What is AWS and what are its core services?
Why Interviewers Ask This
Interviewers use this question to quickly assess whether a candidate has the foundational knowledge required for AWS / Cloud Computing development. It reveals whether you understand the building blocks that more complex concepts rely on.
Answer
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's comprehensive cloud platform, launched in 2006 — the world's most widely adopted cloud. It offers 200+ fully featured services from data centers globally. Core service categories: Compute: EC2 (virtual servers), Lambda (serverless), ECS/EKS (containers), Fargate (serverless containers), Elastic Beanstalk (PaaS); Storage: S3 (object storage), EBS (block storage for EC2), EFS (managed NFS), Glacier (archival); Database: RDS (managed relational — MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server), Aurora (high-performance MySQL/PostgreSQL compatible), DynamoDB (NoSQL), ElastiCache (Redis/Memcached), Redshift (data warehouse); Networking: VPC (virtual private cloud), Route 53 (DNS), CloudFront (CDN), ELB (load balancing), API Gateway; Security/Identity: IAM (identity management), Cognito (user auth), KMS (key management), WAF (web application firewall), Shield (DDoS protection); Messaging: SQS (queue), SNS (pub/sub), EventBridge, Kinesis (streaming); DevOps: CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CloudFormation (IaC), CDK; Monitoring: CloudWatch (metrics, logs, alarms), CloudTrail (API audit), X-Ray (distributed tracing). AWS operates in 32 geographic Regions with 102 Availability Zones worldwide.
Pro Tip
If you're unsure about a detail, say so honestly and explain your reasoning. Interviewers respect candidates who can think through uncertainty rather than bluffing.