Top 45 Amazon Software Developer Interview Questions [with Answers]

February 8, 2024November 15, 2024 Aseem

Amazon is one of the top tech companies in the world, known for its innovative products and services. As a software developer, getting an interview with Amazon can be both exciting and nerve-wracking. To help you prepare for this opportunity, we have compiled some of the top Amazon software developer interview questions asked during an Amazon interview along with steps of the entire hiring process. These questions will give you insight into what it takes to succeed as a software developer at Amazon.

Table of Contents

Amazon Software Developer Interview Questions for Fresher

Here are the top Amazon software developer fresher interview questions and answers for recent graduates:

Q1. Outline the steps for implementing a CloudFormation solution.

Answer: The steps for implementing a CloudFormation solution are:

Design Resources – Plan out the resources needed for your architecture.
Create a Template – Pick a template that specifies the resources you will want to have in your stack.
Validate – Confirm that all the dependent resources needed for the template are available
Create Stack – Use the template to create a stack
Verify Functionality – Test to ensure that the created resources work as expected
Clean Up – Clean up by deleting the stack and resources to avoid unwanted charges.

Q2. Explain the role of CloudWatch in the AWS ecosystem.

Answer: CloudWatch monitors & manages performance. It collects logs, metrics & events for real-time health monitoring & triggering alerts.

Q3. Are there alternative tools for accessing cloud environments besides the console?

Answer: Alternative tools are:

Tools for Windows PowerShell
AWS SDK
AWS CLI for Linux
AWS Software Developer Kits
Putty
AWS CLI for Windows
AWS CLI for Windows CMD

Also Read: Amazon Interview Questions for SDE

Q4. Define a DDoS Attack And suggest AWS services for mitigating such attacks.

Answer: A DDoS attack is one of the various types of cyberattacks. It is an intentional and malicious act aimed at interrupting the regular flow of traffic to a website or online platform. To combat DDoS attacks, one effective approach is to reduce the potential targets for attackers. By minimizing the surface area that can be exploited, you limit their options and make it easier to implement protective measures in a centralized location.

Q5. What are the three main types of cloud services and the corresponding AWS products?

Answer: The three main types of cloud services are

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This is a cloud computing service that provides virtual resources such as servers, storage, etc delivered over the internet. The services used are EC2, Lambda & Lightsail.
Platform as a Service (PaaS): This is a cloud computing model where users receive hardware and software tools from a third-party provider over the Internet. It uses Elastic Beanstalk & Amplify services.
Software as a Service (SaaS): This is a method of accessing and using applications through the internet, eliminating the need for software installation or hardware management. The AWS services used for SaaS are Rekognition & Polly.

You can take a comprehensive cloud computing with AWS course to further enhance your skills.

Q6. How can you resolve the absence of a service in a specific region?

Answer: When Amazon introduces a new service, it is not immediately available in all regions. Instead, they roll out the service gradually and expand to other areas over time. If a particular service is unavailable in your region, it likely has not yet been made available there. But if you still wish to access the unavailable service, you can switch to the nearest region where it is offered.

Q7. How do NAT gateways and NAT instances differ in AWS?

Answer: When a connection expires, the NAT gateway responds with an RST packet to any resources located behind it that attempt to maintain the connection. This differs from how a NAT instance handles expired connections, as it sends a FIN packet to terminate the connection for those same resources.

Q8. How can you set up real-time website metrics monitoring on AWS?

Answer: Amazon CloudWatch is a tool for keeping track of the performance and availability of your AWS services. It allows you to monitor important events such as state changes in Amazon EC2, auto-scaling lifecycle events, scheduled activities, AWS API calls, console sign-in attempts, and CloudTrail activity. By providing real-time data on these key metrics and customizable alerts when thresholds are reached or exceeded, CloudWatch enables efficient management of your applications running on AWS.

Q9. Differentiate between the various types of virtualization available in AWS.

Answer: There are three main types of virtualization utilized in AWS:

Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM): This involves fully virtualized hardware where each virtual machine operates independently from one another. The boot process is initiated by executing a master boot record within the image’s root block device.
Paravirtualization (PV): This uses GRUB as its bootloader to start up PV AMIs. This chain-loading method allows for the selection of specific kernels during startup.
PV on HVM: PV on HVM combines elements of both hardware and para-virtualization to enable operating systems to utilize host storage and network I/O capabilities effectively.

Q10. What tools and methods are available in AWS to manage excessive spending?

Answer: Here are the tools available in AWS:

Cost Explorer: This tool provides users with visualizations and cost breakdowns of their AWS spending, allowing them to track costs over time and identify areas for optimization.
AWS Budgets: With AWS Budgets, users can set limits on how much they want to spend on specific services or resources within a given period. This allows for proactive monitoring and alerts when spending exceeds the defined budget.
Reserved Instances (RIs): RIs allow customers to reserve computing capacity in advance at discounted prices compared to On-Demand rates, providing significant savings if used effectively.
Savings Pl: Similar to RIs but offering more flexibility in usage across different instance types regardless of region or availability zone.
Pricing Calculator: The Pricing Calculator lets customers estimate costs before launching services. It provides estimated monthly bills based on configurations, even before resources are launched.

Q11. What is the purpose of an elastic transcoder?

Answer: The Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a media transcoding service provided by Amazon Web Services. It provides an easy way to convert or “transcode” media files from their original format into different formats that will play on different devices and platforms.

Q12: Which services are suitable for creating a centralized logging solution?

Answer: Centralized logging solutions can be created using Amazon CloudWatch Logs, Amazon Kinesis Streams & Amazon Redshift.

Q13. How do availability zones and regions work together in AWS?

Answer: AWS Regions are designated geographic locations that operate independently from each other. These regions consist of multiple Availability Zones, which are physically isolated and connected by high-speed networks with redundant capabilities. Each Availability Zone consists of one or more data centers equipped with backup power sources, and robust networking infrastructure, and housed in distinct facilities for added resilience.

Q14. What is auto-scaling and how does it function?

Answer: Auto Scaling is an Amazon Web Services feature that allows you to automatically adjust the number of Amazon EC2 instances in response to changing application demand.

Also Read: Amazon SQL Interview Questions and Answers

Q15. Explain geo-targeting in CloudFront.

Answer: Amazon CloudFront’s Geo-Targeting feature allows you to identify the country of your users and pass on this information to your server. You can customize content based on its location and cache it in nearby servers for quicker retrieval. As a result, not only does it enhance the overall user experience but also boosts the efficiency of the website.

Amazon Software Developer Coding Interview Questions for Mid-Level Candidates

Below are the most asked mid-level Amazon software engineer interview questions and answers to help you adequately prepare for your upcoming interview.

Q16. In Amazon RDS, will your standby instance be launched in the same availability zone as your primary instance?

Answer: No, RDS standby instances can be launched in different availability zones from the primary instance to provide greater fault tolerance.

Q17. Define snapshots in the context of Amazon lightsail.

Answer: Snapshots capture the state of EC2 instances, and block storage drives, and databases at a specific moment, serving as backups. They’re created manually or automatically, enabling resource restoration to a previous state, and maintaining functionality akin to the originals.

Q18. Can an Amazon elastic compute cloud (EC2) instance be launched with specified private IP addresses? if yes, which Amazon service enables this functionality?

Answer: Yes, an Amazon EC2 instance can be launched with specified private IP addresses using the Elastic Network Interfaces (ENI) service. ENIs allow you to assign custom private IP addresses to your EC2 instances.

Q19. What is the maximum limit for the creation of elastic IPs?

Answer: The maximum number of VPC elastic IPs per region is 5 by default. This limit can be easily increased by requesting AWS support.

Q20. How would you recommend implementing the use of your business’s email address and domain for sending and receiving compliance emails cost-effectively?

Answer: An effective way to achieve this is by utilizing Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), a web-based platform for sending emails.

Q21. can you explain the concept of PAAS (platform as a service)?

Answer: PaaS (Platform as a Service) is a comprehensive cloud platform that provides developers with everything necessary to create, operate, and oversee applications. This includes servers, operating systems, networking capabilities, storage options, middleware solutions, and various tools.

Q22. What exactly is Amazon EC2 (elastic compute cloud)?

Answer: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as Amazon EC2, is a cloud-based service that offers secure and scalable computing resources. Its main purpose is to simplify web-scale computing for developers by providing an easy-to-use platform. Through its user-friendly interface, users can quickly acquire and configure the necessary capacity with minimal effort.

Q23. What is the maximum number of S3 buckets that can be created?

Answer: The maximum number of S3 buckets that can be created per AWS account is 100 by default. This limit can be increased by requesting AWS support.

Q24. What are the distinctions between a spot instance, an on-demand instance, and a reserved instance?

Answer: Spot instances provide spare EC2 capacity at discounted prices but can be interrupted. On-demand instances provide reliable, consistent capacity at standard prices. Reserved Instances provide capacity reservations at discounted hourly rates.

Q25. Could you describe SES (simple email service) in detail?

Answer: SES (Simple Email Service) is a scalable and highly available email sending and receiving service. It can be used to send marketing, notification, or transactional emails at scale.

Q26. Explain the concept of an Amazon EC2 root device volume.

Answer: The root device volume of an Amazon EC2 instance is the primary storage volume that contains the operating system and any other installed software. It is used as the main boot volume for the instance and can be customized and modified to suit the specific needs of the user’s application.

Q27. If the CPU usage on your EC2 instance reaches 80%, what strategy would you use to alleviate the load on the instance?

Answer: One way to achieve this is by implementing an auto-scaling group that automatically adds more instances when a single EC2 instance’s CPU usage exceeds 80%. Additionally, distributing traffic among these instances can be done through the use of an application load balancer and by designating certain EC2 instances as target destinations.

Q28. How would you handle a situation where the relational database engine frequently crashes under increased traffic, without promoting the RDS instance replica to the master instance?

Answer: A larger RDS instance type is necessary to effectively manage a high volume of traffic and create backups, whether manually or automatically, in case the RDS instance experiences any failures.

Q29. What are the various types of instances available in Amazon EC2, and what features do they offer?

Answer: The EC2 instance types include General Purpose, Compute Optimized, Memory Optimized, Storage Optimized, and Accelerated Computing. They provide varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and network capacity for different workloads.

Q30. What are a few recommended security protocols for Amazon EC2?

Answer: Recommended security protocols for Amazon EC2 include:

Using Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access
Enabling Security Groups to restrict network access
Using AWS Key Management Service for encryption keys
Enabling EC2 instance firewalls and OS-level firewalls
Regularly patching and updating EC2 instances
Using AWS CloudTrail to monitor API calls

Amazon Software Engineer Interview Questions for Experienced Professionals

Here are frequently asked Amazon software developer interview questions and answers for experienced candidates.

Q31. How does stopping an EC2 instance differ from terminating it?

Answer: Although it may seem that stopping and terminating are equivalent actions, there is a distinction between the two. Stopping an EC2 instance involves initiating a regular shutdown process, resulting in the instance being placed in a stopped state. On the other hand, the termination of an instance also leads to its status changing to stop; however, this action permanently deletes any attached EBS volumes with no possibility of recovery.

Q32. How can CloudWatch be configured to automatically restore an EC2 instance?

Answer: CloudWatch alarms can be configured to automatically recover EC2 instances by stopping and restarting them when a failure is detected based on metrics thresholds.

Q33. Explain the purpose and function of SnowBall within AWS services.

Answer: AWS Snowball is a physical storage device that transfers large amounts of data in/out of AWS over a high-speed physical connection instead of the Internet. Useful for large data migrations.

Q34. In the event of a lost key, how can you restore access to an EC2 instance?

Answer: Amazon EC2 does not retain a backup of your private key. This means that if you misplace or lose it, there is no way to retrieve it. In the case of an instance store-backed instance, losing the private key will result in being unable to access the instance. The recommended course of action would be to terminate this particular instance and create a new one using a different key pair.

Q35. Can you integrate S3 with EC2 instances, and if so, what’s the procedure?

Answer: Yes, it is possible to integrate Amazon S3 with EC2 instances. The common ways are:

Storing instance bootstrap scripts or application artifacts in S3 and retrieving them from within the instance
Using S3 as a data store for applications running on EC2
Backing up EBS volumes or instance storage to S3

Also Read: Amazon Coding Interview Questions

Q36. Can you provide an overview of Amazon S3 and its functionality?

Answer: Amazon S3 provides scalable object storage for files, images, videos, etc. It offers durability, availability, and security with REST-based access.

Q37. What EC2 instance variants exist in terms of their pricing models?

Answer: There are three main types of EC2 instances available for use:

On-demand Instance: This option offers affordable pricing on a short-term basis, but may not be cost-effective in the long run.
Spot Instance: These instances can be purchased through bidding and typically have lower prices compared to on-demand instances.
Reserved Instance: For those looking to utilize an instance for a year or more, this type offers the best value as it allows users to reserve capacity ahead of time at discounted rates.

Q38. What is connection draining?

Answer: Connection Draining is a feature provided by AWS that permits us to serve ongoing requests on servers that are undergoing updates or decommissioning. It works by allowing the Load Balancer to give an outgoing instance enough time to complete its existing requests before assigning it any new ones. If Connection Draining is not activated, a departing server will abruptly go offline, resulting in failed pending requests.

Q39. How do you monitor S3 cross-region replication for consistency without manual inspection?

Answer: S3 cross-region replication can be monitored in real-time using Amazon CloudWatch metrics and dashboards to check for replication lag or errors.

Q40. Could you elaborate on Solaris and AIX operating systems, and their availability on AWS?

Answer: Solaris and AIX are UNIX operating systems that are available as EC2 AMIs for specialized workloads. However, their usage on AWS is relatively limited compared to Linux and Windows.

Q41. Can you define RTO and RPO in the context of AWS?

Answer: RTO, which is an acronym for Recovery Time Objective, denotes the timeframe within which an application must be restored after experiencing a disruption. On the other hand, RPO (Recovery Point Objective) pertains to the amount of data loss that can be acceptable for your application.

Q42. What steps are involved in granting user access to a specific bucket?

Answer: To enable access, please follow the following steps:

Categorize your instances based on their purpose and function.
Define permissions for authorized users to manage specific servers according to their roles and responsibilities.
Implement strict tagging policies to ensure secure access control.
Attach the appropriate policies to IAM users or groups based on their level of authorization.

By following these steps, you can effectively manage user access within your system while maintaining security protocols in place.

43. What role do Key-pairs serve within the AWS ecosystem?

Answer: Key pairs allow secure SSH login access to EC2 instances. The private key is held by the user and the public key is embedded in the instance during launch.

Q44. How can SSH agent forwarding be established to avoid repetitive key copying during logins?

Answer: SSH agent forwarding allows SSH keys to be forwarded to EC2 instances without copying private keys. The SSH client handles authentication using the forwarded keys.

Q45. Explain how AWS config works with AWS CloudTrail.

Answer: When you create an AWS account, CloudTrail is automatically activated and can provide information on any changes made to your resources. Additionally, by utilizing AWS Config, you can determine if these modifications adhere to your company’s policies. If there are discrepancies or issues with the changes, both services allow for automatic actions to be taken in response.

Technical Amazon Software Developer Interview Questions

Here are the top technical Amazon SDE interview questions:

Q. What are the K largest elements in an array?
Q. How can a Binary tree be converted to a DLL (Doubly Linked List)?
Q. Given binary tree T, what is the maximum sum that can be obtained along any path within it?
Q. How do you rotate a matrix by 90 degrees?
Q. Discuss how dynamic programming can be used for assembly line scheduling.
Q. What is the lowest common ancestor of two nodes in both a Binary Search Tree and Binary Tree?
Q. How would you perform rotation on an array with a given number of rotations(K)?
Q. Explore Object-oriented analysis and design techniques while designing the Snake Game.
Q. Can all permutations of a string be printed recursively?
Q. How can we implement a queue data structure using a linked list?

Amazon Hiring Process: Steps

Below are all you need to know about Amazon’s hiring process

1. Submission of Documents

Submission of documents is a crucial step in the Amazon hiring process that ensures all necessary information and credentials are provided by potential candidates. This includes resumes, well-written job cover letters, references, and any other relevant materials requested by Amazon during the application or interview stages.

These documents allow recruiters to assess qualifications and determine if an applicant meets their required criteria for job roles within the company. It is important for you to carefully review submission requirements and provide accurate documentation as requested in the job description.

2. A Call or Email from HR

Once your resume has been selected, you will be contacted by an HR recruiter through email or phone. During the interview, they will try to get a better understanding of your interests and how well you align with the company’s values. If they are satisfied with your responses, you may be asked to complete an online assessment.

3. Virtual Assessment

The online evaluation is a vital component of Amazon’s recruitment procedures and typically consists of three parts. You will be given seven debugging tasks with a time limit of 20 minutes. Each task presents an issue along with a code snippet containing an error that needs to be resolved within the allotted time frame.

4. Telephonic Interview

After completing the online assessments, you will be able to take part in one or two technical telephonic interviews. These sessions typically last 45 minutes to an hour and involve a mix of questions about data structures and algorithms as well as behavioral questions.

5. Physical Interview

If you successfully pass the initial phone screening, you will have the opportunity to visit one of Amazon’s offices for a full day or attend virtual video calls. During this stage, there will be four to six interviews lasting 60 minutes each. Your performance in these sessions will be assessed based on your coding proficiency, system design abilities, and responses to behavioral questions.

6. Selection Round

In Amazon’s interview process, the final stage of Amazon’s rigorous interview process is conducted by experienced interviewers called Bar Raisers. They conduct interviews and lead debriefing sessions that enable them to make data-driven hiring decisions that align with Amazon’s strategic objectives. After interviews are completed, recruiters thoroughly evaluate candidates by reviewing feedback, aligning qualifications to role needs, and deciding on top finalists. Unfortunately, numerous talented software engineers are unable to pass this critical round and end up being rejected.

7. Offer Letter

After completing all rounds, the HR recruiter will extend an offer to you. The duration of this process is typically one week, although it may occasionally take longer. Depending on the current needs and requirements of the branch.

Conclusion

Amazon software developer interview questions cover a wide range of technical and behavioral aspects that you must be prepared to answer. From demonstrating coding skills and problem-solving abilities to showcasing leadership potential and cultural fitness, these questions provide insight into what it takes to succeed as an Amazon software developer. It is crucial to thoroughly research and practice these questions before the interview to stand out among other candidates.

If this has been helpful to you, leave us your feedback in the comment section below. Consider checking out this quick guide on mastering the art of acing your interview with proven tips.