Amazon Cloud Support Engineer -I interview questions

Had a couple technical phone screens with current engineers, and then I was invited for a day of on-site interviews. The phone screens were covering pretty basic technical areas based on my previous experience. The engineer was very pleasant. He asked about FSMO roles in Active Directory, what are the aspects of setting up a VPN connection between two sites, what all happens when www.amazon.com is typed into a browser, and some basic firewall questions. On-site, I met with a couple engineers, and several managers. These were a mix of technical questions (describe how you'd set up a network with three locations, what is a GPO and how is it applied in AD, etc) and soft questions (Tell me about a time when doing things the normal way didn't work, Tell me about a time you came up against a problem you'd never seen before, etc). I thought the process was very thorough, but I never felt like I was being grilled. The people were all great.

You only need to know two things: 1] Their HR is just bunch of lazy ignorants. 2] You will be asked weird encyclopaedic questions from any possible IT industry (see phone interview below) - completely different questions then HR was telling me to prepare for. I was expecting to talk more about AWS. First, you will write simple test (roughly about 35-40 questions): ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * difference between ext2, ext3 * how to find out if web server listens on the port? - browser?, cURL?, telnet? * port DNS - 53 * port POP3 - 110 * port HTTP - 80 * what is UDP timeout value * 255.255.255.240 is /28 * what is DNS - domain name system * what is reverse DNS good for? * in Linux, you have plenty of space, but still cannot write on the drive, what could be the issue? - ran out of inodes * what is mysql dump * what is orphaned record in mysql - it no longer has a corresponding "parent" record * what is NULL in MySQL glossary * HTTP error 404 - not found * HTTP error 400 - bad request * How many VPN tunnels can you have without NAT * DNS AAAA - ipv6 * classes of private IP addresses * what does it mean if you have IP address of 169.XXXX - DHCP not working * Interior/exterior gateway routing protocols * ISS multiple web servers * what is GPO - group policy object * primary key in MySQL - database glossary question * what is /var folder usually for? * what is /opt folder usually for? * what is /bin folder usually for? * 2 questions about Active Directory Service Interfaces Editor (ADSI Edit) * essay "what is cloud computing?" * essay "what exactly happens when you type www.amazon.com into the browser?" Phone interview (with clearly Windows guy): ----------------------------------------------------- Explain what is the role you're applying about and how you understand it? Explain what the cloud is? Have you used any AWS services in the past? Did you hit any challenges along the way setting up those services? Something that you are pationate to learn more of AWS? Explain in simple terms what is virtualization How does the hypervisor work? Types of hypervisors? How does the "Live motion" in VMware work? Is there hardware component that must be shared across both clusters to make that work. What TCP/IP is? What a subnet mask is used for? How it works? What it's made up of? In class C space, how many host can you have in that space? Is there a special IP address that cannot be used? Any differences between TCP and UDP? Tell me about different DNS record types. Is it possible to overwrite the DNS record at the PC? What's an lmhosts file used for? What are different RAID levels you can use? And which one would you use for specific situation? What abour RAID5? Windows PC has an IP address 169.254.X.X. What does it typically mean and whit the cause? How would you troubleshoot it? What would you look for on the DHCP server? Is there any log you can look at? Windows Blue Screen of Death, what are the troubleshooting steps there? How to log in to a PC that might be bluescreening? When you press F8, there is an option "Last known good configuration" can you explain exactly what that is? There is a customer who used to be able to connect to a Windows server on the internet over remote desktop, they now report they are unable to do so. Can you explain what DCOM is and why it may not sometimes work? How would you start a windows service for remote machine over the network. Soft-skills questions: ------------------------- Customer reporting they've lost some business critical data. What would you be doing. You discover there was no backup and it is impossible to recover it. What would you be doing then? Are you able to tell me about specific time where you coached or mentored somebody in the past? Was it a formal training or informal training when you trained someone? Can you give me an example how you specifically learned rapidly in the past and how do you learn new technologies?