Are you looking for AWS Solution Architect Interview Questions? If so, this video is
for you.
Hi, my name is Michael Gibbs and I'm the founder and CEO of Go Cloud Architects. And we're
an organization dedicated towards building high performance cloud computing careers.
Today, we're going to be speaking with you about AWS Solutions Architect Interview Questions.
And if you want to start your cloud computing career, you're going to have to do well on
the interview since that's the last step in getting hired. And today, we're going to give
you six questions that can help you in your cloud architect interviews. Now, when we ask
questions, we always ask open-ended questions. And the reason we hiring managers ask open-ended
questions, so we want to find out your ability to explain things, the depth of your technical
knowledge, and how well you communicate. So we're going to ask open-ended questions and
we are looking for answers.
Now, ideally, an answer will say, what is the technology? How does it work? And why
would you use it? Why? Because we can understand it that way, but it also shows that you understand
the technology. So today, we're going to give you six questions and we're going to start
off with an AWS question. The first question we're going to give you is what is the difference
between a region, an availability zone, an edge location, and a local zone? So what we're
looking to hear is that a region is a huge geography, perhaps a continent, perhaps part
of a content, but it's a big area. And then we're looking for it in an availability zone.
It's just a data center inside of this large geographic area. So you might have this large
geographic area called the region and you may have multiple little availability zones
inside of that region. And they're just data centers. And that's really what you need to
know.
Now there's a concept of an edge location and an edge location is going to be where
the user accesses CloudFront in the area that's most local to them. So when users are using
the CloudFront content delivery network, it's going to be close to the user. That's why
it's a content delivery network. And the edge location is where the user's going to connect
to, which is going to bring them back through the content deliveries network back to your
servers on the AWS cloud. So that's where an edge location is used by CloudFront. The
last component we're going to talk about is a local zone. And when you're dealing with
high performance computing applications, sometimes latency is very critical. Sometimes we'll
stick all of our servers in the same rack to reduce latency. In a cloud computing environment,
they might do a cluster placement group, but it's really the same thing, they're trying
to reduce latency. And sometimes the latency between your data center, for example, and
the AWS cloud is just too long. It may be several milliseconds, but that may be too
long for certain applications. So if you could get the distance shorter between the user's
data center and where the computers were housed on the cloud, then you can improve performance
and reduce latency. So that's exactly what a local zone is. A local zone exists, it's
an extension of the reason which basically brings cloud computing and edge computing
power much closer to the user. So basically you've got your region here. You've got some
networking to the edge location and the edge location is close to where your user is. So
edge locations enable you to do some high-performance low-latency computing, closer to the user.
The next question we're going to ask you today is what is IAM?
And we asked this question a lot and we generally don't get the kind of answers that really
satisfy us. And that's why we're working through this problem with you. So what is IAM? IAM,
or identity and access management, is really about determining who's allowed access to
the systems, what they can do on the system, and then tracking what they did. That's really
what IAM is we used to call it AAA or authentication, authorization and accounting. And it's really
the same concept though. Who's allowed on this system, what are they allowed to do,
and then track, what they did. So IAM is simply a matter of just determining who is allowed
access, what they can do and then tracking it. There you go. That's IAM. Now the next
question is actually going to be a networking question, but it's also extremely applicable
to AWS.
What is an 802.1Q tag. I'll repeat the question. What is an 802.1Q tag. Now, when we asked
this question, we find a lot of people are stumped here, especially if they don't come
from a networking background. Now if they come from a networking background, this is
simple for them. So in the cloud computing environment, basically what we have is a virtualized
network and a virtualized data center. That's what a cloud is. In switching, we have the
concept of taking a physical switch and virtualizing the switch and basically creating something
called a VLAN. So if you've got one big switch and it's got a hundred ports, you could say
ports 1 through 10 are VLAN 1, ports 10 through 20 are in VLAN 2, ports 20 through 3 are in
VLAN 3, and so on and so forth until you use up the ports.
And you know what? Inside of that same switch, users inside of a VLAN can talk to users inside
the VLAN, but they can't talk to users in other VLANs without routing. So an, a VLAN
is a virtualized switch. Now, the reason I told you about the virtualized switch is the
VLAN and the 802.1Q tag go together. So let's say now that you're connecting to AWS over
a direct connection. Now let's say AWS has a single cable between them and their computing
power and their availability zones, They don't, but let's just assume they do. If you gave
them your information on one VLAN and everybody else was on the same VLAN, all of your traffic
could talk to each other and would be completely and secure. So since AWS has to back haul
their traffic over their network.
Your traffic and other customers traffic that all connect through the same direct connection
locations. They need to separate your traffic. So an 802.1Q tag is basically how you can
take a single ethernet wire or port or fiber optic connection, and logically chop up that
ethernet wire into multiple VLANs. So a trunk port basically just takes multiple VLANs over
a single cable. So it was basically virtualizing the cable. So an 802.1Q tag is basically how
you would put VLAN information on a wire. And AWS uses 802.1Q tagging on direct connections,
so they can keep your traffic separate from other customers. That's just part of the whole
virtualization process.
The next question I'm going to ask you is what's a content delivery network. And we
find that everybody knows the word CloudFront, but the concept and the true understanding
of what content delivery network needs some help. So that's why we're going to talk about
this. As hiring managers, what we're looking for is we want you to understand that inside
of your network, you can guarantee performance because you have complete control over your
links and you have complete control of your routers and switches, but once you leave your
network and it goes to the internet, there's no guarantees on the internet. Your internet
service provider guarantees your performance to them. But once your traffic goes on the
internet, it goes through maybe 5, 10, 15 internet service providers, and a lot of routers
along the way. And there's no guarantee of performance after you get to your internet
service provider.
So in order to improve performance, and in order to reduce costs, what if you could get
the content closer to the user? So what a content delivery network does is it enables
me, being in say, Palm Beach, Florida to reach my local content delivery network location,
say it's in Miami. And when I want to go to a webpage, say www.amazon.com instead of just
doing my standard DNS thing and having my data go to the AWS data center, what's going
to happen is going to be redirected through the content delivery network. And the content
delivery network is going to take me to the say a place in Miami and the content delivery
network is going to say, is Mike's request already here? Is it cached? And if the answer
is, yes, I'm going to get the information directly from the location in Miami.
Now if it's not, if the information is not cached on the content delivery network, meaning
somebody didn't request it, prior to me, my request is going to be sent directly through
the content delivery network, to the web servers. And then it will be sent back to me. And then
it will be stored at this edge location for future users to be able to receive the same
data. See the difference is between going through the content delivery network for uncached
data, versus going through the internet as the content delivery network manages the network
and they own the network. So they can guarantee the performance on their content delivery
network. So even if your information is not cached, if you have to go to the internet
1 way versus the content delivery network, it's probably much faster over the content
delivery network, because you don't have to deal with best effort delivery over the internet.
You've got guaranteed performance over the content delivery network. So the content delivery
network does a lot of things for you. First and foremost, it enables you to connect to
it and get your information much quicker, especially if it's cached. Now, if that information
is cached in the content delivery network, it doesn't have to go back to your web servers,
reducing the load on your web servers. Now also, if the content delivery network does
not have to go to the web servers, you're not dealing with transfer costs on the AWS
network, so it can reduce your transfer costs, especially when your going in between regions.
So content delivery networks are used to speed up content. There were used to reduce network
bandwidth and server requirements due to the caching effect, and they get you closer to
the user and they give you guaranteed performance on the content delivery network's backbone,
as opposed to best effort internet delivery.
The next question we're going to ask is what is the process to take a web server and make
it publicly available on the internet, if you're inside of the AWS cloud? We're looking
for a few things. We're first looking for you to know, understand that systems with
private IP addresses are not reachable from the public internet. We're also looking for
you to know that you have to get to the internet somehow. So somehow you're going to need a
public address. And somehow you're also going to need to connection to the internet. So
that's what we're really looking for. So what does that take in the AWS context? For one
thing, you're going to have to add an external IP address, which AWS calls an elastic IP.
So basically you'll get an elastic IP. You will temporarily, as long as you need it,
take a public IP address from the Amazon pool, and you will assign it to your instance.
And now you have a public IP address. Now, the next thing that you're going to need to
do is you're going to need a route to the internet. So you're going to need the default
route to your internet router. Now your internet router and AWS is called an internet gateway.
So what has to happen in order to connect your systems to the internet? First, you need
an external IP address. Then if you need a public facing external IP address, you need
a route to the internet. So you're going to have a default route to the internet gateway
and the internet gateway connects to the internet. So how do you do it? You basically take a
server, you give it an elastic IP address and which is a public address. And then you
tell that server to have a default route to the internet gateway, which is connected to
the internet.
And that's how you take a web server and connect it to the internet on AWS. Now there's lots
of other ways this could occur. For example, if you have load balancers, you could place
an external address or on the load balancer and private addresses on your web servers.
But realistically, what we're looking for is, do you know that you need an internet
connection, the default route to the internet connection and a public address. Now the next
question, we're going to ask you is a basic, basic, basic networking question, but we find
that not a lot of the people that want to become cloud architects truly understand the
network or subnetting, so we're going to ask this question. Because subnetting is going
to be critical if you're a cloud architect. So what is the optimal sub-net size for a
point to point WAN link?, If you're not familiar with WAN links, let me show you what a WAN
link is.
You've got a location and location, and there's a cable in between them, which basically means
there's a host on one side and there's a host on the other side. And that's it. So knowing
that you need to host addresses, what is the optimal subnet size for a point to point WAN
link? We're hoping that you can do this math in your head and you know that it's a slash
30 cause a slash 30 gave basically gives you four total addresses. The first addresses
used for the network. The last address was used for the broadcast and you've got two
addresses. So for example, a slash 30, which would look like 255.255.255.252 is a subnet
mask. Let's say we're using 192.168.0.0/30 as the sub-net. 192.168.0.0/30 is the network
address.
And that's what you're going to see in your router's routing table. Then you'll have 192.168.0.1,
and 0.2. is available, uses, addresses. And then you'll have the 192.168.0.3 is if you
wanted to say send a broadcast ping, something that all systems on that subnet could actually
see. And there you go. That's the optimal sub-net size for a point to point WAN link.
So what did we talk about today? We talked about the differences between regions, availability
zones, edge locations, and locals zones. We talked about identity and access management.
What it is, we talked about 802.1Q tags and VLANs, and how they can keep your traffic
segregated over a single connection. We talked about what is a content delivery network?
We talked about what is the process to make a web server available on the internet?
And we talked about the optimal sub-net size for a point to point WAN link. And the reason
we ask this question is we want to know that you understand subnetting. So if you'd not
know the answer to that subnetting question, make sure you do some research on subnetting.
Let me tell you about some free offerings our organization does for the cloud architect
community. Every Monday and every Thursday, we have a live, "How to get your first cloud
job" webinar. And on this webinar, we basically do the following. We tell you what hiring
managers desire. We teach you how to leverage your past experience to get your cloud architect
job. We teach you exactly the type of career plan that cloud architects need to be hired.
Meaning what hiring managers actually desire. And we tell you how to prepare for the interview.
And we tell you everything you need to do to get your first cloud architect job. We
present for an hour.
And then we answer questions for about an hour, and we do this free on Mondays and Thursdays.
Now on every Tuesday, we actually have a "How to get real cloud architect experience" webinar.
Now we know that without experience and competency, it's almost impossible to get your first cloud
architect job, because employers want to know that you're competent. They're more concerned
about competency than experience, but they use experience often as a proxy for competency.
So we have a webinar on how to do this because we get asked constantly, how do I get the
experience to get hired? And that's really a problem. If you don't have the experience,
you can't get hired, but if you're not hired, how do you get the experience? So with all
of our years of coaching, we put it together a way that you can actually get the experience
in your home so you can get hired.
We do that free every Tuesday. Most Wednesdays, not all, we actually do a YouTube live stream
when it's based on cloud architect, career questions. So bring us any cloud architect
career question. And when you do that, we'll answer them live. And we do it for free. We
are launching the "Ask cloud Mike" once a week. What we'll do is you'll submit your
questions to us via an email, which we'll leave the link in the description below and
anything related to cloud architect careers, send us an email and we'll produce a YouTube
video by the end of the week. And we'll answer as many of the questions and requests that
come in as we can, because we want to do everything we can for the cloud architect community.
We also have a free AWS certified solution architect ebook. I'll leave the link in the
description below, and we have a free AWS certified solution architect associate e-course,
a full course.
I'll leave the link in the description below. Now, my team is in the process of developing
an AWS to advanced networking specialty ebook. And we're also developing AWS security specialty
ebook, and we're going to give them away completely free when they're released in 8 weeks, because
we want to do everything we can for the cloud architect community. I'll leave the links
for the pre-registrations below, and you can register for them now, and we'll email them
to you, the second they're released, which should be in about eight weeks or so. I want
to thank you so much for watching this video. I have another video coming out next Wednesday,
and we hope to see you soon. Take care, be well.