AWS Interview Questions for 2026

  ## AWS Interview Success: Beyond the Basics
  With AWS dominating the cloud market, interviews now focus on **Well-Architected designs**, **Serverless performance**, and **Cloud-native security**.

  ### Core Services & Connectivity
  1. **What is the difference between a Public Subnet and a Private Subnet?**
     - A public subnet has a route to an Internet Gateway, allowing direct external access. A private subnet uses a NAT Gateway for outbound traffic but remains inaccessible from the internet.
  2. **Explain AWS Lambda execution models.**
     - Synchronous (Request-Response), Asynchronous (Event-driven), and Polling (SQu/Kinesis).

  ### Architectural Design
  3. **How do you design for High Availability (HA) on AWS?**
     - Use Multi-AZ deployments, Auto Scaling Groups (ASG), Elastic Load Balancers (ELB), and global services like Route 53 or CloudFront.
  4. **What is S3 Versioning and why is it used?**
     - It keeps multiple versions of an object in the same bucket, providing protection against accidental deletes or overwrites.

  ### Security & Compliance
  5. **What is IAM (Identity and Access Management)?**
     - IAM enables you to securely control access to AWS services and resources for your users.
  6. **Explain AWS Shared Responsibility Model.**
     - AWS is responsible for security 'of' the cloud (global infrastructure), while the customer is responsible for security 'in' the cloud (data, OS, IAM).

  ### 2026 Focus: Sustainability & AI
  AWS is heavily promoting 'Sustainability' as a pillar. Be ready for questions on Graviton instances, Spot instance optimization, and integrating Bedrock for AI workloads.