SRE Interview Questions for AWS Engineer

AWS Disaster Recovery (DR) Questions:

1. What is your approach to implementing Disaster Recovery (DR) for a critical application in AWS?
   • Follow-up: What are the different DR strategies you have used (e.g., backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, multi-site active-active)?
2. How would you design a cross-region disaster recovery solution for a multi-tier web application?
   • Follow-up: How would you ensure minimal downtime and data loss in the event of a regional failure?
3. How do you automate failover and recovery in AWS?
   • Follow-up: Which AWS services would you use to handle the automation (e.g., Route 53 health checks, AWS Lambda, AWS Backup)?
4. What are the key factors you consider when planning for RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) in AWS?
   • Follow-up: Can you share a specific example where you achieved aggressive RTO/RPO targets?
5. How do you ensure the consistency of databases across regions in a disaster recovery scenario?
   • Follow-up: How do you handle data replication and synchronization (e.g., using Amazon RDS cross-region replication, AWS DMS, etc.)?

EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) Questions:

1. How do you manage the availability and scalability of Kubernetes workloads on AWS EKS?
   • Follow-up: How do you configure auto-scaling for your Kubernetes pods using Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) or Cluster Autoscaler?
2. Explain how you secure an EKS cluster in AWS.
   • Follow-up: How do you implement role-based access control (RBAC), network policies, and secure communications between pods and services?
3. How do you monitor and troubleshoot an application running on EKS?
   • Follow-up: What tools do you use for monitoring (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch) and logging (e.g., Fluentd, ELK)?
4. How do you handle application deployment in an EKS cluster?
   • Follow-up: How do you manage canary or blue-green deployments within Kubernetes on EKS?
5. How do you manage disaster recovery for EKS-based applications across AWS regions?
   • Follow-up: How do you back up EKS configurations and persistent storage?

RDS (Relational Database Service) Questions:

1. How do you manage high availability for a relational database on AWS RDS?
   • Follow-up: What strategies do you use for failover and data replication (e.g., Multi-AZ, Read Replicas)?
2. Explain how you secure an RDS database in a production environment.
   • Follow-up: How do you manage encryption for data at rest and in transit, and how do you handle IAM policies and security groups?
3. How do you monitor the performance and health of RDS instances?
   • Follow-up: What are the key metrics you monitor (e.g., CPU utilization, database connections, IOPS), and how do you set up alerts using CloudWatch?
4. How do you handle backup and recovery for RDS databases?
   • Follow-up: How would you automate backups, and what is your approach to point-in-time recovery?
5. What is your strategy for scaling RDS in case of increasing workloads?
   • Follow-up: How do you manage horizontal scaling using read replicas, and when would you choose vertical scaling?

Application Performance and Availability Questions:

1. How do you ensure the performance and reliability of an application running in AWS?
   • Follow-up: What tools and strategies do you use for performance tuning (e.g., AWS X-Ray, CloudWatch, caching strategies)?
2. How do you monitor the performance of a microservices-based application in AWS?
   • Follow-up: What key metrics do you track for microservices, and how do you set up end-to-end tracing?
3. Explain how you handle application scaling for traffic spikes and high load scenarios.
   • Follow-up: How do you configure and tune AWS Auto Scaling, and what are the triggers you use for scaling decisions?
4. How do you ensure fault tolerance and high availability in a distributed application architecture on AWS?
   • Follow-up: How do you implement multi-AZ and multi-region deployments to mitigate risks?
5. How do you handle application versioning and zero-downtime deployments in a production environment?
   • Follow-up: How do you manage blue-green or canary deployments for minimizing downtime?

Route 53 (DNS and Traffic Management) Questions:

1. How do you use Route 53 to manage DNS and ensure high availability of your application?
   • Follow-up: How do you configure health checks and failover routing in Route 53 for disaster recovery?
2. Explain the different routing policies in Route 53 and how you would apply them for load balancing and disaster recovery.
   • Follow-up: Can you explain the difference between latency-based, geolocation, and weighted routing?
3. How would you implement global traffic distribution for an application using Route 53?
   • Follow-up: How do you ensure that users are routed to the nearest or healthiest endpoint?
4. How do you manage DNS failover in a multi-region setup with Route 53?
   • Follow-up: How do you integrate Route 53 with AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) or Application Load Balancer (ALB) for high availability?
5. How do you secure DNS records and prevent DNS hijacking in Route 53?
   • Follow-up: What is your experience with DNSSEC and how do you use it in AWS?

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Questions:

1. How do you ensure high availability and fault tolerance for an application deployed on EC2 instances?
   • Follow-up: How do you design EC2 architectures with Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) and Elastic Load Balancers (ELB)?
2. Explain how you monitor and manage the performance of EC2 instances in AWS.
   • Follow-up: What are the key EC2 metrics you monitor (e.g., CPU, network, memory) and how do you configure alarms and alerts?
3. How do you optimize EC2 costs in a large-scale deployment?
   • Follow-up: What techniques do you use for rightsizing, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances?
4. How do you ensure security for EC2 instances?
   • Follow-up: How do you manage key pairs, security groups, IAM roles, and OS-level security (patching, firewalls)?
5. How do you handle scaling and failover for EC2 instances?
   • Follow-up: How do you configure Auto Scaling Groups for EC2, and what are the scaling policies you use?

Auto Scaling Questions:

1. Explain how Auto Scaling works in AWS and how you configure it for EC2 instances.
   • Follow-up: How do you define the scaling policies and triggers (e.g., CPU utilization, custom CloudWatch metrics)?
2. How do you implement Auto Scaling for different AWS services (e.g., EC2, ECS, Lambda)?
   • Follow-up: Can you explain the differences between scheduled scaling, dynamic scaling, and predictive scaling?
3. How do you balance between cost and performance when using AWS Auto Scaling?
   • Follow-up: How do you ensure optimal resource utilization while minimizing costs?
4. What are the challenges in configuring Auto Scaling for an application that experiences unpredictable load?
   • Follow-up: How do you tune the scaling parameters (e.g., cooldown periods, step scaling, target tracking)?
5. How do you monitor and troubleshoot Auto Scaling issues in AWS?
   • Follow-up: What are the key metrics you monitor, and how do you handle under-provisioning or over-provisioning?

These questions are designed to evaluate an SRE engineer’s experience and expertise in managing AWS infrastructure and ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of critical applications. The key to success in these questions is demonstrating a deep understanding of AWS services, automation, monitoring, disaster recovery, and performance tuning strategies.

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