Support Engineer – Technical Round 1:

1. Linux & Networking Questions

🔹 Basic Commands & System Monitoring:

1. How do you check CPU and memory usage on a Linux server?
2. What command would you use to find which process is using the most memory?
3. How do you check if a service is running on a Linux system?
4. What does the top command show, and how do you interpret its output?
5. What is the difference between df -h and du -sh?

🔹 Networking Fundamentals:
6. Explain how DNS works when you enter a URL in a browser.
7. What is the difference between TCP and UDP?
8. What is the difference between a public and a private IP address?
9. How do you check if a server is reachable?
10. What is a subnet mask, and why is it important?
11. What is the difference between a Security Group and Network ACL?
12. How do you troubleshoot network connectivity issues in Linux?

🔹 Security & Access Management:
13. How would you check which ports are open on a Linux server?
14. What is iptables, and how do you use it to allow or block traffic?
15. Explain the ssh command and how to troubleshoot SSH connection failures.

2. AWS & Cloud Support Questions

🔹 EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud):
16. What happens if an EC2 instance does not have a public IP? How can you connect to it?
17. You are unable to SSH into an EC2 instance. What steps will you take?
18. Explain the difference between an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and an Auto Scaling Group (ASG).
19. What are the different instance types in AWS?
20. Your EC2 instance is suddenly terminated. How do you troubleshoot it?

🔹 S3 (Simple Storage Service):
21. What are the different storage classes in S3?
22. What are bucket policies and ACLs? How do they differ?
23. You receive an “Access Denied” error when trying to access an S3 object. How do you fix it?

🔹 IAM (Identity & Access Management):
24. What is the difference between an IAM Role and an IAM User?
25. How do you restrict access to an S3 bucket using IAM policies?
26. What happens if an IAM user has multiple policies attached, one allowing access and one denying it?

🔹 Networking in AWS (VPC, Route 53, Security Groups):
27. How does an EC2 instance in a private subnet communicate with the internet?
28. What is a NAT Gateway, and when would you use it?
29. What is the difference between a Security Group and NACL?
30. How do you troubleshoot a website hosted on AWS that is not loading?

3. Troubleshooting Scenarios

🔹 EC2 Issues:
31. Your EC2 instance is running but not accessible via SSH. What do you do?
32. An application running on EC2 is extremely slow. How do you debug it?

🔹 Networking Issues:
33. A user reports they cannot access a website hosted on AWS. What do you check first?
34. Your application is giving 504 Gateway Timeout errors. How do you resolve it?
35. You cannot connect to an RDS database from your EC2 instance. What are the possible causes?

🔹 S3 & IAM Issues:
36. An S3 file is publicly accessible, but a user is still getting an Access Denied error. What could be wrong?
37. You need to allow an EC2 instance to write logs to an S3 bucket. How do you configure permissions?

💡 Tips to Prepare:

✅ Practice AWS CLI commands (aws ec2 describe-instances, aws s3 ls, etc.)
✅ Set up an AWS Free Tier account to test services hands-on
✅ Learn Linux system troubleshooting and networking concepts
✅ Read AWS troubleshooting case studies from the AWS Knowledge Center

Would you like to do a mock interview where I ask you questions and give feedback on your responses? 🚀

Scenario:

You’re interviewing for the Cloud Support Engineer role at Amazon, and this is Technical Round 1.

Interviewer (Me):

💬 Q1: You’re unable to SSH into an EC2 instance. What steps would you take to troubleshoot the issue?

👉 Please answer as if you’re explaining your thought process to an interviewer.

Comment your answer