AWS DevOps Scenario-Based Questions

I. CI/CD Pipeline & Automation (40 Questions)

1.​ Scenario: You need to set up a fully automated CI/CD pipeline for a new microservices
application hosted on AWS. The application uses Docker containers.
○​ How would you design the pipeline using AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild,
CodeDeploy, and ECR?
○​ What considerations would you have for unit testing, integration testing, and
end-to-end testing within this pipeline?
○​ How would you ensure that only thoroughly tested code reaches production?
2.​ Scenario: Your current CI/CD pipeline built with Jenkins is becoming a bottleneck due to
scaling issues and maintenance overhead. You want to migrate to a fully managed AWS
CI/CD solution.
○​ Describe your migration strategy.
○​ Which AWS services would you use to replace Jenkins' functionalities (source
control, build, deploy, orchestration)?
○​ How would you handle existing Jenkinsfiles and build scripts?
3.​ Scenario: A critical bug fix needs to be deployed to production as quickly as possible,
bypassing some non-essential stages of the CI/CD pipeline.
○​ How would you design your pipeline to allow for expedited deployments for
hotfixes while maintaining proper controls?
○​ What automated gates or approvals would you still recommend?
4.​ Scenario: Your development team frequently pushes small code changes, leading to
many build and deployment cycles. You want to optimize the CI/CD pipeline for faster
feedback and reduced build times.
○​ What strategies would you employ to speed up the build process in AWS
CodeBuild?
○​ How can you parallelize testing within the pipeline?
5.​ Scenario: You need to implement a blue/green deployment strategy for a web
application hosted on Amazon EC2 to minimize downtime during deployments.
○​ Explain how you would achieve this using AWS CodeDeploy and an Application
Load Balancer (ALB).
○​ What steps would you include for health checks and traffic shifting?
○​ How would you handle a rollback if the new "green" environment has issues?
6.​ Scenario: Your application is serverless, built with AWS Lambda and API Gateway. You
need to automate the deployment process with canary releases.
○​ How would you implement canary deployments for Lambda functions using AWS
CodeDeploy and API Gateway?
○​ What metrics would you monitor during the canary release, and how would you
automate rollbacks based on these metrics?
7.​ Scenario: A new developer joins the team and needs access to the CI/CD pipeline. You
want to ensure least privilege access and proper security.
○​ How would you manage IAM roles and policies for different stages of the CI/CD
pipeline (e.g., source, build, deploy)?
○​ What considerations would you have for secret management within the pipeline
(e.g., database credentials)?
8.​ Scenario: Your CI/CD pipeline needs to trigger deployments based on events from a
third-party Git repository (e.g., GitHub Enterprise).
○​ How would you integrate this external source with AWS CodePipeline?
○​ What security measures would you put in place for the integration?
9.​ Scenario: You want to implement automated security scans (static analysis,
dependency scanning) as part of your CI/CD pipeline.
○​ At which stages of the pipeline would you integrate these scans?
○​ Which AWS services or third-party tools would you consider for this purpose?
○​ How would you handle identified vulnerabilities (e.g., failing the build, reporting)?
10.​Scenario: Your application build process generates large artifacts that need to be stored
and versioned efficiently.
○​ Where would you store these build artifacts in AWS?
○​ How would you ensure proper versioning and lifecycle management for these
artifacts?
11.​Scenario: You need to build and deploy multiple microservices from a single monorepo.
○​ How would you configure your CodeBuild projects and CodePipeline stages to
handle independent builds and deployments for each microservice?
12.​Scenario: A new feature branch is created, and you want to deploy a temporary
environment for testing this feature before merging to main.
○​ How would you automate the provisioning of a temporary testing environment
using your CI/CD pipeline?
○​ How would you ensure these temporary environments are torn down after use?
13.​Scenario: Your CI/CD pipeline is experiencing intermittent failures in the build stage.
○​ What AWS services and strategies would you use for troubleshooting and
debugging these failures?
○​ How would you implement better logging and observability for your CodeBuild
projects?
14.​Scenario: You need to ensure that every code commit goes through a formal approval
process before deployment to production.
○​ How would you incorporate manual approval steps into your AWS CodePipeline?
○​ What kind of notifications would you set up for these approval steps?
15.​Scenario: Your application requires custom build environments with specific tools and
libraries not available in standard CodeBuild images.
○​ How would you create and use a custom build environment in AWS CodeBuild?
16.​Scenario: You want to perform performance testing on your application as part of the
CI/CD pipeline.
○​ How would you integrate a performance testing tool (e.g., Apache JMeter,
Locust) into your CodePipeline?
 ○​ How would you analyze and report on the performance test results?
17.​Scenario: Your team wants to adopt GitFlow branching strategy.
○​ How would you configure your CodeCommit repositories and CodePipeline to
support the GitFlow branching model?
18.​Scenario: You need to trigger your CI/CD pipeline based on changes in an Amazon S3
bucket (e.g., configuration files).
○​ How would you set up this S3-triggered pipeline?
19.​Scenario: Your deployment to a staging environment keeps failing due to missing
environment variables.
○​ How would you manage and inject environment-specific variables into your
CodeBuild and CodeDeploy processes securely?
20.​Scenario: You're migrating an existing application that uses specific version of Python
and Node.js.
○​ How do you ensure CodeBuild uses the exact versions required for your
application?
21.​Scenario: Your pipeline needs to deploy to multiple AWS accounts (e.g., Dev, Staging,
Prod).
○​ How would you structure your CodePipeline to handle cross-account
deployments securely?
○​ What IAM roles and trust policies would be necessary?
22.​Scenario: You want to implement infrastructure testing (e.g., using Terratest or InSpec)
as part of your CI/CD pipeline.
○​ Where in the pipeline would these tests be executed, and what AWS services
would facilitate this?
23.​Scenario: Your development team wants to receive Slack notifications for successful
and failed deployments.
○​ How would you integrate AWS Chatbot with CodePipeline for these notifications?
24.​Scenario: You need to enforce specific code quality standards (e.g., linting, cyclomatic
complexity checks) before code can be merged.
○​ How would you integrate code quality gates into your CI/CD pipeline using AWS
services or third-party tools?
25.​Scenario: You want to implement A/B testing for a new feature.
○​ How could your CI/CD pipeline help in deploying and managing different versions
for A/B testing?
○​ What AWS services would you leverage for traffic routing and monitoring?
26.​Scenario: Your application has a complex database schema that needs to be migrated
with each deployment.
○​ How would you incorporate automated database migrations into your CI/CD
pipeline, ensuring reversibility and data integrity?
27.​Scenario: You have a mono-repository with multiple services, and you only want to
trigger a build for a specific service when its code changes.
○​ How would you configure your CodeBuild and CodePipeline to achieve this
selective triggering?
28.​Scenario: You need to automate the creation of new user accounts and their
permissions in an application after deployment.
○​ How would you integrate a post-deployment script for user provisioning into your
CI/CD pipeline?
29.​Scenario: Your organization requires detailed audit trails for every deployment.
○​ Which AWS services would you use to track and log all CI/CD pipeline activities,
including who deployed what and when?
30.​Scenario: You are using AWS Elastic Beanstalk for application deployment, and you
need to automate updates and rollbacks.
○​ How would you integrate Elastic Beanstalk into a CodePipeline for continuous
deployment?
○​ What deployment policies would you configure in Elastic Beanstalk to minimize
downtime?
31.​Scenario: You want to incorporate immutable infrastructure principles into your
deployments.
○​ How would your CI/CD pipeline create new EC2 AMIs with each build and deploy
them without modifying existing instances?
○​ What AWS services would be central to this approach?
32.​Scenario: A new security vulnerability is discovered in a common library used by your
application. You need to rapidly redeploy all affected services with the patched version.
○​ How would you use your CI/CD pipeline to identify affected services and
orchestrate a mass redeployment?
33.​Scenario: Your CI/CD pipeline needs to deploy containerized applications to Amazon
EKS.
○​ Describe the stages involved in building a Docker image, pushing it to ECR, and
deploying it to EKS using CodePipeline.
○​ How would you manage Kubernetes manifests?
34.​Scenario: You need to manage environment-specific configurations (e.g., API
endpoints, database names) for your application across Dev, UAT, and Production
environments.
○​ How would you store and inject these configurations into your application at
deployment time using AWS services?
35.​Scenario: Your team wants to shift left on security by integrating security scanning tools
directly into the development workflow and CI/CD.
○​ What specific types of security scans would you integrate and at what points in
the pipeline?
○​ How would you ensure developers receive timely feedback on security issues?
36.​Scenario: Your application uses a polyglot architecture (multiple programming
languages).
○​ How would your CI/CD pipeline handle building and testing code written in
different languages (e.g., Python, Java, Node.js)?
37.​Scenario: You need to deploy static website content to Amazon S3 and serve it via
CloudFront.
 ○​ How would you automate the CI/CD pipeline for this, ensuring invalidation of
CloudFront cache on new deployments?
38.​Scenario: You want to implement a "push-button" rollback mechanism for your
deployments.
○​ How would you design your CodePipeline to enable easy and fast rollbacks to a
previous successful version?
39.​Scenario: Your CI/CD pipeline needs to build and deploy a desktop application to
end-users (e.g., via S3 for download).
○​ How would the deployment stage of your pipeline differ from a web application
deployment?
○​ How would you handle versioning and notification of new releases?
40.​Scenario: You are implementing a feature flag system to control feature rollout.
○​ How would your CI/CD pipeline integrate with and deploy changes related to
feature flags?

II. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Configuration Management (30 Questions)

41.​Scenario: Your team is currently provisioning AWS resources manually through the
console, leading to inconsistencies and errors. You want to adopt Infrastructure as Code.
○​ Which AWS IaC service would you recommend (CloudFormation vs. CDK) and
why?
○​ How would you handle existing manually provisioned resources? (Hint: Drift
detection)
42.​Scenario: You need to deploy a complex, multi-tier application stack (VPC, subnets,
EC2, RDS, ALB) in a repeatable manner across different environments (Dev, Staging,
Prod).
○​ How would you structure your CloudFormation templates (e.g., nested stacks,
parameters) to manage this complexity?
○​ How would you ensure consistency while allowing for environment-specific
variations?
43.​Scenario: Your CloudFormation stack update failed, and it's stuck in
UPDATE_ROLLBACK_FAILED state.​
* What steps would you take to recover the stack and identify the root cause of the
failure?
44.​Scenario: You need to manage configuration drift for your EC2 instances.
○​ How would you use AWS Systems Manager State Manager or
Ansible/Chef/Puppet to ensure instances remain in their desired state?
○​ What's the difference between using Systems Manager State Manager and
traditional configuration management tools for this purpose?
45.​Scenario: Your team is using Terraform for IaC, and you need to manage Terraform
state files securely and collaboratively.
○​ Where would you store your Terraform state files, and how would you ensure
remote backend locking?
○​ How would you handle sensitive data within your Terraform configurations?
46.​Scenario: You need to deploy a serverless application consisting of AWS Lambda
functions, API Gateway, and DynamoDB tables.
○​ How would you define this infrastructure using AWS Serverless Application
Model (SAM) or AWS CloudFormation?
○​ What are the benefits of using SAM over raw CloudFormation for serverless
applications?
47.​Scenario: You have a common set of network resources (VPC, subnets, security
groups) that need to be shared across multiple application stacks.
○​ How would you design your IaC to create and manage these shared resources,
and then reference them in application-specific templates?
48.​Scenario: You need to automate the patching of operating systems on your EC2
instances.
○​ How would you use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to achieve this,
ensuring minimal downtime and proper reporting?
49.​Scenario: Your organization has a strict naming convention for all AWS resources.
○​ How would you enforce this naming convention using IaC (e.g., CloudFormation
tags, Terraform local values)?
50.​Scenario: You need to ensure that all EC2 instances launched comply with specific
security configurations (e.g., no public IP, specific security groups).
○​ How would you use AWS Config Rules to monitor and enforce these compliance
policies?
○​ How would you integrate this with your IaC deployments?
51.​Scenario: You are tasked with migrating an existing on-premises application that relies
heavily on Windows Server and Active Directory to AWS.
○​ How would you provision the necessary Windows EC2 instances and integrate
with AWS Directory Service using IaC?
52.​Scenario: You need to implement a "golden AMI" strategy for your EC2 instances.
○​ How would you automate the creation and updating of these golden AMIs using
AWS services like Packer, EC2 Image Builder, or a custom CodeBuild pipeline?
53.​Scenario: Your IaC templates (CloudFormation/Terraform) need to consume secrets
(e.g., database passwords) without hardcoding them.
○​ How would you integrate AWS Secrets Manager or AWS Systems Manager
Parameter Store with your IaC for secret injection?
54.​Scenario: You need to perform a "dry run" or validate your IaC templates before actual
deployment to catch errors early.
○​ How would you achieve this for CloudFormation and Terraform?
55.​Scenario: Your development team frequently needs to spin up new environments for
testing new features, and then tear them down.
○​ How would you automate the provisioning and de-provisioning of these
ephemeral environments using IaC?
56.​Scenario: You're managing a large number of EC2 instances, and you need to ensure
they have the latest application configuration applied automatically.
○​ How would you use AWS Systems Manager Distributor and Run Command to
deploy configuration updates across your fleet?
57.​Scenario: You need to define a consistent security baseline for all new EC2 instances,
including security groups, NACLs, and instance roles.
○​ How would you codify this security baseline using CloudFormation or Terraform
and ensure it's applied to all new deployments?
58.​Scenario: You are refactoring a monolithic CloudFormation template into smaller,
modular components.
○​ How would you approach this refactoring, and what are the benefits of doing so?
59.​Scenario: You need to audit changes made to your AWS infrastructure.
○​ How does CloudFormation/Terraform help in providing an audit trail for
infrastructure changes?
○​ What other AWS services would you leverage for comprehensive auditing?
60.​Scenario: You want to implement a tagging strategy across all your AWS resources for
cost allocation and resource identification.
○​ How would you enforce mandatory tagging using IaC
(CloudFormation/Terraform) and AWS Config?
61.​Scenario: Your CloudFormation stack deployment fails due to a dependency issue (e.g.,
a resource trying to reference a non-existent resource).
○​ How would you troubleshoot and resolve such dependency-related failures in
CloudFormation?
62.​Scenario: You need to grant specific, temporary access to an AWS resource for a
maintenance task, without hardcoding credentials.
○​ How would you use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager and IAM roles to
provide secure, temporary access to EC2 instances?
63.​Scenario: You are using CloudFormation, and a critical resource (e.g., an S3 bucket)
was accidentally deleted outside of CloudFormation.
○​ How would you detect this drift and reconcile your CloudFormation stack with the
actual state?
64.​Scenario: You want to ensure that all S3 buckets created in your AWS account have
encryption enabled by default.
○​ How would you enforce this using AWS CloudFormation and AWS Config?
65.​Scenario: You need to orchestrate a complex deployment that involves launching
resources in a specific order and waiting for them to be healthy before proceeding.
○​ How would you use CloudFormation wait conditions or custom resources to
manage these dependencies?
66.​Scenario: Your team needs to share common IaC modules (e.g., a standard VPC
module) across multiple projects.
○​ How would you achieve this reusability with CloudFormation (e.g., nested stacks,
macros) or Terraform (e.g., modules)?
67.​Scenario: You're using Ansible to configure your EC2 instances after they are launched
by CloudFormation.
○​ How would you integrate Ansible playbooks into your CloudFormation template
or a post-launch script?
68.​Scenario: You want to use AWS CloudFormation StackSets to deploy the same
CloudFormation template to multiple AWS accounts and regions.
 ○​ Describe a use case for StackSets and how you would set it up.
69.​Scenario: You need to define custom security groups that allow traffic only from specific
VPCs or IP ranges.
○​ How would you define these security group rules in your IaC templates?
70.​Scenario: You're managing stateful applications (e.g., databases) with IaC.
○​ What precautions and strategies would you employ to manage changes to these
resources without data loss during IaC updates?

III. Monitoring, Logging & Alerting (30 Questions)

71.​Scenario: Your production web application is experiencing intermittent slow response
times, but you're not getting any alerts.
○​ What AWS monitoring and logging services would you use to investigate this
issue?
○​ How would you set up proactive alerts for similar issues in the future?
72.​Scenario: You need to collect application logs from EC2 instances and centralize them
for analysis and troubleshooting.
○​ How would you use AWS CloudWatch Logs to achieve this?
○​ How would you implement log parsing and filtering?
73.​Scenario: Your application runs on AWS Lambda, and you need to monitor its
performance, invocations, and errors.
○​ What CloudWatch metrics would you focus on for Lambda, and how would you
set up alarms?
○​ How would you use CloudWatch Logs Insights to analyze Lambda function logs?
74.​Scenario: You want to create a comprehensive dashboard to visualize the health and
performance of your entire application stack.
○​ How would you use CloudWatch Dashboards to aggregate metrics from various
AWS services (EC2, RDS, ALB, Lambda, etc.)?
75.​Scenario: Your team needs to be notified via Slack or PagerDuty when critical
application errors occur.
○​ How would you integrate CloudWatch Alarms with SNS and then with a
third-party notification service?
76.​Scenario: You need to audit all API calls made to your AWS account for security and
compliance purposes.
○​ How would you use AWS CloudTrail to achieve this?
○​ How would you store and analyze CloudTrail logs effectively?
77.​Scenario: Your database (Amazon RDS) is experiencing high CPU utilization during
peak hours.
○​ How would you use CloudWatch metrics for RDS to identify the bottleneck?
○​ What actions would you recommend based on your findings (e.g., scaling, query
optimization)?
78.​Scenario: You are implementing a new microservice, and you need to set up distributed
tracing to understand request flow and latency across services.
 ○​ How would you use AWS X-Ray for this purpose, and how would you instrument
your application code?
79.​Scenario: You need to monitor the cost of your AWS resources and receive alerts if
costs exceed a certain threshold.
○​ How would you use AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer for cost monitoring and
alerting?
80.​Scenario: Your application logs contain sensitive data (e.g., PII). You need to redact or
mask this data before it's stored in CloudWatch Logs.
○​ How would you implement log sanitization or redaction as part of your logging
strategy?
81.​Scenario: You want to analyze log data from multiple sources (EC2, Lambda, VPC Flow
Logs) to identify security threats or anomalies.
○​ How would you use AWS Athena or a third-party SIEM solution (e.g., Splunk)
with your centralized logs?
82.​Scenario: You need to collect custom application metrics (e.g., number of user sign-ups,
successful API calls) and push them to CloudWatch.
○​ How would you implement custom metrics collection for your application?
83.​Scenario: Your application is generating a high volume of logs, leading to increased
CloudWatch costs.
○​ What strategies would you employ to optimize log ingestion and storage costs?
(e.g., log retention, filtering)
84.​Scenario: You need to set up an automated response to a specific alarm, such as
stopping an unhealthy EC2 instance.
○​ How would you use CloudWatch Alarms to trigger an EC2 action or an SNS topic
that invokes a Lambda function for automated remediation?
85.​Scenario: Your team requires real-time dashboards for operational metrics during major
deployments.
○​ How would you leverage CloudWatch Dashboards and widgets to provide
immediate visibility into deployment health?
86.​Scenario: You want to ensure that all critical security groups have specific
inbound/outbound rules.
○​ How would you use AWS Config to monitor for non-compliant security group
configurations and generate alerts?
87.​Scenario: Your development team wants to debug issues in a shared development
environment without direct SSH access to instances.
○​ How would you enable secure and audited debugging using AWS Systems
Manager Run Command and CloudWatch Logs?
88.​Scenario: You need to predict future resource utilization trends for capacity planning.
○​ How can historical data from CloudWatch metrics assist in capacity planning?
89.​Scenario: You suspect an external attack on your web application.
○​ What logging and monitoring sources would you immediately check (e.g.,
CloudFront access logs, ALB access logs, VPC Flow Logs)?
90.​Scenario: You need to implement log archival for compliance purposes, storing logs for
several years in a cost-effective manner.
 ○​ How would you configure CloudWatch Logs to automatically export logs to S3
and manage their lifecycle?
91.​Scenario: You are receiving too many "false positive" alarms from CloudWatch.
○​ How would you fine-tune your CloudWatch alarm thresholds and metric
definitions to reduce alert fatigue?
92.​Scenario: Your application's performance varies significantly throughout the day.
○​ How would you use CloudWatch's anomaly detection or composite alarms to
capture these unusual patterns effectively?
93.​Scenario: You need to analyze user activity within your AWS account to detect
suspicious behavior.
○​ How would you utilize CloudTrail events and integrate them with a security
information and event management (SIEM) system?
94.​Scenario: You want to monitor the health of your Amazon SQS queues, including
messages in flight and message age.
○​ What CloudWatch metrics are relevant for SQS, and how would you set up alerts
for potential bottlenecks?
95.​Scenario: Your application relies on external APIs, and you need to monitor the latency
and error rates of these calls.
○​ How would you use CloudWatch metrics and logs to track the performance of
external API integrations?
96.​Scenario: You need to perform log retention for different log groups based on their
criticality.
○​ How would you configure varied retention policies for CloudWatch Log Groups?
97.​Scenario: You're deploying an application that uses Amazon Kinesis for real-time data
streaming.
○​ How would you monitor Kinesis stream utilization, put/get records, and errors
using CloudWatch?
98.​Scenario: You need to set up a "single pane of glass" for your operations team,
integrating metrics, logs, and traces.
○​ How would you use CloudWatch to bring together data from CloudWatch Metrics,
CloudWatch Logs, and AWS X-Ray?
99.​Scenario: Your application utilizes Amazon DynamoDB.
○​ How would you monitor DynamoDB's read/write capacity units, throttled events,
and latency using CloudWatch?
100.​ Scenario: You need to ensure that specific security configurations (e.g., encryption
for RDS instances) are always applied and alerted if not.​
* How would you use AWS Config rules and remediation actions to enforce and monitor
these configurations?

IV. Security & Compliance (30 Questions)

101.​ Scenario: Your company handles sensitive customer data, and you need to ensure
strong security and compliance (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA) for your AWS environment.​
* What are the foundational AWS security services you would implement (IAM, VPC,
 Security Groups, NACLs)?​
* How would you automate compliance checks and reporting?
102.​ Scenario: You need to implement the principle of least privilege for all IAM users and
roles in your AWS account.​
* How would you approach defining granular IAM policies for different roles (developers,
operations, auditors)?​
* What tools would you use to review and refine existing IAM policies?
103.​ Scenario: Your organization requires encryption for all data at rest and in transit.​
* How would you ensure data encryption for S3 buckets, RDS databases, EBS volumes,
and inter-service communication (e.g., ALB to EC2)?
104.​ Scenario: You need to protect your web application from common web exploits like
SQL injection and cross-site scripting.​
* How would you deploy and configure AWS WAF with an Application Load Balancer
(ALB) or CloudFront?
105.​ Scenario: You want to prevent unauthorized access to your S3 buckets.​
* What S3 bucket policies and public access block settings would you configure?​
* How would you regularly audit S3 bucket permissions?
106.​ Scenario: You need to securely manage database credentials, API keys, and other
secrets for your applications.​
* How would you use AWS Secrets Manager or AWS Systems Manager Parameter
Store to store and rotate these secrets?​
* How would applications retrieve these secrets securely?
107.​ Scenario: You need to establish secure connectivity between your on-premises data
center and your AWS VPC.​
* What are the options (VPN, Direct Connect), and when would you choose each?​
* How would you configure the networking and security for this hybrid setup?
108.​ Scenario: Your security team wants to receive alerts for any suspicious activity in
your AWS account, such as root user login or unusual API calls.​
* How would you configure CloudTrail and CloudWatch Alarms to detect and notify on
these events?
109.​ Scenario: You need to ensure that all EC2 instances are launched with a specific,
hardened AMI and follow a security baseline.​
* How would you enforce the use of golden AMIs and specific security group rules using
AWS Config and IaC?
110.​ Scenario: You want to implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for all IAM users
accessing the AWS Management Console.​
* How would you enforce this across your organization?
111.​ Scenario: Your compliance requirements dictate that all network traffic within your
VPC must be logged and monitored.​
* How would you enable and configure VPC Flow Logs for central logging and analysis?
112.​ Scenario: You need to prevent accidental deletion of critical AWS resources (e.g.,
production databases, S3 buckets).​
* How would you enable termination protection and S3 versioning, and what other
preventative measures would you take?
113.​ Scenario: Your development team frequently needs temporary access to production
EC2 instances for troubleshooting.​
* How would you provide secure, time-limited, and auditable access without sharing SSH
keys or opening inbound SSH ports? (Hint: SSM Session Manager)
114.​ Scenario: You need to conduct regular security vulnerability assessments of your
EC2 instances.​
* How would you use Amazon Inspector to automate vulnerability scanning and
reporting?
115.​ Scenario: You want to centralize security findings and track remediation efforts
across your AWS environment.​
* How would you use AWS Security Hub to aggregate findings from various security
services (Inspector, GuardDuty, Macie, WAF)?
116.​ Scenario: Your application requires encryption of data in transit between
microservices within your VPC.​
* How would you implement this using TLS/SSL and potentially AWS Certificate
Manager (ACM)?
117.​ Scenario: You need to restrict access to an S3 bucket to only specific VPC
endpoints, not public internet.​
* How would you configure the S3 bucket policy and VPC endpoint policy to achieve
this?
118.​ Scenario: You're concerned about potential data exfiltration from your VPC.​
* How would you use VPC Flow Logs and AWS GuardDuty to detect and respond to
suspicious network activity?
119.​ Scenario: You need to ensure that all sensitive data stored in S3 is discovered and
classified.​
* How would you use Amazon Macie to automate sensitive data discovery and
protection?
120.​ Scenario: You want to manage your security group rules as code and integrate them
with your CI/CD pipeline.​
* How would you define security group rules in CloudFormation or Terraform, and ensure
changes go through a review process?
121.​ Scenario: You need to prevent users from accidentally creating public S3 buckets.​
* How would you implement an AWS Organizations Service Control Policy (SCP) to
enforce this?
122.​ Scenario: Your application interacts with external APIs, and you need to securely
manage the API keys for these integrations.​
* How would you use Secrets Manager for storing these keys and ensure applications
retrieve them dynamically?
123.​ Scenario: You're building a multi-tenant application and need to ensure strong
isolation between tenants' data and resources.​
* What security patterns and AWS services would you employ to achieve tenant
isolation?
124.​ Scenario: You need to restrict IAM user permissions based on their IP address.​
* How would you apply IP-based conditions to IAM policies?
 125.​ Scenario: You want to implement a strong password policy for all IAM users in your
AWS account.​
* How would you configure the IAM account password policy?
126.​ Scenario: Your security team requires regular reports on your AWS environment's
compliance posture.​
* How would you use AWS Config and AWS Audit Manager to generate these reports
automatically?
127.​ Scenario: You need to securely store Docker images and scan them for
vulnerabilities before deployment.​
* How would you use Amazon ECR and ECR Image Scanning?
128.​ Scenario: Your application is publicly accessible, and you need to protect it from
large-scale DDoS attacks.​
* How would you use AWS Shield Advanced to mitigate these attacks?
129.​ Scenario: You need to provide cross-account access for a third-party auditor to
review CloudTrail logs without granting full administrative access.​
* How would you set up an IAM role with a trust policy for cross-account access?
130.​ Scenario: You are establishing a new AWS account structure for your organization.​
* How would you use AWS Organizations and AWS Control Tower to set up a secure
and compliant multi-account environment from the start?

V. High Availability, Scalability & Disaster Recovery (30 Questions)

131.​ Scenario: Your single-instance web application is experiencing downtime during
traffic spikes. You need to improve its availability and scalability.​
* How would you re-architect the application to be highly available across multiple
Availability Zones (AZs)?​
* Which AWS services would you use for load balancing and automatic scaling?
132.​ Scenario: Your Amazon RDS instance is a single point of failure. You need to ensure
database high availability.​
* How would you configure RDS for multi-AZ deployment?​
* What are the implications for failover and application connectivity?
133.​ Scenario: Your application's traffic is highly unpredictable, with sudden, massive
spikes. You need to ensure your EC2 instances can handle these spikes.​
* How would you configure Auto Scaling Groups with predictive scaling or target tracking
policies?​
* What metrics would you use to drive scaling decisions?
134.​ Scenario: Your company requires a disaster recovery plan with a low Recovery Time
Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for a critical application.​
* Describe a multi-region active-passive (pilot light or warm standby) or active-active
disaster recovery strategy using AWS.​
* Which AWS services (Route 53, S3 Cross-Region Replication, RDS Read
Replicas/Multi-AZ) would be involved?
135.​ Scenario: You need to ensure your application can recover quickly from a regional
outage.​
 * How would you implement cross-region data replication for your S3 buckets and
DynamoDB tables?
136.​ Scenario: Your application is read-heavy, and your RDS instance is struggling to
keep up with the query load.​
* How would you use RDS Read Replicas to offload read traffic and improve
performance?​
* What considerations would you have for eventual consistency?
137.​ Scenario: You are designing a serverless application using AWS Lambda, and you
need to ensure its scalability under high load.​
* How does Lambda inherently scale?​
* What are cold starts, and how would you mitigate their impact (e.g., provisioned
concurrency)?
138.​ Scenario: Your application serves global users, and you need to reduce latency and
improve content delivery speed.​
* How would you use Amazon CloudFront (CDN) to cache static and dynamic content
closer to your users?​
* What are the benefits of using CloudFront with S3?
139.​ Scenario: Your application requires a shared file system accessible by multiple EC2
instances. You need high availability for this file system.​
* How would you use Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) across multiple Availability
Zones?
140.​ Scenario: You are migrating a stateful application from on-premises to AWS. You
need to ensure session stickiness for load-balanced traffic.​
* How would you configure session stickiness on an Application Load Balancer (ALB)?​
* What are the pros and cons of using session stickiness?
141.​ Scenario: You need to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple regions
for global availability and disaster recovery.​
* How would you use Amazon Route 53 with latency-based routing, geolocation routing,
or failover routing policies?
142.​ Scenario: Your application stores large files (e.g., videos, images) that need to be
highly available and durable.​
* How would you use Amazon S3 for this purpose, including its various storage classes
and replication options?
143.​ Scenario: You have a batch processing application that runs only during off-peak
hours and can tolerate interruptions.​
* How would you leverage AWS Spot Instances within an Auto Scaling Group to reduce
costs for this workload while maintaining availability guarantees?
144.​ Scenario: Your application uses a message queue for asynchronous processing. You
need to ensure the queue is highly available and scalable.​
* How would you use Amazon SQS (Standard vs. FIFO) and integrate it with your
application?
145.​ Scenario: You need to design a highly available Kubernetes cluster on AWS.​
* How would you configure Amazon EKS to span multiple Availability Zones and ensure
control plane and data plane high availability?
146.​ Scenario: Your application experiences sudden failures of individual EC2 instances.​
* How would Auto Scaling Groups automatically replace unhealthy instances?​
* What health checks would you configure?
147.​ Scenario: You need to build a caching layer for your read-heavy database to improve
application performance and reduce database load.​
* How would you use Amazon ElastiCache (Redis or Memcached) for this purpose?​
* What are the considerations for cache invalidation?
148.​ Scenario: You are running a mission-critical legacy application on a single EC2
instance that cannot be easily containerized or refactored.​
* How would you ensure its high availability using EC2 auto-recovery or other methods,
despite its limitations?
149.​ Scenario: Your application has a microservices architecture, and you need a highly
available and scalable service discovery mechanism.​
* How would you use AWS Cloud Map for service discovery?
150.​ Scenario: You need to handle distributed cron jobs or scheduled tasks reliably and
scalably.​
* How would you use AWS EventBridge (CloudWatch Events) to trigger Lambda
functions or other targets on a schedule?
151.​ Scenario: Your application needs to store highly available and durable object data
that is frequently accessed.​
* Which S3 storage class would you choose (Standard, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA) and
why?
152.​ Scenario: You're using an Application Load Balancer, and you need to route traffic to
different target groups based on URL paths or host headers.​
* How would you configure ALB listener rules for path-based or host-based routing?
153.​ Scenario: You need to ensure zero downtime during database schema changes for
your RDS instance.​
* What strategies (e.g., blue/green deployment for RDS, logical replication, specific
migration tools) would you consider?
154.​ Scenario: Your application processes real-time streaming data, and you need a
highly available and scalable streaming data service.​
* How would you use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for this purpose, including sharding
and consumer groups?
155.​ Scenario: You need to recover specific files or directories from an EBS volume
snapshot after an accidental deletion.​
* How would you attach the snapshot as a new volume and recover the data?
156.​ Scenario: You want to perform load testing on your application to identify bottlenecks
and ensure it can handle expected traffic.​
* What AWS services or third-party tools would you use for load generation and
performance monitoring?
157.​ Scenario: Your application has varying workloads throughout the day, and you want
to scale your database dynamically.​
* How would you leverage Amazon Aurora Serverless for automatic database scaling?
 158.​ Scenario: You need to provide a highly available and scalable managed DNS service
for your public-facing applications.​
* How would you use Amazon Route 53, including health checks and different routing
policies?
159.​ Scenario: You need to distribute large software updates to a fleet of edge devices or
IoT devices.​
* How would you use AWS IoT Greengrass or AWS Device Farm for this, ensuring
reliable and secure delivery?
160.​ Scenario: You are designing a new application that needs extreme low-latency
access to data, with high throughput.​
* How would you consider using a distributed caching layer (e.g., ElastiCache for Redis)
and data partitioning strategies?

VI. Cost Optimization (15 Questions)

161.​ Scenario: Your AWS bill is increasing rapidly, and you need to identify areas for cost
optimization for your EC2 instances.​
* What strategies would you employ (e.g., right-sizing, reserved instances, spot
instances, scheduling)?​
* Which AWS tools would you use for cost analysis?
162.​ Scenario: You have a large number of S3 buckets storing various types of data. You
want to optimize S3 storage costs.​
* How would you use S3 Intelligent-Tiering or S3 lifecycle policies to move data to
lower-cost storage classes (e.g., S3 Standard-IA, S3 Glacier)?
163.​ Scenario: Your RDS database is running 24/7, but it's only heavily utilized during
business hours.​
* How would you optimize its cost (e.g., Aurora Serverless, Reserved Instances,
stopping/starting non-production instances)?
164.​ Scenario: You have many EC2 instances that are idle during nights and weekends.​
* How would you automate the stopping and starting of these non-production instances
to save costs? (Hint: AWS Lambda, CloudWatch Events)
165.​ Scenario: You are seeing high data transfer costs between your EC2 instances and
other AWS services.​
* How would you analyze and optimize inter-service data transfer costs (e.g., VPC
endpoints, colocation within AZs)?
166.​ Scenario: Your Lambda function costs are higher than expected due to long
execution times.​
* How would you optimize Lambda function performance and memory allocation to
reduce costs?
167.​ Scenario: Your organization is committed to using a certain amount of EC2 capacity
over the next year.​
* How would you use EC2 Reserved Instances or Savings Plans to reduce costs for this
committed usage?
 168.​ Scenario: You have multiple AWS accounts, and you want to get a consolidated view
of your costs and implement cost allocation.​
* How would you use AWS Organizations, Cost Explorer, and tagging for consolidated
billing and cost allocation?
169.​ Scenario: Your EBS volumes have high I/O operations but are attached to
low-performance instance types, leading to underutilization of provisioned IOPS.​
* How would you right-size your EBS volumes and instance types to optimize cost and
performance?
170.​ Scenario: You are using Amazon ECR for Docker image storage, and you have
many old, unused images.​
* How would you implement ECR lifecycle policies to automatically delete old images
and reduce storage costs?
171.​ Scenario: Your Application Load Balancer (ALB) is configured, but you suspect it's
over-provisioned or not being utilized efficiently.​
* How would you monitor ALB metrics and potentially optimize its configuration or
consider alternative load balancing strategies?
172.​ Scenario: You want to identify and terminate unused or idle AWS resources across
your accounts to save costs.​
* What strategies and tools (e.g., AWS Config, custom scripts, third-party tools) would
you use for resource cleanup?
173.​ Scenario: Your CloudFront distribution has high data transfer out costs.​
* How would you optimize CloudFront costs (e.g., caching strategies, compression,
origin shield)?
174.​ Scenario: You need to convince management to invest in a cost optimization
initiative.​
* How would you demonstrate the potential cost savings using AWS Cost Explorer
reports and historical data?
175.​ Scenario: Your application uses DynamoDB, and you're seeing high costs for
read/write capacity.​
* How would you optimize DynamoDB costs (e.g., on-demand vs. provisioned capacity,
right-sizing capacity, leveraging DAX)?

VII. Containerization & Orchestration (15 Questions)

176.​ Scenario: You have a legacy application running on EC2 instances, and you want to
containerize it and move it to a managed container service.​
* Would you choose Amazon ECS or EKS, and why?​
* How would you containerize the application (Dockerfile creation)?
177.​ Scenario: You need to deploy a microservices application using Docker containers
on AWS, and you want a serverless compute option for your containers.​
* How would you use AWS Fargate with either ECS or EKS?​
* What are the benefits of Fargate in terms of operational overhead?
178.​ Scenario: Your containerized application needs to store persistent data that can be
accessed by multiple containers.​
 * How would you manage persistent storage for containers on ECS or EKS (e.g., EFS,
EBS CSI driver)?
179.​ Scenario: You are deploying a containerized application to Amazon ECS, and you
need to manage secret injection into your containers.​
* How would you use Secrets Manager or Parameter Store with ECS task definitions for
secure secret delivery?
180.​ Scenario: You need to scale your containerized application automatically based on
custom metrics (e.g., messages in an SQS queue).​
* How would you configure Auto Scaling for ECS services or EKS deployments based on
custom metrics using CloudWatch?
181.​ Scenario: You want to implement a service mesh for your microservices running on
EKS to gain capabilities like traffic management, mTLS, and observability.​
* How would you deploy AWS App Mesh or Istio on your EKS cluster?
182.​ Scenario: Your containerized application on ECS needs to communicate with an
RDS database in a private subnet.​
* How would you configure the networking (VPC, security groups) for your ECS tasks to
securely access the database?
183.​ Scenario: You are troubleshooting a containerized application that is failing to start
on ECS.​
* What steps would you take to diagnose the issue (e.g., checking task logs, task events,
security group rules)?
184.​ Scenario: You need to automate the build and push of Docker images to a private
registry.​
* How would you use AWS CodeBuild to build your Docker images and push them to
Amazon ECR?
185.​ Scenario: Your Kubernetes pods on EKS need to assume specific IAM roles to
access other AWS services.​
* How would you implement IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) on EKS?
186.​ Scenario: You have a legacy application that can't be easily containerized due to its
dependencies on the host OS.​
* What alternatives would you consider besides containers (e.g., EC2, Elastic
Beanstalk)?
187.​ Scenario: You need to run scheduled tasks or batch jobs as containers.​
* How would you use ECS Scheduled Tasks or Kubernetes CronJobs on EKS?
188.​ Scenario: You are moving from a single Dockerfile to a multi-stage Dockerfile for
optimizing image size.​
* How would this impact your CodeBuild configuration for building images?
189.​ Scenario: Your EKS cluster needs to integrate with AWS Load Balancer Controller
(formerly ALB Ingress Controller) for exposing services via an ALB.​
* How would you deploy and configure the AWS Load Balancer Controller in your EKS
cluster?
190.​ Scenario: You want to implement container health checks to ensure only healthy
containers receive traffic.​
 * How would you define readiness and liveness probes in your Kubernetes deployments
or ECS task definitions?

NAVNEET YADAV