20 AWS Command Line Interface Interview Questions and Answers

The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a powerful tool that allows you to control AWS services from the command line. If you’re applying for a position that involves AWS, it’s likely that you’ll be asked questions about the CLI during your interview. In this article, we review some of the most common AWS CLI questions and provide tips on how to answer them.

AWS Command Line Interface Interview Questions and Answers

Here are 20 commonly asked AWS Command Line Interface interview questions and answers to prepare you for your interview:

1. What is the AWS CLI?

The AWS CLI is a command line interface that allows you to interact with AWS services. With the AWS CLI, you can manage Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, and more.

2. Can you explain what a command line interface (CLI) tool is?

A command line interface (CLI) tool is a type of software that allows users to interact with a computer by typing in commands, rather than using a graphical interface. This is in contrast to a graphical user interface (GUI), which uses pictures and icons to represent software and data.

3. How do you install and configure AWS CLI on Linux, Windows, macOS, or Unix based operating systems?

The AWS CLI is a tool that allows you to interact with AWS services from the command line. You can use it to manage your AWS resources, including creating and deleting resources, changing their properties, and monitoring their status.

To install the AWS CLI on your system, you will need to download the appropriate installer for your operating system from the AWS website. Once you have downloaded the installer, you will need to run it and follow the prompts to complete the installation.

Once the AWS CLI is installed, you will need to configure it with your AWS credentials. You can do this by running the aws configure command and entering your AWS access key ID and secret access key.

4. Can you provide examples of some common uses for the AWS Command Line Interface?

The AWS Command Line Interface can be used for a variety of tasks, such as managing Amazon EC2 instances, working with Amazon S3 buckets, and creating Amazon CloudFront distributions.

5. How would you use the AWS CLI to create an Amazon S3 bucket?

The AWS CLI command for creating an Amazon S3 bucket is “aws s3 mb”.

6. How can you use the AWS CLI to list all instances in your account with their instance ID, instance type, and private IP address?

You can use the following command:

aws ec2 describe-instances –query ‘Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId, InstanceType, PrivateIpAddress]’ –output text

This will give you a list of all instances in your account, along with their instance ID, instance type, and private IP address.

7. How can you use the AWS CLI to get information about a specific EBS volume?

You can use the AWS CLI to get information about a specific EBS volume by using the “describe-volumes” command.

8. How can you use the AWS CLI to get details about security groups associated with an EC2 Instance?

You can use the AWS CLI to get details about security groups associated with an EC2 Instance by using the “describe-instances” command.

9. How can you use the AWS CLI to find out the status of any running instances?

You can use the AWS CLI to find out the status of any running instances by using the “describe-instances” command.

10. How would you use the AWS CLI to determine if there are any changes pending on your RDS database?

You can use the AWS CLI to check the status of your RDS database by running the following command:

aws rds describe-db-instances –db-instance-identifier mydbinstance

This will return information about your RDS database, including the status of any pending changes.

11. How would you use the AWS CLI to monitor various metrics such as CPU utilization, network traffic etc. for your EC2 server?

You can use the AWS CLI to monitor various metrics for your EC2 server by using the “mon-get-stats” command. This command will allow you to specify the metric you want to monitor, the statistics you want to gather, and the period of time over which you want to gather the statistics.

12. Using the AWS CLI, how would you delete a specific object from an Amazon S3 Bucket?

The command you would use is “aws s3 rm”.

13. Using the AWS CLI, how would you download the most recent backup file from an Amazon S3 Bucket?

The following command would download the most recent backup file from an Amazon S3 Bucket:

aws s3 cp s3://bucket-name/file.txt . –recursive

14. What’s the difference between using “aws” and “aws s3api”?

The “aws” command is used for general AWS tasks, while “aws s3api” is used specifically for S3 tasks.

15. How can you use the AWS CLI to send HTTP GET requests to an Elastic Load Balancer?

You can use the AWS CLI to send HTTP GET requests to an Elastic Load Balancer by using the following command:

aws elbv2 describe-target-health –target-group-arn

16. How can you use the AWS CLI to generate pre-signed URLs for objects stored in S3 buckets?

You can use the “aws s3 presign” command to generate a pre-signed URL for an object stored in an S3 bucket. This URL can be used to access the object for a limited time, after which it will expire.

17. How would you set up multiple profiles with different credentials on your workstation?

You can set up multiple profiles by using the –profile flag with the AWS CLI. For example, you could use the following command to set up a profile named “dev” with the credentials from the file “credentials.ini”:

aws –profile dev configure –profile-name dev –credential-file credentials.ini

You could then use the following command to set up a profile named “prod” with the credentials from the file “credentials2.ini”:

aws –profile prod configure –profile-name prod –credential-file credentials2.ini

18. How can you use the aws ec2 describe-instances command to filter output by resource tag?

You can use the –filters option to specify a resource tag key and value that you want to use to filter the output of the describe-instances command. For example, the following command would only return information about EC2 instances that have a tag with the key “Name” and the value “MyInstance”:

aws ec2 describe-instances –filters “Name=tag:Name,Values=MyInstance”

19. Is it possible to copy files between two S3 buckets using the AWS CLI? If yes, then how?

Yes, it is possible to copy files between two S3 buckets using the AWS CLI. You can use the “aws s3 cp” command to do this.

20. What are some best practices when working with the AWS CLI?

Some best practices for working with the AWS CLI include using IAM roles to control access to AWS resources, using the AWS CLI in conjunction with AWS CloudFormation to manage infrastructure as code, and using the AWS CLI to automate repetitive tasks.