💼 AWS Interview Questions

AWS Interview Questions: 🎬 Interview Scenario: How Much Access Do You Give a CI Pipeline? AdministratorAccess (too broad) What Is Actually Needed?

🎬 Interview Scenario: How Much Access Do You Give a CI Pipeline?

AdministratorAccess (too broad)

What Is Actually Needed?

Interview question: "A CI pipeline needs to upload reports to S3 — what IAM permissions do you grant?" Easy answer: AdministratorAccess. But that's the WRONG answer.

AdministratorAccess also gives the pipeline the power to delete EC2 instances, create IAM users, and read EVERY S3 bucket — WAY more than needed just to upload a report.

The right question: what does the pipeline ACTUALLY do? It only writes reports to ONE bucket — nothing else.

A scoped-down policy is written: ONLY s3:PutObject, ONLY on the qa-reports bucket, on no other resource.

Final — the pipeline still works, but even if its credentials are stolen, an attacker can only write to one bucket, not touch the rest of the account. Interview lesson: least privilege isn't "make it work somehow", it's "grant only what's needed".

Answering "Why Did You Use AWS?" in an Interview

Don't just say "AWS is powerful"…

Don't just say "AWS is powerful" — make concrete which SERVICE you chose, for WHICH problem.

Describe a cost/benefit decision…

Describe a cost/benefit decision: "20 EC2 instances for 4 hours cost $12, a 3-month dedicated server would've cost $3000."

Describe a security/least-privilege decision…