AWS Solutions Architect Interview | All You Need To Know

everything you ever wanted to know about joining aws as a solutions architect so after this video went live many of you have been asking about how i got into aws others wanted to know more about the hiring process so i decided to make this video to try and shed some light on the interview process from my perspective as an aws solutions architect let's talk about the role first of all what is a solutions architect and an essay is someone responsible for the design of applications or services within an organization right uh typically an sa works side by side with a development team he or she must have a balanced mix of technical business people and process skills so a successful essay in my opinion finds ways ways to convey the same message using different words for different types of audiences and so at aws an essay is one of the most valuable resources and you hear andy jesse says that a lot of times but how does aws define the role of an sa and how does b and nsa at aws any different from being an ac at a different organization well um let me let me start by saying that you know it's it's a known fact that an essay at aws is expected to not only help their direct customers but also contribute to solving problems at a bigger scale so if you're an essay at aws you're expected to share blog posts templates reference architectures white papers podcasts books uh pretty much any mean you know of sharing a solution with a wider audience now let me give you some examples of problems you might be working on as a solutions architect i just want you to have an idea a customer of mine who's a big retail company uh has made many acquisitions recently then other companies from all over the world to expand their business footprint and so we've been working with them on a solution to build a resilient and reliable data ingestion pipeline so this pipeline's goal is to collect all kind of data from the different acquired companies and their departments um the collection needs needed to be in real time and then we'd run different algorithms right on all this data that we get and present the result under one single pane of glass giving stakeholders a precise look into the health of the business so data consolidation is one of the common problems probably you will be addressing as a solutions architect you know right now another customer of mine uh was looking to migrate their offering into a pure sas model and so we worked with their products uh their ops and their developer team to design the right sas solution for their for their needs and so we had to leverage many patterns uh in doing so and design many domains of their solutions um security and data isolation right-sizing and auto-scaling onboarding new tenants um we had to design solutions for tenant health and monitoring uh billing and metering and you know and so much more other domains and the end result was a scalable and resilient solution and it's it's always so much rewarding when you get that direct feedback uh from customers um you know and when you also get that direct feedback from the design you know you design it to scale you say you see it scaling right um so it is always you know rewarding uh when you see that with other customers i work to elaborate uh strategies allowing them to go global strategies that involve leveraging the multi-region aspects of the cloud we worked on data backups we worked on disaster recovery policies among others so these are just a few of the problems that you will be working on as a solutions architect all right so now that we got a little bit familiar with the role there is one last thing i need to touch on before we can move on uh to the interview something aws and amazon live by it's the 14 leadership principles and these are 14 principles heavily used within the company every day whether we're discussing ideas for new projects or deciding on the best approach to solving a problem it is just you know one of the things that makes amazon peculiar let's take the first one customer obsession at aws we literally literally obsess about our customers i cannot stress this enough we start with the customer's needs and work backwards from there 90 of our roadmap and features are actually a direct result of customer feedback another aspect of our customer's obsession principle is earning and and keeping customers trust for example it is fairly normal for an essay given a certain type of constraints to recommend the solution of one of our rivals if it means solving our customers problem let's take another lp frugal t which i can resume with a simple phrase accomplish more with less and so being frugal uh speaks to one's resourcefulness uh to one's self-efficiency and invention so you bet that cost optimization sits very high in the list of things essays are expected to include in their day-to-day considerations and you know i'll i'll just put some links in the description for where you can find more about the 14 lps of amazon and so with that we can start talking about the interview so interviewing at aws is no different than interviewing for some of the other big companies uh you know google microsoft facebook twitter yada yada yada in my case an aws agent reached out to me prior to the interview day uh to arrange the flights and accommodation but you know if you're interviewing during the pandemic then never mind you'll be able to go through all the interviews remotely uh we have processes for that so no worries at all i also had a couple of calls with my recruiter who explained uh what should i expect during the interview she mentioned how the different sessions will go and asked me to prepare for one hour presentation but we'll get to that in a minute she also asked me to review the 14 leadership principles and try to think about situations uh where i came across a few with them just you know to save some time uh during the interview day and in all fairness between the recruiter and the agent everything was taken care of and all i had to do was pretty much show up during the interview day and kick some ass now this might slightly vary but uh expect a combination of three elements uh during the interview day interview sessions with technical questions a white boarding session and a presentation so let's talk about the technical questions first during my interview day i've met with different people from different teams right i've met with social architects account managers also met you know i've also got interviewed by business people so i don't think you will have to pass those lead code programming questions that have nothing to do with reality right no one is going to ask you to explain um quantum electrodynamics in two minutes or or how many bricks are there in shanghai right um not for the sa roll anyway i mean i didn't no one asked me that um instead the technical questions i've had were around designing resilient highly available and scalable systems with a given set of constraints that touched on performance cost optimization latency reduction data sovereignty and regulation data encryption i mean you get it um so in every interview session the interviewers started by presenting themselves and setting the boundaries of the session and the nature of the questions and domains i was going to be tested on because you know you might have a whole interview session about security uh maybe a different session about sas workloads or disaster recovery maybe a session that would mix you know all of them in any way the interviewer will make sure to share this information with you so you'll know exactly what to expect now something to keep in mind your answers don't have to include aws services only for example if asked about a use case that involves event streaming you can of course mention a combination of aws lambda and amazon kinesis i mean lambda does even source mapping natively so you know it can read from the kinesis string but you can also mention apache kafka if that's what you're comfortable with the interviewers in my case made it super clear that they were interested in testing analytical uh design and and problem solving skills regardless of the tools i choose that doesn't mean uh you won't get questions about ew services right it's just that no one will ask you to recite by heart uh all ec2 instance types and their respective pricing right but expect questions such as um what are some of the security best practices from amazon ec2 for instance and you'd be expected to talk about i am roles uh lease privilege principles using iom policies automating the creation and rotation of access credentials you can also touch on you know how you'd use uh vpcs subnets security groups limit access all that good stuff you might also get questions about real situations you had to deal with so someone might ask tell me about a time in your career where you had to convince your boss they are making a wrong decision right or um have you ever had to motivate others um how did you do it and i want you to remember that an essay is a customer's facing role right so people and business skills are expected as well and for best addressing these type of questions i highly suggest the use of the star format that is situation task action and results and there is a ton of content out there to learn more about the star method so i'll you know i'll just link uh uh to them in the in the description as well here's a tip for you don't be afraid to say i don't know and this is actually should be um you know it should be the case everywhere uh uh because a more experienced person will be able to detect uh when you're trying to them um saying you know i don't know when obviously you don't know uh makes you gain some time since the interviewer will you know just move on to the next question uh giving you another chance uh to impress them but it also speaks to your character i think one of the simplest ways to gain the trust of not only your customers but people around you is you know simply to be honest all right let's talk about the whiteboard in session whiteboarding is a super important skill to master and one you will be using pretty much every day designing solutions on a whiteboard while collaborating with a customer and improving the design in real time is a super underappreciated skill but anyway expect a white boarding questions you know they will mimic a real life working scenario with a customer in their offices or remotely as we've gotten used to lately there is not much i can teach you about white boarding in this specific video but check out this guy's youtube channel um he has a few great videos on the matter and and i've also put some links uh in the description which takes us to the third part of the interview day the presentation so i remembered starting interviews at 9am and i believe at noon i was given a minute lunch break natural influence noon 11 30. it's it's accessory so after my lunch break i had a one hour time window to give a presentation about a problem i have solved before and the panel i had to present to included people with business and people with technical roles uh and my presentation had to include the company the uh the challenges both business and technical my approach and and and the solution that i suggested and an architecture diagram describing uh the solution uh also uh with a couple of slides that speaks onto the results that came to the company after my solution was adopted now i want you to remember to mention your reasons behind making the decisions you've made designing your solution so if you've chosen a certain ec2 instance type over another because you were trying to cut cost well now's the time to mention it and leverage the fact that you apply frugality right to your designs if you've made the decision to deploy in a certain region because of business requirements that's the moment to talk about it as well um you can also talk about how you were thinking big uh when you designed the solution see something if you've worked with me you've definitely heard me saying is i believe that building a solution is easy the cloud is here managed services exist frameworks exist patterns exist there's even the no code movement that's growing by the day allowing you to build you know full application without writing one line of code so building a solution is really not that difficult but building a solution that scales now that's something harder right it's it's a little bit harder but again building a solution that can be maintained for eight years right for 10 years a solution where you can switch technologies whenever you want that would survive switching teams now you know that's the hardest job of all some managers will tell you you know don't worry we'll just rewrite this app in two years anyway that's a red flag so anyway back to our topic if you took the time to think through your design and design it in a way that allows the solution to grow and survive business needs survive market changes survive team changes technology challenges take the time to mention how awesome your design is so there you have it for the interview day we covered the three types of sessions you'll go through technical questions white boarding and presentations and i want to finish by talking just a little bit more about the role of an essay at aws see we talked about how 90 of our roadmap is driven by customers and essays play a major role in collecting this feedback from customers and taking it back to the services team so in a way essays aws influence the roadmap of the 170 plus services aws offers today sa at aws also joined customers in planning and making strategic decisions for example when many countries went into lockdown because of kovite 19 we saw a big switch towards everything removed right remote education remote work and so many of our customers had to switch their offering towards a reboot model and essays were accompanying aws customers advising and helping at every step of this journey building plc's yes we do design an architecture that sometimes a poc is the best way to showcase a service right or or an aspect of a given service so there's still many many topics we need to touch on like the role of certifications and the hiring process but i'll be making more videos to address these subjects i didn't want to cram everything into one video so make sure to subscribe and hit the notification button if you don't want to miss them which brings us to the end of this video thank you all for watching and if you have any question make sure to use the comment section below i will definitely try to cover as many requests as i can thank you and see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: MecaHumArduino

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Keywords: AWS Solutions Architect Interview, Aws solutions archetect interview proccess, aws interview questions, aws interview questions and answers, aws interview questions and answers for experienced, aws interview questions for experienced, aws interview tips, aws solution architect certification, aws solution architect interview questions, aws solutions architect interview presentation, aws solutions architect interview questions, solution architect

Id: -92HD_Wv9Do

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Film-Greedy]

How long did it take you to acquire the AWS Solutions Architect cert? What path should a beginner take to get into this field?

By the way, awesome video! Love the interior design of your home.

[u/isbkch]

If you guys have any questions or wanted to know more about any specific subject, I'm all ears

[u/cataza]

What’s your daily work ? Sales, presentation, consult or coding ?