TOP 50 Interview Questions on AWS Cloud Computing Services -S3

1. What is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 is object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of knowledge from anywhere on the web . It’s an easy storage service that gives a particularly durable, highly available, and infinitely scalable data storage infrastructure at very low costs.

2. What can I do with Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 provides an easy web service interface that you simply can use to store and retrieve any amount of knowledge , at any time, from anywhere on the online . Using this web service, you’ll easily build applications that make use of Internet storage. Since Amazon S3 is very scalable and you simply buy what you employ , you’ll start small and grow your application as you would like , with no compromise on performance or reliability.

Amazon S3 is additionally designed to be highly flexible. Store any type and amount of knowledge that you simply want; read an equivalent piece of knowledge 1,000,000 times or just for emergency disaster recovery; build an easy FTP application, or a classy web application like the Amazon.com retail internet site . Amazon S3 frees developers to specialise in innovation rather than deciding the way to store their data.

3. How am I able to start using Amazon S3?

You must have an Amazon Web Services account to access this service; if you are not already got one, you’ll be prompted to make one once you begin the Amazon S3 sign-up process. After signing up, please ask the Amazon S3 documentation and sample code within the Resource Center to start using Amazon S3.

4. How much data can I store in Amazon S3?

The total volume of knowledge and number of objects you’ll store are unlimited. Individual Amazon S3 objects can be home in size from a minimum of 0 bytes to a maximum of 5 terabytes. The largest object which will be uploaded during a single PUT is 5 gigabytes. For objects larger than 100 megabytes, customers should think about using the Multipart Upload capability.

5. What storage classes does Amazon S3 offer?

Amazon S3 offers a variety of storage classes designed for various use cases. S3 Intelligent-Tiering for data with unknown or changing access patterns; S3 Standard-Infrequent Access S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access S3 Zone-IA for long-lived, but less frequently accessed data; and Amazon S3 Glacier and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive for long-term archive and digital preservation. 

6. Does Amazon store its own data in Amazon S3?

Yes. Developers within Amazon use Amazon S3 for a good sort of projects. Many of those projects use Amazon S3 as their authoritative data store and believe it for business-critical operations.

7. How do I interface with Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 provides an easy , standards-based REST web services interface that’s designed to figure with any Internet-development toolkit. The operations are intentionally made simple to form it easy to feature new distribution protocols and functional layers.

8. Does Amazon S3 offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA)?

Yes. It provides for a service credit if a customer’s monthly uptime percentage is below our service commitment in any billing cycle.

9. Why do prices vary depending on which Amazon S3 Region I choose?

We charge less where our costs are less. For example, our costs are lower within the US East (Northern Virginia) Region than within the US West (Northern California) Region.

10. How secure is my data in Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 is secure by default. Amazon S3 resources access Only for the resource owners. Amazon S3 supports user authentication to regulate access to data. You can use access control mechanisms like bucket policies and Access Control Lists (ACLs) to selectively grant permissions to users and groups of users. The Amazon S3 console highlights your indicated source of public accessibility, publicly accessible buckets, and also warns you if changes to your bucket policies or bucket ACLs would make your bucket publicly accessible. You should enable Block Public Access for all accounts and buckets that you simply don’t want publicly accessible.

Using the HTTPS protocol you can securely upload and download your data to Amazon S3 via SSL endpoints. If you would like extra security you’ll use the Server-Side Encryption (SSE) choice to encrypt data stored at rest. You can configure S3 buckets to automatically encrypt objects before storing them, don’t have any encryption information if the incoming storage requests. Alternatively, you’ll use your own encryption libraries to encrypt data before storing it in Amazon S3.

11. Does Amazon S3 support data access auditing?

Yes, customers can optionally configure an Amazon S3 bucket to make access log records for all requests made against it. Alternatively, customers who got to capture IAM/user identity information in their logs can configure AWS CloudTrail Data Events.

These access log records are often used for audit purposes and contain details about the request, like the request type, the resources laid out in the request, and therefore the time and date the request was processed.

12. Can I comply with EU data privacy regulations using Amazon S3?

Customers can prefer to store all data within the EU by using the EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), or EU (Paris) region. It is your responsibility to ensure that you comply with EU privacy laws. 

13. What is an Amazon VPC Endpoint for Amazon S3?

An Amazon VPC Endpoint for Amazon S3 may be a logical entity within a VPC that permits connectivity only to S3. The VPC Endpoint routes requests to S3 and routes responses back to the VPC. For more information about VPC Endpoints, read Using VPC Endpoints.

14. Can I allow a specific Amazon VPC Endpoint access to my Amazon S3 bucket?

You can limit access to your bucket from a specific Amazon VPC Endpoint or a set of endpoints using Amazon S3 bucket policies. S3 bucket policies now support a condition, aws:sourceVpce, that you simply can use to limit access. For more details and example policies, read Using VPC Endpoints.

15. What is Access Analyzer for S3?

Access Analyzer for S3 may be a feature that monitors your access policies, ensuring that the policies provide only the intended access to your S3 resources. Access Analyzer for S3 evaluates your bucket access policies and enables you to get and swiftly remediate buckets with potentially unintended access.

16. How do I enable Access Analyzer for S3?

Visit the IAM console to enable the AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer, To get started with Access Analyzer for S3. When you do that , Access Analyzer for S3 will automatically be visible within the S3 Management Console.

Access Analyzer for S3 is out there at no additional cost within the S3 Management Console.

17. What checksums does Amazon S3 employ to detect data corruption?

Amazon S3 uses a mixture of Content-MD5 checksums and cyclic redundancy checks (CRCs) to detect data corruption. These checksums on data at rest and repairs any corruption using redundant data are performed on  Amazon S3. In addition, the service calculates checksums on all network traffic to detect corruption of knowledge packets when storing or retrieving data.

18. Can I set up a trash, recycle bin, or rollback window on my Amazon S3 objects to recover from deletes and overwrites?

You can use Lifecycle rules along with Versioning to implement a rollback window for your Amazon S3 objects. For example, with your versioning-enabled bucket, you can set up a rule that archives all of your previous versions to the lower-cost Glacier storage class and deletes them after 100 days, giving you a 100-day window to roll back any changes on your data while lowering your storage costs.

19. What is Amazon S3 Access Points?

Today, customers manage access to their S3 buckets using a single bucket policy that controls access for hundreds of applications with different permission levels.

Using shared data sets on S3 Amazon S3 Access Points simplifies managing data access at scale for applications. With S3 Access Points, you’ll now easily create many access points per bucket, representing a replacement way of provisioning access to shared data sets. Access Points provide a customized path into a bucket, with a singular hostname and access policy that enforces the precise permissions and network controls for any request made through the access point.

20. How do S3 Access Points work?

Each S3 Access Point is configured with an access policy specific to a use case or application, and a bucket can have hundreds of access points. For example, you can create an access point for your S3 bucket that grants access for groups of users or applications for your data lake. An Access Point could support a single user or application, or groups of users or applications, allowing separate management of each access point. Each access point is associated with a single bucket and contains a network origin control, and a Block Public Access control. For example, you can create an access point with a network origin control that only permits storage access from your Virtual Private Cloud, a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud. You can also create an access point with the access point policy configured to only allow access to objects with a defined prefix, such as “finance”.

21. What is the difference between a bucket and an access point?

A bucket is the logical storage container for your objects while an access point provides access to the bucket and its contents. An access point is a separate Amazon resource created for a bucket with an Amazon Resource Name (ARN), hostname (in the format of https://[access_point_name]-[account ID].s3-access point.[region].amazonaws.com), an access control policy, and a network origin control.

22. Does this change how I create buckets?

No. When you create a bucket, there will be no access points attached to the bucket.

23. What happens to my existing S3 buckets that do not have any access points attached to them?

You can continue to access existing buckets directly using the bucket hostname. These buckets without access points will continue to function the same way as they always have. No changes are needed to manage them.

24. Can I completely disable direct access to a bucket using the bucket hostname?

Not currently, but you can attach a bucket policy that rejects requests not made using an access point. Refer to the S3 Documentation for more details.

25. Can I replace or remove an access point from a bucket?

Yes. When you remove an access point, any access to the associated bucket through other access points, and through the bucket hostname, will not be disrupted.

26. What is the cost of Amazon S3 Access Points?

There is no additional charge for access points or buckets that use access points. Usual Amazon S3 request rates apply.

27. What is S3 Standard-Infrequent Access?

Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) is an Amazon S3 storage class for data that’s accessed less frequently but requires rapid access when needed. S3 Standard-IA offers the high durability, throughput, and low latency of the Amazon S3 Standard storage class, with a coffee per-GB storage price and per-GB retrieval fee. This combination of low cost and high performance make S3 Standard-IA ideal for long-term storage, backups, and as a knowledge store for disaster recovery. The S3 Standard-IA storage class is about at the thin level and may exist within the same bucket because the S3 Standard or S3 One Zone-IA storage classes, allowing you to use S3 Lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects between storage classes with none application changes.

28. Why would I choose to use S3 Standard-IA?

S3 Standard-IA is right for data that’s accessed less frequently, but requires rapid access when needed. S3 Standard-IA is ideally fitted to long-term file storage, older sync and share storage, and other aging data.

29. What performance does S3 Standard-IA offer?

S3 Standard-IA provides an equivalent performance because the S3 Standard and S3 One Zone-IA storage classes.

30. How durable and available is S3 Standard-IA?

S3 Standard-IA is designed for the same 99.999999999% durability as the S3 Standard and S3 Glacier storage classes. S3 Standard-IA is designed for 99.9% availability, and carries a service level agreement providing service credits if availability is less than our service commitment in any billing cycle.

31. How do I get my data into S3 Standard-IA?

There are two ways to urge data into S3 Standard-IA. You can directly PUT into S3 Standard-IA by specifying STANDARD_IA within the x-amz-storage-class header. From the S3 Standard to the S3 Standard-IA storage class You can also set Lifecycle policies to transition objects.

32. How am I charged for using S3 Standard-IA?

Please see the Amazon S3 pricing page for general information about S3 Standard-IA pricing.

33. Is there a minimum storage duration charge for S3 Standard-IA?

S3 Standard-IA is meant for long-lived but infrequently accessed data that’s retained for months or years. Data that’s deleted from S3 Standard-IA within 30 days are going to be charged for a full 30 days.

34. Why is Amazon Glacier now called Amazon S3 Glacier?

Long thought Customers have Amazon Glacier, our backup and archival storage service, as a storage class of Amazon S3. In fact, a very high percentage of the data stored in Amazon Glacier today comes directly from customers using S3 Lifecycle policies to move cooler data into Amazon Glacier. Now, Amazon Glacier is officially a part of S3 and can be referred to as Amazon S3 Glacier (S3 Glacier). All of the existing Glacier direct APIs continue to work just as they have, but we’ve now made it even easier to use the S3 APIs to store data in the S3 Glacier storage class.

35. What are S3 object tags?

S3 object tags are key-value pairs applied to S3 objects which may be created, updated or deleted at any time during the lifetime of the thing . With these, you’ll have the ability to create Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, set up S3 Lifecycle policies, and customize storage metrics. These object-level tags can then manage transitions between storage classes and expire objects within the background.

36. How do I apply object tags to my objects?

You can add tags to new objects once you upload them otherwise you can add them to existing objects. Up to 10 tags are often added to every S3 object and you’ll use either the AWS Management Console, the remainder API, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs to add object tags.

37. How much data can I retrieve from Amazon S3 Glacier for free?

You can retrieve 10GB of your Amazon S3 Glacier data per month for free with the AWS free tier. The free tier allowance can be used at any time during the month and applies to Amazon S3 Glacier Standard retrievals.

38. What is the backend infrastructure supporting the S3 Glacier storage class?

We prefer to focus on the customer outcomes of performance, durability, availability, and security. However, this question is often asked by our customers. We use a number of different technologies which allow us to offer the prices we do to our customers. S3 Glacier benefits from our ability to optimize the sequence of inputs and outputs to maximize efficiency accessing the underlying storage.

39. What is S3 Glacier Deep Archive?

S3 Glacier Deep Archive may be a new Amazon S3 storage class that gives secure and sturdy object storage for long-term retention of knowledge that’s accessed once or twice during a year. From just $0.00099 per GB-month (less than one-tenth of one cent, or about $1 per TB-month), S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest cost storage in the cloud, at prices significantly less than storing and maintaining data in on-premises mag tape libraries or archiving data off-site.

40. How does S3 Glacier Deep Archive differ from S3 Glacier?

S3 Glacier Deep Archive expands our data archiving offerings, enabling you to pick the optimal storage class supported storage and retrieval costs, and retrieval times. Choose S3 Glacier when you need to retrieve archived data typically in 1-5 minutes using Expedited retrievals. S3 Glacier Deep Archive, in contrast, is designed for colder data that is very unlikely to be accessed, but still requires long-term, durable storage. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is up to 75% less expensive than S3 Glacier and provides retrieval within 12 hours using the Standard retrieval speed. You may also reduce retrieval costs by selecting Bulk retrieval, which can return data within 48 hours.

41. How durable and available is S3 Glacier Deep Archive?

S3 Glacier Deep Archive is designed for the same 99.999999999% durability as the S3 Standard and S3 Glacier storage classes. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is designed for 99.99% availability, and carries a service level agreement for 99.9% availability that provides service credits if availability is less than our service commitment in any billing cycle.

42. What is S3 Select?

S3 Select is an Amazon S3 feature that makes it easy to retrieve specific data from the contents of an object using simple SQL expressions without having to retrieve the entire object. You can use S3 Select to retrieve a subset of data using SQL clauses, like SELECT and WHERE, from objects stored in CSV, JSON, or Apache Parquet format. It also works with objects that are compressed with BZIP2 or GZIP, and server-side encrypted objects.

43. What can I do with S3 Select?

You can use S3 Select to retrieve a smaller, targeted data set from an object using simple SQL statements. You can use S3 Select with AWS Lambda to build serverless applications that use S3 Select to efficiently and easily retrieve data from Amazon S3 instead of retrieving and processing the entire object. You can also use S3 Select with Big Data frameworks, such as Presto, Apache Hive, and Apache Spark to scan and filter the data in Amazon S3.

44. Why should I use S3 Select?

S3 Select provides a new way to retrieve specific data using SQL statements from the contents of an object stored in Amazon S3 without having to retrieve the entire object. S3 Select simplifies and improves the performance of scanning and filtering the contents of objects into a smaller, targeted dataset by up to 400%. With S3 Select, you can also perform operational investigations on log files in Amazon S3 without the need to operate or manage a compute cluster.

45. What are Amazon S3 Event Notifications?

Amazon S3 event notifications can be sent in response to actions in Amazon S3 like PUTs, POSTs, COPIEs, or DELETEs. Notification messages are often sent through either Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, or on to AWS Lambda.

46. What can I do with Amazon S3 event notifications?

It enables you to run workflows, send alerts, or perform other actions in response to changes in your objects stored in S3. You can use S3 event notifications to line up triggers to perform actions including transcoding media files once they are uploaded, processing data files once they become available, and synchronizing S3 objects with other data stores. You can also set up event notifications based on object name prefixes and suffixes. For example, you’ll prefer to receive notifications on object names that start with “images/.”

47. What is S3 Inventory?

The S3 Inventory report provides a scheduled alternative to Amazon S3’s synchronous List API. You can configure S3 Inventory to provide a CSV, ORC, or Parquet file output of your objects and their corresponding metadata on a daily or weekly basis for an S3 bucket or prefix. You can simplify and speed up business workflows and big data jobs with S3 Inventory. You can also use S3 inventory to verify encryption and replication status of your objects to meet business, compliance, and regulatory needs.

48. Can S3 Inventory report files be encrypted?

Yes, you can configure encryption of all files written by S3 inventory to be encrypted by SSE-S3 or SSE-KMS. For more information, refer to the user guide.

49. How do I use S3 Inventory?

You can use S3 Inventory as a direct input into your application workflows or Big Data jobs. You can also query S3 Inventory using Standard SQL language with Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and other tools such as Presto, Hive, and Spark.

50. What is S3 Transfer Acceleration?

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration enables easy, fast, and secure transfers of files over long distances between Amazon S3 bucket and client. Globally distributed AWS Edge Locations S3 Transfer Acceleration leverages Amazon CloudFront. data is routed to your Amazon S3 bucket over an optimized network path As data arrives at an AWS Edge Location.