Interview prep

AWS Interview Questions

AWS interviews check whether you can pick the right primitive and reason about IAM, networking and cost.

Questions and answers

01When would you choose ECS Fargate over EKS?

Fargate when you want containers without managing nodes or a control plane; EKS when you need Kubernetes APIs, a broad operator ecosystem or portability across clouds.

02How do IAM roles differ from IAM users?

Users are long-lived identities with static credentials; roles are assumed temporarily and issue short-lived credentials. Production workloads should always use roles.

03Explain S3 storage classes and lifecycle policies.

Standard for hot data, Infrequent Access for occasional reads, Glacier tiers for archival. Lifecycle policies move objects between tiers or expire them on an age-based schedule.

04How do you design a VPC for a three-tier app?

Public subnets for load balancers, private subnets for application compute, isolated subnets for databases, with NAT egress and security groups scoped tier to tier.

05What are common ways to cut an AWS bill?

Right-size instances, use Savings Plans for steady-state compute, move cold data to cheaper storage classes, remove idle NAT gateways and unattached volumes, and put a CDN in front of egress-heavy traffic.

How to answer these well

Interviewers are not grading recall — they are checking whether you've hit the failure mode the question describes. Anchor every answer to something you actually shipped or debugged with AWS.

Say the trade-off out loud. "I'd use X here, but it costs Y under Z conditions" scores higher than a clean textbook definition every time.

Roles asking for AWS

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