AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C01) Interview Questions
Looking for resources to prepare for the AWS Certified solutions architect professional exam interview? Well, you are at the right place. As you know that interview preparation requires an equal amount of attention as the exam itself. Therefore we provide you with a combination of basic to advanced level (SAP-C01) interview questions that are asked frequently. So, before beginning with the questions, let’s look into what the exam is all about.
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C01) exam justifies your technical skills, abilities, and experience in designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. This certification exam validates the following abilities of a candidate:
- Designing and deploying dynamically scalable, highly available, fault-tolerant, and reliable applications on AWS
- Selecting appropriate AWS services to design and deploy an application based on given requirements
- Migrating complex, multi-tier applications on AWS
- Designing and deploying enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS
- Implementing cost-control strategies
Now, let’s look at some of the popular AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C01) interview questions.
What is S3?
Amazon S3 is a storage for the Internet. It is a simple storage service that provides highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure to software developers infrastructure at very low costs. It also provides a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere.
What does AMI mean?
Amazon Machine Image(AMI) is a template that provides the information that is required to launch an instance, that is actually a copy of the AMI running as a virtual server in the cloud. Thus, one can launch instances from as many different AMIs as one wants.
What is Amazon EC2?
The Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It has been designed so as to make web-scale cloud computing easier for software developers. Amazon EC2’s service interface allows the developers to obtain and hence configure capacity with minimal friction.
Mention the different deployment models?
The different deployment models are:
- Private Cloud
- Hybrid Clouds
- Public Cloud
What is API? What are it’s uses?
API stands for Application Programming Interface. It has the following uses:
- Eliminating the need to write fully-fledged programs.
- Providing instructions to set up communication between one or more applications.
- Allowing easy creation of applications and linking the cloud services with other systems.
What are the layers of cloud computing?
Three different layers of cloud computing are:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
What are the roles of a solution architect?
The major roles of a solution architect are:
- Effectively demonstrating the knowledge of architecture and deployment of secure applications on AWS technologies.
- Defining a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements.
- Providing implementation guidance on the basis of best practices to the organization throughout the life cycle of the project.
What is the process of migration in AWS?
The three-phase process of migration helps an organization approach a migration of tens, hundreds, or thousands of applications. These are not discrete phases, but an iterative process. As you iterate more applications, you will be able to drive repeatability and also predictability in procedures, and find that the migration process is accelerating.
What are the features of Amazon EC2?
Some of the features of Amazon EC2 are:
- Virtual computing environments called instances.
- Multiple physical locations for your resources, such as instances and Amazon EBS volumes, called Regions and Availability Zones.
- Various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity for your instances, called instance types.
- Secure login information for your instances using key pairs.
- Preconfigured templates for your instances, known as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), that package the bits you need for your server.
- Persistent storage volumes for your data using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), called Amazon EBS volumes.
- A firewall that enables you to specify the protocols, ports, and source IP ranges that can reach your instances using security groups.
What are the principles of reliability in cloud?
- Automatic recovery from failure: By monitoring a workload for key performance indicators, you can trigger automation when a threshold is breached. These KPIs must be a measure of business value. This allows for automatic notification and tracking of failures, and for automated recovery processes that work around or repair the failure. Hence, with more sophisticated automation, it’s possible to anticipate and remediate failures before they occur.
- Scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability: Replace one large resource with multiple small resources so as to reduce the impact of a single failure on the overall workload. Distribute the requests across multiple, smaller resources in order to ensure that they don’t share a common point of failure.
- Testing recovery procedures: In an on-premises environment, testing is often conducted to prove that the workload works in a particular scenario. Testing is not typically used to justify recovery strategies. In the cloud, you can test how your workload fails and can validate your recovery procedures. You can also use automation to simulate different failures or to recreate scenarios that had led to failures before. Therefore, this approach exposes failure pathways that you can test and fix before a real failure scenario occurs, thus decreasing risk.
- Managing change in automation: Changes to your infrastructure must be made using automation. The changes that need to be managed include changes to the automation, which further can be tracked and reviewed.
How can one design your workload service architecture?
For this purpose, one needs to build highly scalable and reliable workloads using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) or a microservices architecture. SOA is the practice of making software components reusable by service interfaces. Moreover, microservices architecture goes further making components smaller and simpler.
How do you plan Disaster Recovery?
For restoration of availability, RTO and RPO are the main objectives. Having backups and redundant workload components in place is the beginning of DR strategy. One needs to set these according to the needs of the business and implement a strategy to meet these objectives, considering the locations and function of workload data and resources.
What do you mean by AWS backup?
AWS Backup is a fully managed data protection service that eases centralizing and automation across AWS services, in the cloud and on-premises. Using this, you can configure backup policies and also monitor activity for your AWS resources in just one place. Alongside, it allows you to automate and consolidate backup tasks that were previously performed service-by-service and removes the need to create custom scripts and manual processes. Thus, with a few clicks in the AWS Backup Console, you can automate your data protection policies and schedules.
What is the full-form of RDS?
RDS stands for Relational Database Service.
What does Amazon RDS do?
Well, Amazon RDS basically uses the MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL DB engines’ built-in replication functionality so as to create a special type of DB instance known as a read replica from a source DB instance. You can reduce the load on the primary DB instance by routing read queries from your applications to the read replica. Using the read replicas, you can elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads.
How can you optimize cost in cloud?
Cloud optimization is done as follows:
- Implement Cloud Financial Management
- Measure overall efficiency
- Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting
- Adopt a consumption model
- Analyze and attribute expenditure
What do you know about Amazon EventBridge?
Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus service that makes it easy to connect applications with data from a variety of sources. EventBridge provides a stream of real-time data from one’s own applications, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services and routes that data to targets such as AWS services like AWS Lambda or Kinesis, to an HTTP invocation endpoint using an API destination.
What is AWS Cloud Trail?
AWS Cloud Trail enables monitoring of the calls made to the EventBridge API for your account, including the calls made by the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, and some other services. When CloudTrail logging is turned on, EventBridge writes log files to an S3 bucket. Each log file contains one or more records, depending on how many actions are performed in order to satisfy a request.
What is the use of AWS Configuration?
AWS Configuration enables to record configuration changes to AWS resources. This is inclusive of how resources relate to one another and how were they configured in the past so that one can see how the configurations and relationships change over time. You can even create AWS Configuration rules to check whether your resources are compliant or non-compliant with your organization’s policies
What is the use of IAM?
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps in securely controlling access to AWS resources. IAM controls who can use your AWS resources, what resources can they use, and how can they use them i.e authorization.
How do you select database solution?
The optimal database solution for a system varies depending on the requirements for availability, consistency, durability, partition tolerance, latency, scalability, and query capability. Different systems use different database solutions for various subsystems and then enable different features so as to improve performance. Moreover, selecting the wrong database solution and features for a system can lead to lower performance efficiency.
How can tradeoffs help in improving performance?
While architecting solutions, determining tradeoffs enables you to select an approach that is optimal. You can often improve performance by trading consistency, space for time, durability and latency.
What does VPC stand for?
VPC stands for Virtual Private Cloud.
What is the use of VPC?
A VPC is one of the best ways to connect to cloud resources from one’s own data center. Once you connect your data center to the VPC in which your instances are present, each instance is assigned a private IP address that can be accessed from your data center. Thus, you can access your public cloud resources as if they were on your own private network.
What is Amazon CloudFront?
Amazon CloudFront is one of the most popular content delivery networks in the world because of its ability to accelerate the transmission of static and dynamic web content, like .html, .css, and .js files. CloudFront works quite efficiently with services like AWS Shield and helps in curbing DDoS attacks. It utilizes Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, or Amazon EC2 as sources for your applications and also uses Lambda Edge to run custom code closer and personalize customer users.
What do you mean by Sharding?
Sharding or horizontal partitioning is basically a scale-out technique for relational databases. This helps to put that data into smaller subsets and then distribute them across physically separated database servers, where every server is known as a database shard. These shards have the same hardware, database engine, and data structure so as to generate a similar level of performance.
What is AWS Lambda?
AWS Lambda is a compute service that allows you to run code in the AWS Cloud without provisioning or managing servers.
Mention the features of Amazon Cloud search?
Some of the features of Amazon cloud search are:
- Boolean Searches
- Faceting term boosting
- Highlighting
- Prefix Searches
- AutoComplete advice
- Entire text search
- Range searches
Define Amazon Route 53?
Amazon Route 53 is a scalable and highly available Domain Name System. It is created for benefiting developers and companies to route end users to internet applications by the translation of names that is a very reliable and cost-effective process.
What are the benefits of auto-scaling?
Auto-scaling has the following benefits:
- Better availability
- Good cost management
- Better fault tolerance
