AWS Scenarios Scenarios
Real-world AWS scenario-based interview questions and answers — covering high availability, security, containers, databases, cost optimization, observability, and more.
Scenario Labs
Advanced
AwsDesign a Backup Strategy for a 10TB RDS PostgreSQL With 4-Hour RPO and 2-Hour RTO
Design a multi-layer backup strategy for a critical 10TB RDS PostgreSQL database including automated backups, cross-region snapshots, point-in-time recovery, and pre-warmed read replicas.
Advanced
AwsApplication Latency Spiked After Migrating EC2 to ECS Fargate
Your application's p99 latency increased 3× after moving from EC2 to ECS Fargate. Diagnose the root cause — cold starts, DNS delays, missing VPC endpoints, or undersized tasks.
Advanced
AwsSingle AZ Failure Took Down Black Friday — Root Cause & Fix
Your e-commerce application crashed during Black Friday because a single Availability Zone failed. Walk through what went wrong, the immediate fix, and how to prevent it permanently.
Advanced
AwsProduction RDS Ran Out of Storage at 3 AM — Incident Response and RCA
Walk through the full incident response when an RDS PostgreSQL instance runs out of storage, including immediate recovery, 5-why root cause analysis, and preventive controls.
Advanced
AwsMigrate from ECS Fargate to EKS With Zero Downtime
Walk through a phased migration strategy from ECS Fargate to Amazon EKS using the Strangler Fig pattern, Route53 weighted routing, and parallel validation.
Advanced
AwsImplement AWS Control Tower for a 20-Account Organization
Set up AWS Control Tower with Account Factory, custom guardrails via SCPs, account vending automation with AFT, and developer self-service sandbox accounts.
Advanced
AwsHandling Terraform State Drift in Production
AWS resources changed outside of Terraform — via Console, CLI, or another tool. Detect the drift, reconcile state, and prevent it from happening again.
Advanced
AwsEC2 Instance Communicating with Malicious IP — Incident Response
Your VPC flow logs show an EC2 instance sending traffic to a known malicious IP address. Walk through containment, forensic investigation, eradication, and prevention.
Advanced
AwsTerraform Plan Takes 45 Minutes — How to Fix It at Scale
Your team has 500+ Terraform resources and every plan takes 45 minutes, blocking deployments. Diagnose the root cause and implement state splitting, parallelism, and remote execution.
Advanced
AwsMigrate a Java Monolith From On-Premises to AWS With Minimal Downtime
Plan and execute a phased migration of a Java on-premises monolith to AWS using re-platform strategy, AWS DMS for database migration, and a 30-minute cutover window.
Advanced
AwsLambda Function Timing Out Processing Kinesis Stream Records
Debug intermittent Lambda timeouts on a Kinesis stream consumer. Investigate iterator age, cold starts, poison pill records, and implement BisectBatchOnFunctionError with DLQ.
Advanced
AwsEKS Pods Getting OOMKilled in Production — Diagnose and Fix
Your EKS pods are being OOMKilled frequently. Walk through diagnosing memory limits, finding leaks, using VPA recommendations, and implementing Karpenter for better bin-packing.
Advanced
AwsDynamoDB Hot Partition During a Flash Sale — Diagnose and Fix
Your DynamoDB table is experiencing hot partition issues during peak traffic. Debug using CloudWatch metrics, implement write sharding, DAX caching, and SQS buffering.
Advanced
AwsDeveloper Pushed AWS Credentials to Public GitHub — Incident Response
A developer accidentally committed live AWS access keys to a public GitHub repository. Walk through the immediate containment, investigation, and prevention strategy.
Advanced
AwsDesign an Observability Stack for 50+ Microservices on EKS
Build a production observability platform using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Tempo to cover metrics, logs, and traces for a 50-service EKS environment.
Advanced
AwsDesign an IAM Strategy for a 500-Engineer Organization With SOC2 & PCI-DSS Compliance
Build an enterprise IAM framework covering multi-account structure, SSO federation, permission boundaries, break-glass access, and SCPs for SOC2 and PCI-DSS compliance.
Advanced
AwsDesign a PCI-DSS Compliant VPC for a Multi-Tier Application
Design a VPC architecture with isolated PCI cardholder data environment (CDE), network segmentation using NACLs and Security Groups, WAF, and Shield Advanced.
Advanced
AwsDesign a Multi-Region AWS Architecture for 99.99% Uptime
Your company's e-commerce app runs in a single AWS region. The business demands 99.99% uptime with RTO of 15 minutes and RPO of 5 minutes. Design the architecture.
Advanced
AwsBuild a Zero-Downtime Deployment Pipeline for Microservices on EKS
Design a complete CI/CD pipeline for a microservices application on EKS with canary deployments, automated rollbacks, and zero downtime.
Advanced
AwsAWS Bill Jumped 40% Last Month — Investigate and Reduce Costs
Walk through a systematic cost investigation using Cost Explorer, Compute Optimizer, and Trusted Advisor. Implement savings via rightsizing, Spot, Savings Plans, and FinOps practices.
Intermediate
EC2EC2 Production Instance Unreachable — Diagnose and Recover
Your e-commerce site's EC2 instance stopped responding at 2 AM. Customers can't checkout. Walk through the full incident response from alert to resolution.