In this blog, I will talk about the most popular 20 AWS DevOps interview questions that you must know in order to crack your AWS DevOps interviews with ease. We will be looking at the interview questions which a typical DevOps engineer (AWS) faces in an interview. This is both for people who are new to the AWS and DevOps world and people who are experienced in other fields like Linux or production support, cloud computing and are willing or wanting to move to AWS and DevOps. So, let us get started!
Q1. What is Amazon Web Services in DevOps?
AWS provides many services which you can use to practice DevOps at your company and that are built first for use with AWS. These tools automate manual tasks and help teams manage complex environments at scale and keep engineers in control of the high velocity enabled by DevOps.
Q2. What is DevOps with cloud computing?
The development and operations practices in an organization are inseparable and universally relevant. Agile development, DevOps, and Cloud computing are interlocking parts of a strategy for transforming IT and enabling businesses to adopt the change. If the cloud is an instrument, then DevOps is the musician that plays it.
Q3. Tell me about the benefits of using AWS for DevOps?
- Easy to start and easy to use: All you need is to open an AWS account online to access DevOps services provides by AWS
- Enhanced Scaling: AWS’s simplified provisioning, scaling, and configuration features make it feasible to scale up from one instance to multiples thousand instances without any additional software interventions.
- Automation: AWS lets you focus on building the main product, which is your application, by eliminating the need for manual interventions in tasks such as development, deployment, and testing of workflows, configuration management, and container management.
- Reliable and Secure: The AWS Identity and Access Management mechanism grants the complete customer control over the access and use of their resources.
- Flexible Programming: AWS is very flexible when it comes to programming. AWS is highly programmable, and it can be used to suit the needs of the vendors individually.
- The Pay-As-You-Go feature of AWS is what really sets it apart. Unlike other traditional platforms, AWS does not ask for any upfront fees or paid packages to avail of their services.
Q4. What is AMI?
AMI stands for Amazon Machine Image. It is a template that provides the information needed to launch an instance which nothing but a copy of the AMI running as a virtual server on the cloud. You can launch many instances from as many AMIs as you need, so you can configure any number of AMIs that you want.
Q5. What is a VPC?
A VPC is a slice of the Amazon Cloud which they give you to run your resources.
Q6. What is the difference between a public and a private subnet?
A public subnet is a subnet that is directly accessible from the internet, whereas a private subnet is a subnet that is not accessible from the internet. It is only accessible from within the VPC.
Q7. What is a reserved instance?
A reserved instance is an instance that is reserved for you by Amazon for a year, and they give you significant price reductions on that. You can buy that at no upfront, partial upfront, or full upfront payments, and you get discounts from 20% to 60% based on the payment type and terms.
Q8. What is the difference between a spot instance and a reserved instance?
The spot instance is like a bid instance where you have a specific price which you have, and based on that, you were assigned instances. The moment your bid is lower than the next highest bid, your instance is terminated, and it is assigned to the next highest bidder. A reserved instance, on the other hand, is not a biddable instance, you have to buy it for a specific term.
Q9. What is CloudFormation?
CloudFormation is an orchestration or infrastructure or a server deployment tool or service which Amazon provides. So, it takes the JSON as an input, and in that JSON, you provide everything that is required to build up an environment, from VPS to servers to buckets. It is an Amazon provided service that lets you build entire application stacks from scratch.
Q10. Have you used route 53?
Yes, I have used route 53. I used it for managing DNS, and I use it to redirect our code ID, DNS to route 53 using Amazon name servers, and then from there in route 53 we used to create CNAME entries, MX records, txt records, and we used to manage the entire DNS from there.
Q11. What are some of the popular tools/services used in AWS DevOps?
- AWS CodePipeline: AWS Code Pipeline automatically builds, tests, and deploys your application to the target on-premise whenever the developer makes any change in the code.
- AWS CodeBuild: AWS CodeBuild is a code building tool that is fully managed in order to build the source codes of the application, run tests, and make ready to deploy software packages.
- AWS CodeDeploy: This is an automated code deployment mechanism that AWS uses to deploy the applications to an on-premise at any instance.
- AWS CodeStar: AWS CodeStar is a service that provides a unified user interface using which you can develop and deploy applications fast on AWS.
- AWS CodeCommit: This feature enables organizations to host and securely store private Git repositories.
Q12. How will you handle continuous integration and continuous delivery in AWS DevOps?
The developer tools in AWS help you securely store and version the source code of your application and automatically build, test and deploy your application to AWS or your on-premises environment. Start with AWS code pipeline service to build a continuous integration or continuous delivery workflow that uses multiple DevOps services such as AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and other tools or use each service separately.
Q13. What is the best feature of AWS which you like?
I like the auto scaling group and the elastic load balancer because it allows you to scale your application to any level infinitely.
Q14. Tell us about few popular AWS container services.
- Amazon ECS is a container management service that can quickly launch, exit, and manage docker containers on a cluster. It is a management service for the docker containers, which you will be running in the AWS environment.
- AWS Fargate is a compute engine that allows you to run containers without you having to provision, configure or manage and scale clusters of virtual machines on which your containers run.
- With Amazon EKS, you get a managed control plane. EKS makes it easy to get started with Kubernetes on AWS cloud or on-premises. From day 1, the first focus of EKS was always a production-ready control plane that was highly available and highly scalable. You get a 99.95% SLA with EKS, and the control plane is automatically scaled.
Q15. Which source repositories does CodeBuild support in AWS DevOps?
CodeBuild can connect to GitHub, AWS CodeCommit, and AWS S3 to pull source code for builds.
Q16. Which programming frameworks does CodeBuild support in AWS DevOps?
CodeBuild provides multiple pre-configured environments for supported versions of Python, Go, Java, Ruby, Node.js, Android, and Docker. You can also customize your own environment by creating a Docker image and uploading it to the Amazon EC2 Container Registry or the Docker Hub registry. You can then reference this custom image in your build project.
Q17. What is AWS CodeStar in AWS DevOps?
AWS CodeStar enables you to develop, build, and deploy your applications on AWS quickly. AWS CodeStar provides a unified user interface, allowing you to easily manage your software development activities in one place. With AWS CodeStar, you can set up the entire continuous delivery toolchain in just few minutes, which will allow you to start releasing code faster.
Q18. How do you configure a build project in AWS DevOps?
A build project can be configured through the AWS CLI or the console. You specify the source repository location, the runtime environment, the build commands, the IAM role assumed by the container, and the compute class required to run the build. Optionally, you can specify build commands in a buildspec.yml file.
Q19. How can you use CodeBuild with Jenkins in AWS DevOps?
The CodeBuild Plugin for Jenkins can be used to integrate CodeBuild into Jenkins jobs. The build jobs are sent to CodeBuild, which eliminates the need for provisioning and managing the Jenkins worker nodes.
Q20. What happens when a build is run in CodeBuild in AWS DevOps?
- CodeBuild will create a temporary compute container of the class defined in the build project
- Load it with the specified runtime environment
- Download the source code
- Execute the commands configured in the project
- Upload the generated artifact to an S3 bucket
- And then destroy the compute container.
During the build, CodeBuild will stream the build output to the service console and Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
Final Thoughts
AWS and DevOps are a vast topic, and there is plenty to learn about these technologies. So, do not just mug up these answers, understand the technicalities of these answers also. There are multiple AWS DevOps interview questions you can find online, but these are the top 20 AWS DevOps interview questions that are a must know when preparing for interviews and will give you a kickstart to your future AWS DevOps interviews. So, prepare well and all the best!
