at the same time avoiding the cost of a second physical site. The AWS cloud provides support to several widely known disaster recovery architectures that range from small customer workload data center failures to environments that are capable of rapid failover at scale. AWS possesses data centers all over the world and brings a set of cloud-based disaster recovery services that help to provide rapid recovery of an organization’s IT infrastructure and data.

11: A company is storing an access key (access key ID and secret access key) in a text file on a custom AMI. The company uses the access key to access DynamoDBtables from instances created from the AMI. The security team has mandated a more secure solution. Which solution will meet the security team’s mandate?

IAM roles for EC2 instances allow applications running on that instance to access and use AWS resources. The special thing about this kind of access is that the application does not have to create and store any access keys for doing so.

Security keys are needed so that unauthorized applications are not able to access AWS resources without the permission of the Sysadmin. Many dangerous applications such as trojan horses, worms, and viruses often try to access the AWS resources. These applications are created by unscrupulous elements who seek to disrupt the functioning of AWS.

The AWS platform has been designed to have several security measures against such applications such as the system involving security keys. But the specialty of the IAM roles for EC2 instances is that they allow the applications to access security resources without needing to create and store security keys like the rest of the applications which have to ask for permission or produce a security key in order to access AWS resources on a regular basis.

So DynamoDB tables are the solution that will meet the security team’s mandate.

12: A company is developing a highly available web application using stateless web servers. Which services are suitable for storing session state data?

In cloud computing, there is a concept related to key-value pairs. Key-value pairs are pairs of keys and their associated values. They are very important in cloud computing because they enable programmers to store vast amounts of data efficiently and in an organized manner.

Key-value pairs are a very innovative and relatively new concept and have been invented by a very famous and renowned computer scientist. First, the machine generates a lot of keys. These keys, also known as hash keys, are generated by the machine randomly through some very advanced and sophisticated computer science algorithms.

Then these hash keys are assigned one value each. The values are drawn from the data sets stored in the machine or are provided by the programmer himself from the client’s data sets. These data sets are the actual data that the machines will have to store and produce on demand whenever the client desires to access that data.

DynamoDB and ElastiCache are two AWS services that provide storage of key-value pairs at a very low cost and with very high-performance access, retrieval, and modification features. These services are taught in great detail in the aws solution architect associate course.

13: Company salespeople upload their sales figures daily. A Solutions Architect needs a durable storage solution for these documents that also protects against users accidentally deleting important documents. Which action will protect against unintended user actions?

This question is about the deletion of objects. Objects are frequently required to be deleted in cloud computing platforms. They might be required to be deleted for a number of reasons. First, the amount of space that the objects are taking up or using might be too large. The programmer might decide to delete some objects in order to free up space and make the system or the machine less burdened.

The object might be a very important and valuable object and the programmer might have already created a backup of the object on a storage device that is not connected to the AWS platform network.

In such a case, because the programmer has already made a backup of the object, it is not required that the object exists on the main networked system’s hard disk too. So in the interests of security and safety, the programmer might decide to delete the object from the system for good and let only one instance of it exist in the hard disk which is not connected to the main networked system.

The important thing here to note is that if there was a version control system set up in place in the AWS platform (which is usually the case), the programmer can restore the object or the programmer can recover the object from the final version of the object which exists in the version control system. Most often, the version control system which is used in the AWS platform is a modified and customized version of the git version control system.

AWS solutions architect associates usually modify the default and standard version of the Git software for their own specific needs and use. So the vanilla version of the Git version control system is modified and customized into a piece of software that is suitable for the AWS certified solutions architect associate’s needs.

The right answer is to store the data in 2 S3 buckets. This will protect the data against unintended user actions.

14: Company salespeople upload their sales figures daily. A Solutions Architect needs a durable storage solution for these documents that also protects against users accidentally deleting important documents. Which action will protect against unintended user actions?

Relational databases are a very important part of any cloud computing platform. Relational databases are used to store vast amounts of data in an efficient and easy to manage way. They work by creating specific cells and memory addresses in which data is stored.

These memory addresses or memory locations are given special names which act as unique identifiers and help to store the data in such a way that it can be retrieved for further use easily.

Amazon Aurora is the AWS platform’s implementation of a relational database that is very scalable and can easily scale to thousands of instances and accommodate whatever phase of growth a client goes through. This means that Amazon Aurora can increase its capacity according to whatever size is required by the client.

15: A Solutions Architect is designing a critical business application with a relational database that runs on an EC2 instance. It requires a single EBS volume that can support up to 16,000 IOPS. Which Amazon EBS volume type can meet the performance requirements of this application?

EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD provides sustained performance for mission-critical low-latency workloads. EBS General Purpose SSD can provide bursts of performance up to 3,000 IOPS and have a maximum baseline performance of 10,000 IOPS for volume sizes greater than 3.3 TB. The 2 HDD options are lower cost, high throughput volumes.

Perhaps the most critical part of a cloud computing platform is the performance of its networks. Cloud computing platforms are inherently networked systems. This means that the cloud computing platform runs on the basis of networks and is entirely dependent on the performance of its networks.

The networks will perform well only if they have been designed well. But there are other factors that determine the performance of networks. One of the factors is the load on the network or how much workload it has to bear and carry.

If the inflow and outflow of data in the network are too high, it will not be able to perform well and it will start stuttering and stalling. The speed of data transfers in the network will reduce to a very low amount and there will be a lot of lag in the network.

EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD provides the performance which the network needs in order to be able to deliver content to clients at very distant and far away locations in an acceptable time. Many clients need content to be delivered at their location very urgently because the content is very important and has a lot of stakes riding on it. Networks that carry such content are called mission-critical networks.

EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD is the method by which one can achieve sustained performance on such a mission-critical low latency network.

16: A web application allows customers to upload orders to an S3 bucket. The resulting Amazon S3 events trigger a Lambda function that inserts a message to an SQS queue. A singleEC2 instance reads messages from the queue, processes them, and stores them in a dynamo DB table partitioned by a unique order ID. Next month traffic is expected to increase by a factor of 10 and a Solutions Architect is reviewing the architecture for possible scaling problems. Which component is MOST likely to need re-architecting to be able to scale to accommodate the new traffic?

If the programmer sets up EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across 2 availability zones, that arrangement will be able to accommodate the new traffic with a little bit of rearchitecting.

17: An application saves the logs to an S3 bucket. A user wants to keep the logs for one month for troubleshooting purposes, and then purge the logs. What feature will enable this?

The feature of lifecycle management will enable this action. With lifecycle management, the application will be able to keep the logs for 1 month and then purge them completely from the storage.

18: An application running on EC2 instances processes sensitive information stored on Amazon S3. The information is accessed over the Internet. The security team is concerned that the Internet connectivity to Amazon S3 is a security risk. Which solution will resolve the security concern?

VPC endpoints for Amazon S3 will resolve the security concern because they will provide secure connections to Amazon S3 buckets.

19: An organization is building an AmazonRedshift cluster in their shared services VPC. The cluster will host sensitive data. How can the organization control which networks can access the cluster?

The organization can create a security group and specify which persons can access the network. In this way, they will be able to restrict and control access to sensitive data.

20: A Solutions Architect is designing an online shopping application running in a VPC on EC2 instances behind an ELB Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. The application tier must read and write data to a customer-managed database cluster. There should be no access to the database from the Internet, but the cluster must be able to obtain software patches from the Internet. Which VPC design meets these requirements?

A NAT gateway is a VPC design that will meet these requirements and let the internet cluster download patches from the internet. The aws solutions architect associate training teaches about NAT gateways.

Also Know: Best Course For AWS Solutions Architect Associate 2021

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