AWS full-stack development means building both the front-end and back-end of applications using Amazon Web Services (AWS) tools and services. If you want to become an AWS Full Stack Developer, getting an interview can be tough.
But don’t need to be worried, we’re here to help!
In this article, we will delve into the most commonly asked AWS Full Stack Developer Interview Questions, which are beneficial for both freshers and experienced developers. Knowing these questions will help you walk into the interview with 100% confidence.
If you’re thinking about becoming an AWS Full Stack Developer, I recommend taking the AWS Certified Developer Associate exam. This certification gives you a solid foundation and covers many topics related to the role of an AWS developer.
Let’s get started!
Top 25 AWS Full Stack Developer Interview Questions & Answers
1. Explain the different types of cloud services models?
There are three main cloud service models:
- IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): Provides virtual machines (EC2), storage (S3), networking (VPC).
- PaaS (Platform as a Service): Offers development and deployment tools (Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk).
- SaaS (Software as a Service): Provides pre-built applications (Salesforce on AWS).
2. Give me some of the key AWS services for cloud computing
| Category | Service |
| Compute Services | Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) |
| AWS Lambda | |
| Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) | |
| Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) | |
| AWS Elastic Beanstalk | |
| Storage Services | Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) |
| Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) | |
| Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) | |
| Database Services | Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) |
| Amazon DynamoDB | |
| Amazon Aurora | |
| Amazon Redshift | |
| Networking Services | Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) |
| Amazon Route 53 | |
| AWS Direct Connect | |
| Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) | |
| Security, Identity, and Compliance | AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) |
| AWS KMS (Key Management Service) | |
| AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) | |
| Developer Tools | AWS CodePipeline |
| AWS CodeBuild | |
| AWS CodeDeploy | |
| Analytics Services | Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) |
| Amazon Kinesis | |
| Amazon QuickSight | |
| Machine Learning and AI | Amazon SageMaker |
| AWS Rekognition | |
| Amazon Lex | |
| Internet of Things (IoT) | AWS IoT Core |
| Migration and Transfer Services | AWS Migration Hub |
| Management and Governance | AWS CloudFormation |
| Media Services | AWS Elemental MediaConvert |
| Customer Engagement | Amazon Connect |
3. Mention the difference between AWS EC2 and AWS Lambda?
AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and AWS Lambda are both compute services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), but they provide different purposes and have clear characteristics. Here are the main differences between AWS EC2 and AWS Lambda:
| Category | AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) | AWS Lambda |
| Service Type | Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) | Function as a Service (FaaS) |
| Usage Model | Provides virtual servers (instances) | Runs code in response to events |
| Scalability | Requires manual setup or Auto Scaling configuration | Automatically scales based on the number of requests |
| Management | User manages the operating system, software, and server configuration | Fully managed by AWS, users only manage the code |
| Billing | Billed per hour (or second) of instance usage | Billed per execution and duration of the function |
| Startup Time | Typically longer, as instances need to be provisioned | Typically very fast, near-instant startup |
| Configuration | Customizable instance types (CPU, memory, storage) | Limited to function-specific configurations |
| Maintenance | Users are responsible for OS updates, patches, and maintenance | AWS handles all maintenance |
| Ideal Use Cases | Long-running applications, custom environments, full control | Event-driven applications, short-lived tasks, microservices |
| Example Use Cases | Web servers, databases, large applications, batch processing | Real-time file processing, API backends, scheduled tasks |
4. What are Auto Scaling Groups in AWS? What is their purpose?
Auto Scaling Groups are a feature of Amazon EC2 that helps to manage the number of Amazon EC2 instances running to ensure that the application has the right amount of capacity to handle the current load.
The primary purpose of Auto Scaling Groups is to automatically adjust the number of EC2 instances in response to changes in demand, ensuring that your application maintains optimal performance and cost-efficiency. This includes both scaling out (adding instances) when demand increases and scaling in (removing instances) when demand decreases.
5. What do you mean by Elastic Load Balancers (ELB)?
Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) are a managed service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. ELB helps ensure that applications remain available, scalable, and fault-tolerant by evenly spreading the load.
6. What is Amazon S3 Glacier and when will you use it?
Amazon S3 Glacier is a cloud storage service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) designed for data archiving and long-term backup. It is optimized for infrequently accessed data where retrieval times of several hours are acceptable. It offers extremely low storage costs compared to other S3 storage classes.
Amazon S3 Glacier will be used to access long-term backup data, archive data for legal or regulatory compliance purposes and infrequently accessed media files.
7. How to protect data stored in S3 buckets?
To protect data in S3 buckets, use access controls to restrict who can access your data. Enable server-side encryption for additional security. You can also use S3 bucket policies and IAM roles to manage permissions.
8. What are the different types of databases offered by AWS?
AWS offers various types of databases, including relational databases like Amazon RDS, NoSQL databases such as Amazon DynamoDB, data warehousing with Amazon Redshift, and graph databases like Amazon Neptune. Each type is designed to handle specific data storage needs.
9. What are the advantages of using Amazon RDS?
Amazon RDS provides automated backups, software patching, and easy scalability. It also offers high availability and reliability, making it simple to set up, operate, and scale your databases without managing the underlying infrastructure.
10. What is a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in AWS?
A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) allows you to launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. This gives you control over your network settings, including IP address ranges and subnets. VPCs enhance security by isolating your resources from the public internet.
11. Explain how Amazon Route 53 helps with routing traffic?
Amazon Route 53 is a scalable DNS and domain name registration service. It routes end users to Internet applications by translating domain names into IP addresses. Route 53 also offers health checking and DNS failover to improve the availability of your applications.
12. What are the different types of IAM policies?
IAM policies in AWS are of several types which include managed policies, inline policies, and service-control policies (SCPs).
- AWS or you create and manage managed policies.
- The inline policies are the policies which got directly embedded with a single user or group or role.
- SCPs are used to manage permissions across multiple AWS accounts.
13.What is AWS CloudFormation? How does it help with infrastructure provisioning?
AWS CloudFormation is a service that helps you model and set up your Amazon Web Services resources so that you can spend less time managing those resources and more time focusing on your applications. You create a template that describes all the AWS resources you want, and CloudFormation takes care of provisioning and configuring those resources.
14. What is AWS CodeDeploy and how does it help with application deployments?
AWS CodeDeploy is a service that automates code deployments to any instance, including EC2 instances and on-premises servers. It helps you release new features rapidly, avoid downtime during the deployment, and handles the complexity of updating applications.
AWS CodeDeploy integrates with AWS services like AWS CodePipeline, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for streamlined workflows and monitoring.
15. What is AWS CodePipeline and how does it help with CI/CD?
AWS CodePipeline is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. It automates the build, test, and deploy phases of your release process every time there is a code change.
16. What is AWS CodeBuild and how does it integrate with CodePipeline?
AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages ready to deploy. CodeBuild integrates with CodePipeline by acting as a build step in your CI/CD pipeline, enabling automated testing and building.
17. How can you implement serverless authentication in an AWS application?
Serverless authentication in AWS can be implemented using Amazon Cognito. Cognito handles user sign-up, sign-in, and access control, making it easy to add authentication to your applications without managing servers.
18. Discuss strategies for disaster recovery in an AWS environment.
Disaster recovery strategies in AWS include regular backups, data replication across multiple regions, and using services like AWS Backup and AWS Disaster Recovery. Plan for recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) to minimize downtime and data loss.
19. How can you monitor and troubleshoot your AWS applications?
You can monitor AWS applications using services like Amazon CloudWatch for logging and metrics, AWS X-Ray for tracing, and AWS CloudTrail for auditing. These tools help you gain insights into application performance and troubleshoot issues.
20. Describe a situation where you had to optimize the cost of an AWS application. How did you approach it?
To optimize the cost of an AWS application, you can start by analyzing your usage with AWS Cost Explorer. Identify underutilized resources and right-size them. Use reserved instances or savings plans for predictable workloads and consider using spot instances for flexible workloads.
Scenario Based:
22. Your company’s e-commerce application on AWS experiences a surge in traffic during peak seasons, leading to high compute costs. How would you approach optimizing the cost without impacting performance?
Here we will explore a multi-pronged approach:
- Utilize Auto Scaling: Implement auto scaling groups to automatically adjust EC2 instances based on traffic, scaling up during peak hours and down during off-peak times.
- Consider Spot Instances: Explore using Spot Instances for non-critical tasks, taking advantage of lower costs with the understanding of potential interruption.
- Reserved Instances: Analyze usage patterns and consider purchasing Reserved Instances for predictable workloads, offering significant cost savings.
- Optimize resource utilization: Review application code and server configurations to identify and eliminate inefficiencies.
22. You’re building a new serverless application on AWS Lambda. How would you implement secure user authentication?
We would leverage AWS Cognito for user authentication. Cognito provides a user pool for signup and login, integrates with various identity providers like social logins, and offers token-based authentication for secure access to Lambda functions.
23. Describe your strategy for implementing disaster recovery for a critical application running on AWS?
Here we would focus on redundancy and failover:
- Utilize Multi-AZ Deployment: Deploy the application across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) within a region to ensure redundancy in case of an AZ outage.
- Backup and Recovery: Regularly backup application data and configuration to S3 in a different region for disaster recovery.
- CloudFormation for Infrastructure: Use CloudFormation templates to define and deploy infrastructure in a repeatable manner, simplifying recovery efforts.
24. List some security best practices you would implement when developing an AWS application?
The approach here would be to prioritize security:
- IAM Policies: Implement least privilege using IAM policies to grant users and services only the necessary permissions.
- Encryption: Encrypt data at rest and in transit using AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
- Security Groups: Secure resources using security groups to control inbound and outbound network traffic.
- Regular Security Reviews: Conduct regular security audits and penetration testing to identify and address vulnerabilities.
25. How would you implement caching to improve the performance of a dynamic web application on AWS?
To improve performance, we should use caching strategies like:
- Amazon CloudFront: Leverage CloudFront as a content delivery network (CDN) to cache static content closer to users for faster loading times.
- In-Memory Caching: Utilize in-memory caching services like Amazon ElastiCache to cache frequently accessed database queries.
- Application-Level Caching: Implement application-level caching within your code to store and reuse frequently accessed data.
Conclusion
By going through these common AWS full-stack developer interview questions and practicing your responses, you can boost your confidence and increase your chances of success.
Whether you are aiming for a role in front-end, or back-end platforms in AWS, going through these questions can equip you with the knowledge and strategies needed to succeed in the interview room.
Best of luck on your interview journey!
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