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What are the Top 10 AWS jobs you can get with an AWS certification in 2022 plus AWS Interview Questions
AWS certifications are becoming increasingly popular as the demand for AWS-skilled workers continues to grow. AWS certifications show that an individual has the necessary skills to work with AWS technologies, which can be beneficial for both job seekers and employers. AWS-certified individuals can often command higher salaries and are more likely to be hired for AWS-related positions. So, what are the top 10 AWS jobs that you can get with an AWS certification?
AWS solutions architects are responsible for designing, implementing, and managing AWS solutions. They work closely with other teams to ensure that AWS solutions are designed and implemented correctly.
AWS Architects, AWS Cloud Architects, and AWS solutions architects spend their time architecting, building, and maintaining highly available, cost-efficient, and scalable AWS cloud environments. They also make recommendations regarding AWS toolsets and keep up with the latest in cloud computing.
Professional AWS cloud architects deliver technical architectures and lead implementation efforts, ensuring new technologies are successfully integrated into customer environments. This role works directly with customers and engineers, providing both technical leadership and an interface with client-side stakeholders.
AWS sysops administrators are responsible for managing and operating AWS systems. They work closely with AWS developers to ensure that systems are running smoothly and efficiently.
A Cloud Systems Administrator, or AWS SysOps administrator, is responsible for the effective provisioning, installation/configuration, operation, and maintenance of virtual systems, software, and related infrastructures. They also maintain analytics software and build dashboards for reporting.
AWS devops engineers are responsible for designing and implementing automated processes for Amazon Web Services. They work closely with other teams to ensure that processes are efficient and effective.
AWS DevOps engineers design AWS cloud solutions that impact and improve the business. They also perform server maintenance and implement any debugging or patching that may be necessary. Among other DevOps things!
AWS cloud engineers are responsible for designing, implementing, and managing cloud-based solutions using AWS technologies. They work closely with other teams to ensure that solutions are designed and implemented correctly.
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5. AWS Network Engineer:
AWS network engineers are responsible for designing, implementing, and managing networking solutions using AWS technologies. They work closely with other teams to ensure that networking solutions are designed and implemented correctly.
Cloud network specialists, engineers, and architects help organizations successfully design, build, and maintain cloud-native and hybrid networking infrastructures, including integrating existing networks with AWS cloud resources.
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AWS security engineers are responsible for ensuring the security of Amazon Web Services environments. They work closely with other teams to identify security risks and implement controls to mitigate those risks.
Cloud security engineers provide security for AWS systems, protect sensitive and confidential data, and ensure regulatory compliance by designing and implementing security controls according to the latest security best practices.
As a database administrator on Amazon Web Services (AWS), you’ll be responsible for setting up, maintaining, and securing databases hosted on the Amazon cloud platform. You’ll work closely with other teams to ensure that databases are properly configured and secured.
8. Cloud Support Engineer:
Support engineers are responsible for providing technical support to AWS customers. They work closely with customers to troubleshoot problems and provide resolution within agreed upon SLAs.
9. Sales Engineer:
Sales engineers are responsible for working with sales teams to generate new business opportunities through the use of AWS products and services .They must have a deep understanding of AWS products and how they can be used by potential customers to solve their business problems .
10. Cloud Developer
An AWS Developer builds software services and enterprise-level applications. Generally, previous experience working as a software developer and a working knowledge of the most common cloud orchestration tools is required to get and succeed at an AWS cloud developer job
Cloud consultants provide organizations with technical expertise and strategy in designing and deploying AWS cloud solutions or in consulting on specific issues such as performance, security, or data migration.
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The field of cloud computing will continue to grow and even more different types of jobs will surface in the future.
AWS certified professionals are in high demand across a variety of industries. AWS certs can open the door to a number of AWS jobs, including cloud engineer, solutions architect, and DevOps engineer.
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Through studying and practice, any of the listed jobs could becoming available to you if you pass your AWS certification exams. Educating yourself on AWS concepts plays a key role in furthering your career and receiving not only a higher salary, but a more engaging position.
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What is Problem Formulation in Machine Learning and Top 4 examples of Problem Formulation in Machine Learning?
Machine Learning (ML) is a field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that enables computers to learn from data, without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning algorithms build models based on sample data, known as “training data”, in order to make predictions or decisions, rather than following rules written by humans. Machine learning is closely related to and often overlaps with computational statistics; a discipline that also focuses on prediction-making through the use of computers. Machine learning can be applied in a wide variety of domains, such as medical diagnosis, stock trading, robot control, manufacturing and more.
The process of machine learning consists of several steps: first, data is collected; then, a model is selected or created; finally, the model is trained on the collected data and then applied to new data. This process is often referred to as the “machine learning pipeline”. Problem formulation is the second step in this pipeline and it consists of selecting or creating a suitable model for the task at hand and determining how to represent the collected data so that it can be used by the selected model. In other words, problem formulation is the process of taking a real-world problem and translating it into a format that can be solved by a machine learning algorithm.
There are many different types of machine learning problems, such as classification, regression, prediction and so on. The choice of which type of problem to formulate depends on the nature of the task at hand and the type of data available. For example, if we want to build a system that can automatically detect fraudulent credit card transactions, we would formulate a classification problem. On the other hand, if our goal is to predict the sale price of houses given information about their size, location and age, we would formulate a regression problem. In general, it is best to start with a simple problem formulation and then move on to more complex ones if needed.
Some common examples of problem formulations in machine learning are: – Classification: given an input data point (e.g., an image), predict its category label (e.g., dog vs cat). – Regression: given an input data point (e.g., size and location of a house), predict a continuous output value (e.g., sale price). – Prediction: given an input sequence (e.g., a series of past stock prices), predict the next value in the sequence (e.g., future stock price). – Anomaly detection: given an input data point (e.g., transaction details), decide whether it is normal or anomalous (i.e., fraudulent). – Recommendation: given information about users (e.g., age and gender) and items (e.g., books and movies), recommend items to users (e.g., suggest books for someone who likes romance novels). – Optimization: given a set of constraints (e.g., budget) and objectives (e.g., maximize profit), find the best solution (e.g., product mix).
Problem Formulation: What this pipeline phase entails and why it’s important
The problem formulation phase of the ML Pipeline is critical, and it’s where everything begins. Typically, this phase is kicked off with a question of some kind. Examples of these kinds of questions include: Could cars really drive themselves? What additional product should we offer someone as they checkout? How much storage will clients need from a data center at a given time?
The problem formulation phase starts by seeing a problem and thinking “what question, if I could answer it, would provide the most value to my business?” If I knew the next product a customer was going to buy, is that most valuable? If I knew what was going to be popular over the holidays, is that most valuable? If I better understood who my customers are, is that most valuable?
However, some problems are not so obvious. When sales drop, new competitors emerge, or there’s a big change to a company/team/org, it can be easy to say, “I see the problem!” But sometimes the problem isn’t so clear. Consider self-driving cars. How many people think to themselves, “driving cars is a huge problem”? Probably not many. In fact, there isn’t a problem in the traditional sense of the word but there is an opportunity. Creating self-driving cars is a huge opportunity. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem or challenge connected to that opportunity. How do you design a self-driving system? What data would you look at to inform the decisions you make? Will people purchase self-driving cars?
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Part of the problem formulation phase includes seeing where there are opportunities to use machine learning.
In the following practice examples, you are presented with four different business scenarios. For each scenario, consider the following questions:
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Is machine learning appropriate for this problem, and why or why not?
What is the ML problem if there is one, and what would a success metric look like?
What kind of ML problem is this?
Is the data appropriate?’
The solutions given in this article are one of the many ways you can formulate a business problem.
I) Amazon recently began advertising to its customers when they visit the company website. The Director in charge of the initiative wants the advertisements to be as tailored to the customer as possible. You will have access to all the data from the retail webpage, as well as all the customer data.
ML is appropriate because of the scale, variety and speed required. There are potentially thousands of ads and millions of customers that need to be served customized ads immediately as they arrive to the site.
The problem is ads that are not useful to customers are a wasted opportunity and a nuisance to customers, yet not serving ads at all is a wasted opportunity. So how does Amazon serve the most relevant advertisements to its retail customers?
Success would be the purchase of a product that was advertised.
This is a supervised learning problem because we have a labeled data point, our success metric, which is the purchase of a product.
This data is appropriate because it is both the retail webpage data as well as the customer data.
II) You’re a Senior Business Analyst at a social media company that focuses on streaming. Streamers use a combination of hashtags and predefined categories to be discoverable by your platform’s consumers. You ran an analysis on unique streamer counts by hashtags and categories over the last month and found that out of tens of thousands of streamers, almost all use only 40 hashtags and 10 categories despite innumerable hashtags and hundreds of categories. You presume the predefined categories don’t represent all the possibilities very well, and that streamers are simply picking the closest fit. You figure there are likely many categories and groupings of streamers that are not accounted for. So you collect a dataset that consists of all streamer profile descriptions (all text), all the historical chat information for each streamer, and all their videos that have been streamed.
ML is appropriate because of the scale and variability.
The problem is the content of streamers is not being represented by the existing categories. Success would be naturally grouping the streamers into categories based on content and seeing if those align with the hashtags and categories that are being commonly used. If they do not, then the streamers are not being well represented and you can use these groupings to create new categories.
There isn’t a specific outcome variable. There’s no target or label. So this is an unsupervised problem.
The data is appropriate.
III) You’re a headphone manufacturer who sells directly to big and small electronic stores. As an attempt to increase competitive pricing, Store 1 and Store 2 decided to put together the pricing details for all headphone manufacturers and their products (about 350 products) and conduct daily releases of the data. You will have all the specs from each manufacturer and their product’s pricing. Your sales have recently been dropping so your first concern is whether there are competing products that are priced lower than your flagship product.
ML is probably not necessary for this. You can just search the dataset to see which headphones are priced lower than the flagship, then compare their features and build quality.
IV) You’re a Senior Product Manager at a leading ridesharing company. You did some market research, collected customer feedback, and discovered that both customers and drivers are not happy with an app feature. This feature allows customers to place a pin exactly where they want to be picked up. The customers say drivers rarely stop at the pin location. Drivers say customers most often put the pin in a place they can’t stop. Your company has a relationship with the most used maps app for the driver’s navigation so you leverage this existing relationship to get direct, backend access to their data. This includes latitude and longitude, visual photos of each lat/long, traffic delay details, and regulation data if available (ie- No Parking zones, 3 minute parking zones, fire hydrants, etc.).
ML is appropriate because of the scale and automation involved. It’s not feasible to drive everywhere and write down all the places that are ok for pickup. However, maybe we can predict whether a location is ok for pickup.
The problem is drivers and customers are having poor experiences connecting for pickup, which is pushing customers away from the platform.
Success would be properly identifying appropriate pickup locations so they can be integrated into the feature.
This is a supervised learning problem even though there aren’t any labels, yet. Someone will have to go through a sample of the data to label where there are ok places to park and not park, giving the algorithms some target information.
The data is appropriate once a sample of the dataset has been labeled. There may be some other data that could be included too. What about asking UPS for driver stop information? Where do they stop?
In conclusion, problem formulation is an important step in the machine learning pipeline that should not be overlooked or underestimated. It can make or break a machine learning project; therefore, it is important to take care when formulating machine learning problems.”
AWS machine Learning Specialty Exam Prep MLS-C01
Step by Step Solution to a Machine Learning Problem – Feature Engineering
Feature Engineering is the act of reshaping and curating existing data to make patters more apparent. This process makes the data easier for an ML model to understand. Using knowledge of the data, features are engineered and tuned to make ML algorithms work more efficiently.
For this problem, imagine a scenario where you are running a real estate brokerage and you want to predict the selling price of a house. Using a specific county dataset and simple information (like the location, total square footage, and number of bedrooms), let’s practice training a baseline model, conducting feature engineering, and tuning a model to make a prediction.
First, load the dataset and take a look at its basic properties.
# Load the dataset import pandas as pd import boto3
df = pd.read_csv(“xxxxx_data_2.csv”) df.head()
housing dataset example: xxxxx_data_2.csv
Output:
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feature_engineering_dataset_example
This dataset has 21 columns:
id – Unique id number
date – Date of the house sale
price – Price the house sold for
bedrooms – Number of bedrooms
bathrooms – Number of bathrooms
sqft_living – Number of square feet of the living space
sqft_lot – Number of square feet of the lot
floors – Number of floors in the house
waterfront – Whether the home is on the waterfront
view – Number of lot sides with a view
condition – Condition of the house
grade – Classification by construction quality
sqft_above – Number of square feet above ground
sqft_basement – Number of square feet below ground
yr_built – Year built
yr_renovated – Year renovated
zipcode – ZIP code
lat – Latitude
long – Longitude
sqft_living15 – Number of square feet of living space in 2015 (can differ from sqft_living in the case of recent renovations)
sqrt_lot15 – Nnumber of square feet of lot space in 2015 (can differ from sqft_lot in the case of recent renovations)
This dataset is rich and provides a fantastic playground for the exploration of feature engineering. This exercise will focus on a small number of columns. If you are interested, you could return to this dataset later to practice feature engineering on the remaining columns.
A baseline model
Now, let’s train a baseline model.
People often look at square footage first when evaluating a home. We will do the same in the oflorur model and ask how well can the cost of the house be approximated based on this number alone. We will train a simple linear learner model (documentation). We will compare to this after finishing the feature engineering.
import sagemaker import numpy as np from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split import time
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t1 = time.time()
# Split training, validation, and test ys = np.array(df[‘price’]).astype(“float32”) xs = np.array(df[‘sqft_living’]).astype(“float32”).reshape(-1,1)
If you examine the quality metrics, you will see that the absolute loss is about $175,000.00. This tells us that the model is able to predict within an average of $175k of the true price. For a model based upon a single variable, this is not bad. Let’s try to do some feature engineering to improve on it.
Throughout the following work, we will constantly be adding to a dataframe called encoded. You will start by populating encoded with just the square footage you used previously.
encoded = df[[‘sqft_living’]].copy()
Categorical variables
Let’s start by including some categorical variables, beginning with simple binary variables.
The dataset has the waterfront feature, which is a binary variable. We should change the encoding from 'Y' and 'N' to 1 and 0. This can be done using the map function (documentation) provided by Pandas. It expects either a function to apply to that column or a dictionary to look up the correct transformation.
Binary categorical
Let’s write code to transform the waterfront variable into binary values. The skeleton has been provided below.
You can also encode many class categorical variables. Look at column condition, which gives a score of the quality of the house. Looking into the data source shows that the condition can be thought of as an ordinal categorical variable, so it makes sense to encode it with the order.
Ordinal categorical
Using the same method as in question 1, encode the ordinal categorical variable condition into the numerical range of 1 through 5.
A slightly more complex categorical variable is ZIP code. If you have worked with geospatial data, you may know that the full ZIP code is often too fine-grained to use as a feature on its own. However, there are only 7070 unique ZIP codes in this dataset, so we may use them.
However, we do not want to use unencoded ZIP codes. There is no reason that a larger ZIP code should correspond to a higher or lower price, but it is likely that particular ZIP codes would. This is the perfect case to perform one-hot encoding. You can use the get_dummies function (documentation) from Pandas to do this.
Nominal categorical
Using the Pandas get_dummies function, add columns to one-hot encode the ZIP code and add it to the dataset.
In this way, you may freely encode whatever categorical variables you wish. Be aware that for categorical variables with many categories, something will need to be done to reduce the number of columns created.
One additional technique, which is simple but can be highly successful, involves turning the ZIP code into a single numerical column by creating a single feature that is the average price of a home in that ZIP code. This is called target encoding.
To do this, use groupby (documentation) and mean (documentation) to first group the rows of the DataFrame by ZIP code and then take the mean of each group. The resulting object can be mapped over the ZIP code column to encode the feature.
Nominal categorical II
Complete the following code snippet to provide a target encoding for the ZIP code.
means = df.groupby(‘zipcode’)[‘price’].mean() encoded[‘zip_mean’] = df[‘zipcode’].map(means)
Normally, you only either one-hot encode or target encode. For this exercise, leave both in. In practice, you should try both, see which one performs better on a validation set, and then use that method.
Scaling
Take a look at the dataset. Print a summary of the encoded dataset using describe (documentation).
encoded.describe()
Scaling – summary of the encoded dataset using describe
One column ranges from 290290 to 1354013540 (sqft_living), another column ranges from 11 to 55 (condition), 7171 columns are all either 00 or 11 (one-hot encoded ZIP code), and then the final column ranges from a few hundred thousand to a couple million (zip_mean).
In a linear model, these will not be on equal footing. The sqft_living column will be approximately 1300013000 times easier for the model to find a pattern in than the other columns. To solve this, you often want to scale features to a standardized range. In this case, you will scale sqft_living to lie within 00 and 11.
Feature scaling
Fill in the code skeleton below to scale the column of the DataFrame to be between 00 and 11.
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Tech Jobs and Career at FAANG (now MAANGM): Facebook Meta Amazon Apple Netflix Google Microsoft
The FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft) are some of the most sought-after employers in the tech industry. They offer competitive salaries and benefits, and their employees are at the forefront of innovation.
The interview process for a job at a FAANG company is notoriously difficult. Candidates must be prepared to answer tough technical questions and demonstrate their problem-solving skills. The competition is fierce, but the rewards are worth it. Employees of FAANG companies enjoy perks like free food and transportation, and they often have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects.
If you’re interested in a career in tech, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft are great places to start your search. These companies are leaders in their field, and they offer endless opportunities for career growth.
Legend – Base / Stocks (Total over 4 years) / Sign On
Google (Alphabet)
– 145/270/30 (2017, L4) – 150/400/30 (2018, L4)
*Google’s target annual bonus is 15%. Vesting is monthly and has no cliff.
Facebook ( Meta) – 115/160/100 (2017, E3)
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*Facebook’s target annual bonus is 10% for E3 and E4. 15% for E5 and 20% for E6. Vesting is quarterly and has no cliff.
*Amazon stocks have a 5/15/40/40 vesting schedule and sign on is split almost evenly over the first two years*
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Microsoft – 106/120/15 (2016, SDE) – 107/90/35 (2016, SDE)
Twitter
– 130/200/20 (2016, SWE1)
– 160/600/50 (2017, SWE II)
Uber
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That’s my guess. It hasn’t changed when Google became Alphabet.
FAANG stared as FANG circa 2013. The 2nd A became customary around 2016 as it wasn’t clear whether A referred to Apple or Amazon. Originally, FANG meant “large public, fast growing tech companies”. Now in 2021, the scope of what FANG referred to just doesn’t correspond to these 5 companies.
From an investment perspective (which is the origin of FANG) Facebook stock has grown the slowest of the 5 companies over the past 5 years. And they’re all dwarfed by Tesla.
From an employment desirability perspective (which is the context where FAANG is most used today). Microsoft is very similar to the group. It wasn’t “cool” around 2013 but its stock actually did better than Facebook or Alphabet over the past five years. Other companies like Airbnb, Twitter or Salesforce offer the same value proposition to employees, that is stability and tradable equity as part of the compensation.
FAANG refers to a category more than a specific list of companies.
As a side note, I expect people to routinely call the company Facebook, just like most people still say Google when they really mean Alphabet.
The technical interviews at FAANG companies, in the grand scheme, aren’t very difficult.
People frequently fail FAANG interviews because they choke — they experience anxiety and just forget their knowledge — or they don’t know the material to begin with.
Inverting a binary tree, matching up pairs of brackets, finding the duplicate in an array of distinct integers, etc., are all weeder-questions that should be solvable in 5–10 minutes, if you’re the type to suffer from interview jitters. You should know which data structures to use, intuitively, and you should be doing prep work to cover your knowledge gaps if you don’t.
Harder questions will take longer, but ultimately, you’ll have 45 minutes or so to solve 2–3 questions.
Technical interviews at FAANG companies are only difficult if you have shaky computer science fundamentals. Luckily, the process for cracking the code interview *cough* is very well-documented, hence, you only need to follow the already established strategies. If you’re interested in maximizing income while prioritizing career growth, it behooves you to spend a month or two studying these strategies.
In FAANG interview process, when you fail at the 1st (or 2nd stage), does it mean that single interviewer on the respective stage failed you, or is it still team collaboration /hiring manager decision?
If you were dropped after doing a single interview (usually called a “screen”) it means that this interviewer gave negative feedback. I would guess at some companies this feedback is reviewed by the hiring manager, but mostly I think a recruiter will just reject if the interviewer recommends no hire. Even if a hiring manager looks at it, they would probably reject almost always if the feedback is negative. The purpose of the screen is to quickly evaluate if a person is worth interviewing in depth.
If you were rejected after a whole interview panel, probably a hiring manager or similar did look at the entire feedback, and much of the time there was a discussion where interviewers looked at the entire feedback as well and shared their thoughts. However, if the feedback was clearly negative, it could’ve been just a snap decision by a manager without much discussion. Source.
What do you do after you absolutely flop a technical interview?
Take care of yourself / don’t beat yourself up.
It happens. It happened to me, it happened to smarter people. It’s ok.
Two thoughts to help here –
Getting to the interview stage is already a huge achievement. If you are interviewed, this means that in the expert opinion of the recruiters, people that did tech screens etc. you stand a chance to pass the interview. You earned your place in the interviewee seat. This is an accomplishment you can be proud of.
The consequences are probably* negligible in the long run. There’s at least 100 very desirable tech companies to work at at a given moment. You didn’t get in 1% of them at a moment in time. Big deal. You can probably retry in a few months. It’s very likely that you get an equivalent or even better opportunity, and there’s no use imagining what would have happened if you had had that job. (*“probably” because if you’re under time pressure to get a job rapidly… it may sting differently. But hey, there’s still the first thought).
As a bonus, you’ll probably remember very well the question on which you failed. Source: Jerome Cukier
If an interviewer says “we’re still interviewing other candidates at the moment”, and then walks you out into the lobby, does that mean they want to hire you potentially after or no?
Here’s a secret. I have been a recruiter for 24 years and when they walk you out after your interview and tell you that they are still interviewing other candidates at the moment, it really means they’re still interviewing other candidates at the moment. There’s no secret language here to try to interpret. It means what it means. You will have to wait for them to tell you what next steps are for you because, again, they have other people to interview. By Leah Roth
The difficulty of the interview is going to vary more interviewer to interviewer, than company to company. Also, how difficult the questions are is not directly related to how selective the process is; the latter being heavily influenced by business factors currently affecting these companies and what are their current hiring plans.
Comments:
#1: So, how do know you this? You don’t. An affirmative answer to this question can only come from data.
#Answer #1: Fair question. I have been very involved in interviewing in a number of large tech cos. I have read, by now, thousands of interview debriefs. I have also interviewed a fair amount as a candidate, although I have not interviewed in each of the “FAANG” and I have definitely be more often on the interviewing side.
As such, I have seen for the same position, very easy questions and brutally difficult ones; I have seen very promising candidates not brought to onsite interviews because the hiring organization didn’t currently have resources to hire, but also ok-ish candidates given offers because the organization had trouble meeting their hiring targets. As a candidate I also experienced: easy interview exercises but no offer, very hard interview exercises and offer (with the caveat that I never know exactly how well I do, but I certainly can tell if a coding question or a system design question is easy or hard).
So. I am well aware that it’s still anecdotal evidence, but it’s still based on a fairly large sample of interviews and candidates.
#Reply to #1: Nope, you’re wrong. I have experience in the interview process at Amazon and Microsoft and have a different conclusion. Moreover, “experts” in lots of disparate fields make claims that are a bunch of bullcrap due to their own experiential biases. Additionally, you would need to be involved at all of the companies listed, not just some of the them, for that experience to be relevant in answering this question. We need to look at the data. If you don’t have data, I will not trust you just because of “your experience”. I don’t think it’s possible for Jerry C to have the necessary information to justify the confidence that is projected in this answer.
What you need is not so much a list of “incidents” but more generally some self-awareness on what you care about and how you’ve progressed and how you see your career.
The best source for this material is your performance reviews. Ideally you also kept some document about your career goals and/or conversation with your manager. (If you haven’t such documents, it’s never too late to start them!).
You should have 5–6 situations that are fairly recent and that you know on the back of your hand. These must include something difficult, and some of these situations must be focused on interpersonal relationships (or more generally, you should be aware of more situations that involved a difficult interpersonal relation). They may or may not have had a great outcome – it’s ok if you didn’t save the day. But you should always know the outcome both in terms of business and on your personal growth.
Once you have your set of situations and you can easily access these stories / effortlessly remember all details, you’ll find it much easier to answer any behavioural question.
In a software engineering interview, How should one answer the question, ‘Could you tell me about some of the technical challenges in your previous projects’?
To take a few steps back, there are 2 things that interviewers care about in behavioural interviews – whether the candidate has the right level, and whether they exhibit certain skillsets.
When you look at this question from the first angle, it’s important to be able to present hard problems on which it’s clear what the candidate’s personal contribution was. Typically, later projects are better for that than earlier ones.
Now, in terms of skillsets, this really depends company by company but typically, how well a candidate is able to describe a problem especially to someone with a different expertise, and whether they spontaneously go on to describe impact metrics, goes a long way.
So great answer: hard, recent, large scale project, that the candidate is able to contextualize (why was is important, why was it hard, what was at stake), where they are able to describe what they’ve done and what was the potential impact, and what were the actual consequences.
Not so great answer: a project that no one asked the candidate to do, but which they insisted on doing because they thought it was cool/interesting, on which they worked alone and which didn’t have any business impact. Source.
This question (like many other things in life) is much more complicated than it appears on the surface. That’s because it is conflating several very different issues, including:
What is retirement?
What is “early”?
At what age do most software engineers stop working in that role?
How long do employees stay on average at the FAANGs?
In the “old” days (let’s arbitrarily call that mid-20th century America), the typical worker was white, male and middle class, employed on location at a job for 40–50 hours a week. He began his working career at 18 (after high school) or 22 (after college), and worked continuously for a salary until the age of 65. At that time he retired (“stopped working”) and spent his remaining 5–10 years of life sitting at home watching tv or traveling to places that he had always wanted to visit.
That world has, to a large extent, been transmogrified over the past 50 years. People are working longer, changing employment more frequently, even changing careers and professions as technology and the economy change. The work force is increasingly diverse, and virtually all occupations are open to virtually all people. Over the past two years we have seen that an astonishing number of jobs can be done remotely, and on an asynchronous basis. And all of these changes have disproportionately affected software engineering.
So, let’s begin by laying out some facts:
When people plan to retire is a factor of their generation: Generation Y — ages 25 to 40 — plans to retire at an average age of 59. For Generation X — now 41 to 56 — the average age is 60. Baby boomers — who range from 57 to 75 — indicated they plan to work longer, with an average expected retirement age of 68.[1]
The average actual retirement age in the US is 62[2]
Most software engineers retire between the ages of 45 and 65, with less than 1% of developers working later than 65.[3]
But those numbers are misleading because many software engineers experience rapid career progression and move out of a pure development role long before they retire.
The average life expectancy in Silicon Valley is 85 years.[4]
The tenure of employment at the FAANGs is much shorter than than one might imagine. Unlike in the past, when a person might spend his or her entire career working for one or two employers, here are the average lengths of time that people work at the FAANGs: Facebook 2.5 years, Google 3.2 years, Apple 5 years.[5]
Therefore, if the question assumes that a software engineer gets hired at a FAANG company in his or her 20s, works there for 20 or 30 years as a coder, and then “retires early”, that is just not the way things work.
Much more likely is the scenario in which an engineer graduates from college at 21, gets a masters degree in computer science by 23, starts as a junior engineer at a small or large company for a few years, gets hired into a FAANG by their early 30s, spends 3–5 years coding there, is recruited to join a non-FAANG by their early 40s in a more senior role, and moves into management by their late 40s.
At that point things become a matter of personal preference: truly “retire”, start your own venture; invest in cryptocurrency; move up to senior management; begin a second career; etc.
The fact is that software engineering at a high level (such as would warrant employment at a FAANG in the first place) pays very well in relative terms, and with appropriate self-control and a moderate lifestyle would enable someone to “retire” at a relatively early age. But paradoxically, that same type of person is unlikely to do so.
Are companies like Google and Facebook heaven on earth in terms of workplaces?
No. In fact Google’s a really poor workplace by comparison with most others I’ve had in my career. Having a private office with a door you can close is a real boon to doing thoughtful, creative work, and having personal space so that you can feel psychologically safe is important too.
You don’t get any of that at Google, unless you’re a director or VP and your job function requires closed-door meetings. I have a very nice, state-of-the-art standing desk, with a state-of-the-art monitor, and the only way for me to avoid hearing my tech lead’s conversations is to put headphones on. (You can get very nice, state-of-the-art headphones, too.)
On the other hand, I also have regular access to great food, and an excellent gym, and all the La Croix water I can drink. I get to work on the most incredible technological platform on earth. And the money’s good. But heaven on earth? Nah. That’s one of the reasons the money’s good.
What is the starting salary of a software engineer at Google?
A new grad software engineer (L3) at Google makes a salary around $193,000 including stock compensation and bonus. The industry is getting a lot more competitive and top companies such as Google have to make offers with really generous stock packages. The below diagram shows a breakdown for the salary. View all the crowdsourced reports as well as other levels on Levels.fyi.
Hope that helps!
What is the best Google employee perk, and why?
Having recent left Google for a new startup I have to agree that the most-missed perk is the food. It’s not so much that it’s free — you can get lunch for about $10 per day so the cost is not a huge deal. There is simply nowhere you can go, even in a Silicon Valley city like Mountain View, that has healthy low-fat, varied choices that include features like edible fruits and vegetables. The food is even color-coded (red/yellow/green) based on how healthy it is (it always bothered me that the peanut-butter cups are red….).
Outside of Google you end up having muffins for breakfast and pizza for lunch. It tastes good but it’s not the same to your body.
But beyond just the food, the long term health impact of the set of perks at Google is huge. There is nothing better than being able to come in early, work out at the (free) gym by your office, shower (with towels provided as noted by others), then have eggs (or egg whites if you prefer) and toast (or one of a dozen other breakfasts). Source
Everyone has a study plan and list of resources they like to use. Different plans work for different people and there is no one size fits all.
This by no means is the only list of resources to join a larger technology company. But it is the list of resources I used myself to prepare for all my technology interviews.
Quick Background
I’m a current engineer at Microsoft who previously worked at Amazon for 1 year each respectively. I don’t have a master’s degree and I graduated from NYU, not an Ivy League. I’ll soon be joining Google and the following resources is how I got there.
Yes, the purchasable resources are affiliate links that help support this blog. Regardless, these are the resources I’ve used both purchasable and free.
This is the simplest book to get anyone started in studying for coding interviews.
If you’re an absolute beginner, I recommend you to start here. The questions have very details explanations that are easy to understand with basic knowledge of algorithms and data structures.
Elements of Programming Interviews (Python, Java, C++)
If you’re a little more experienced, every question in this book is at the interviewing level of all large technology companies.
If you’ve mastered the questions in this book, then you are more than ready for the average technology interview. The book is not as beginner friendly as CTCI but it does include a study plan depending on how much you need to prepare for your interviews. This is my personal favorite book I carried everywhere in university.
Blind has a list of 75 questions that is generally enough to solve most coding interviews. It’s a very curated and focused list for the most essential algorithms to leverage your time.
The playlist above is one of the clearest explanations I’ve ever seen and highly recommend if you need an explanation on any of the problems.
These problems are hard. Really hard for anyone who hasn’t practiced algorithms and is not beginner friendly. But if you are able to complete the sorting and searching section, you will be more capable than the average LeetCode user and be more than ready for your coding interview.
Consider this if you’re comfortable with LeetCode medium questions and find the questions in CTCI too easy.
This is the most common and best textbook anyone could use to learn algorithms. It’s also the textbook my university used personally to learn the core and essential algorithms to most coding problems.
The 4th edition was recently released and is still relevant to MIT students. If you need structure and a traditional classroom setting to study, follow MIT’s algorithm course here.
Graph theory does come up in interviews (and was a question I had at both Bloomberg and Google). Stay prepared and follow William Fiset’s graph theory explanation.
The diagrams are comprehensive and the step-by-step explanations are the best I’ve ever seen on the topic.
This handbook is for people who are strongly proficient with most Leetcode algorithms. It’s a free resource that strongly complements the CSES.fi curriculum.
For the most experienced algorithm enthusiasts, this book will cover every niche data structure and algorithm that could possibly be asked in any coding interview. This level of preparation is not generally needed for FAANG type companies but can show up if you’re considering hedge fund type companies.
In my opinion, you will be more than ready for any system design interview using these resources. The diagrams are clear and the explanations are as simple as possible in each book to help you learn system design concepts quickly.
I recommend the online course personally because yes the content from both books is great to own, it’s the online community discord you get access to that makes the yearly subscription worth it. The discord includes mock interview buddies, salary discussion, and over view on each system design topics to study with other users on.
The system design primer is the best free resource on all things system design. Dig deep into the Git repository and you will learn everything you need to know on system design. It’s all curated in a single repository and the clearly structured to give you a guided curriculum.
This quick overview on system design is great to review if you’re in a rush. The read typically takes users 45 minutes but you’ll be left knowing more system design than the average engineer.
Give it a read. If concepts are unclear or confusing, that might be a sign you’re not ready for interviews.
Regardless if you’re learning design patterns for the object-oriented programming interview, you will need to know design patterns as a software engineer at these large companies.
The book is the origin of the world’s most common design patterns today and showing proficiency in these for your object oriented interview is a requirement for certain large technology companies like Amazon.
The above resource is dense and written in language that’s hard to understand. While the original source material in design patterns is great, it doesn’t help much if it’s difficult to understand.
Consider Head First Design patterns to study a simplified explanation of those common design patterns. It might not be as in-depth as the original source material, but your understanding in design patterns will be more than enough to crack any object-oriented interview.
Closing Thoughts
Honestly, I did not go through all of these resources from cover to cover. If you do, I’m sure you wouldn’t need to study for another interview again. But likely we don’t have the time to do that so make sure that once you understand the core concepts in the any of the above categories that you invest your time moving on to the next.
Again, these are the resources I used and is not at all inclusive of anyone else’s study plan.
3 Years ago I applied to Google and was rejected immediately after the phone screen. Fast forward 2022 and was given another chance to re-interview. Here’s how the entire experience went.
Quick Background
I am currently a junior level software engineer at Microsoft (L60) with previous experience at Amazon (SDE I). My tenure is 1 year at Microsoft and 1 year at Amazon.
The first time I applied to Google was fall of my senior year of college at NYU. I failed the phone screen horribly and never thought I would join a company as competitive as Google. But I did not want to count myself out before even interviewing.
Recruiter Screen
I slowly built my LinkedIn to make sure recruiters would notice me whenever I wrote a LinkedIn post. With 15,000 followers at the time, it wasn’t too difficult to have one of them reach out with the chance to interview. A message came in my LinkedIn inbox and I responded promptly to schedule the initial recruiter call.
The chat was focused more on my previous experiences engineering and some of the projects I worked on. It was important to talk about what languages I was using and how much of my day was spent coding (70% of my day at Microsoft).
The recruiter was interested in having me follow through with a full-loop and asked when I would like to go through the process. It was important to me to ask what engineering level I was applying for. He shared it was L3/L4 role where the interviews would calibrate me depending on my performance. Knowing that, I mentioned I’d like to interview 1 month later and asked what the process looked like as explained to me.
Technical Phone Screen
6 Hour Virtual On-site a. 4 Technical Coding Interviews or 3 Technical Coding Interviews + 1 system design b. Behavioral “Googliness” interview
Phone Screen
Following the initial recruiter phone screen, I received an email from Google. It explained that I would be exempt from the Google Technical Phone Screen.
Why? I am personally not sure but it likely had to do with prior experience at large technology companies. I was personally surprised because to this day my first Google Phone Screen is still one of the toughest coding interviews I have ever been given.
It looked like that was as relevant as my current work experience and I didn’t have much to complain about moving quicker through the process and directly on-site.
Technical Onsite
Every coding question I had was a coding question that was either on LeetCode or could be solved with the patterns you find solving coding questions. Here’s what my experience for each of them looked like
Coding Interview #1
The interviewer looked like someone who was my age and likely joined Google directly after university. Maybe I wasn’t jealous. Maybe I was.
The question I was given was a string parsing Hash-Map question. Easily doable if you worked through a few medium questions regarding hash-maps and string parsing. But if you’re not careful, you may have fallen into a common trap.
Let me point it out for you. Abstract away the logic for tedious parsing logic by writing something like “parsingFunction()”. Otherwise 30 minutes may pass without you solving the question. I wrote a short “ToDo” mentioning I’d come back to it if the interviewer cared.
Spoiler: The interviewer didn’t care.
They lastly asked me to optimize with a heap and what the running time was. Unlike others who assert the running time, I solved for it and the interview concluded there.
Coding Interview #2
The interviewer who was more senior than the previous interviewer. I heard the coding question and thought the on-site was over.
The thing about some coding questions is whether you see the pattern for the algorithm or not. The recognizing the pattern for the algorithm can be much more difficult than actually writing the code for it. This was one of those interviews.
After hearing the questions I was thinking of ways to brute force the question or if there was a pattern I could see using smaller test cases. I wasn’t able to recognize it and eventually the interviewer told me what the pattern was.
I tried not to come off embarrassed but followed up with the algorithm to implement that pattern and the interviewer gave me the “go ahead” to code. I finished coding the pattern and answer the follow up by the interviewer on how to make my code modular to handle another requirement. This did not require implementation.
Afterwards was a discussion on time and space complexity and the interview was over.
Coding Interview #3
The interviewer was a mid-level engineer who was not as keen on chatting as much as the interviewers.
Some coding interviews are just one interview where you have to get the question correct or not. This one started off easy and iterated to be tougher.
My quick advice to anyone is to never come off arrogant for any coding question. You may know the question is easy and the interviewer likely does as well. Often times it’ll get harder and all that ego will go out the window. Go through the motions and communicate you always do for any other coding problem.
The problem given was directly on LeetCode and I felt more comfortable knowing I had solved this awhile ago before. If you’re familiar with “sliding window” then you more than likely would be able to solve it. But here’s where the challenge was.
After the warm-up question, the follow up had another requirement on top of the previous question. That follow up was more array manipulation. Finally the last iteration was shared.
I implemented the algorithm where Math.max was being called more than necessary. To me it didn’t affect the output of the algorithm and looked like it didn’t matter. But it mattered to the interviewer. I took that feedback and carefully implemented it the way the interviewer asked me to (whether it actually affected the algorithm or not).
Time and space complexity was solved and the interview was over.
Coding Interview #4
This was another interviewer who had joined Google after university and had the same work experience I did.
This prompt was not given to me and I expected I had to write down the details to the question myself. After asking some clarifying questions on what was and wasn’t in scope, I shared my algorithm.
The question was an object-oriented question to implement a graph. If you had taken any university course on graph theory, you would be more than prepared.
The interesting discussion was whether I had to implement the graph with BFS or DFS and explain the pro’s and con’s of each. Afterwards, I decided with BFS (because BFS is easier for me to implement) and the requirement followed up with taking K-most steps iterative.
I’m not sure if that’s the follow-up because I implemented it in BFS or if that was always the follow-up but I quickly adjusted the algorithm and solved for space and time complexity as always.
Googliness is just Google’s behavioral interview. Most questions were along the lines of
Tell me about yourself
What’s a project you worked on?
When was a time you implemented a change?
When was a time you dealt with a coworker who wasn’t pulling their weight?
To prepare for these, I’d recommend learning about the STAR format and outlining your work experiences if you can recall them before interviewing.
This seemed to go well but then I was given a question I didn’t expect. A product question and my thought process on how to work with teammates to answer the question.
My key point of advice: Nothing matters if the user doesn’t want it.
Emphasize how important user research is to build a product that a user will use otherwise everyone’s time could be better invested in other initiatives. Avoid jumping straight into designing the product and coordinating talks with product managers and UX designers.
Offer
2 weeks later, an informal offer was shared with me in my email.
Most of the interview didn’t not pertain to my previous experience directly. A systematic way of approaching, communicating, and implementing coding problems is enough without experience from Amazon/Microsoft.
That means you interviewed well. Someone else interviewed better for the first role, but the recruiter sees that there other roles for which you might be a better fit.
The eight interviews is a sign that someone in the process wanted you specifically for some role.
I think there may be two different things going on.
First, are you sure whether it’s a FAANG recruiter, or someone from an external sourcing firm which is retained by a FAANG company? I had this experience where someone reached out on LinkedIn and said they were recruiting for a Google role and passed along a job description. As I started asking them questions, it became clear that they just wanted me to fill out an application so that they can pass it to someone else. Now, as it happens, I am a former Google employee, so it quickly became clear that this person was not from Google at all, but just retained to source candidates. The role they wanted me to apply for was not in fact suitable, despite their claim that they reached out to me because I seemed like a good match.
If you are dealing with a case like this, probably what happens is that they source very broadly, basically spamming people, on the chance that some of the people they identify will in fact be a good fit. So they would solicit a resume, pass it to someone who is actually competent to judge, and that person would reject. And the sourcing firm will often ghost you at this point.
If you are dealing with an actual internal recruiter, I think it can be a similar situation. A recruiter often doesn’t really know if you are a fit or not, and it will often be some technical person who decides. That person may spend 30 seconds on your resume and say “no”. And positions get filled too, which would cause everyone in the pipeline to become irrelevant.
In such cases there is no advantage for the recruiter to further interact with you. Now, every place I worked with, I am pretty sure, had a policy that if a recruiter interacted with the candidate at all, they were supposed to formally reject them (via email or phone). But I imagine there’s very little incentive for a recruiter to do it, so they often don’t. And as a candidate, you don’t really have any way to complain about it to the company, unless you have a friend or colleague on the inside. If you do, I suggest you ask them, and it may do some good, if not to you (you are rejected either way), at least to the next applicant.
It’s not actually a line of code, so to speak, but lines of code.
I work in Salesforce, and for those who are not familiar with its cloud architecture, a component from QA could be moved to production only if the overall test coverage of the production is 75% or more. Meaning, if the total number of lines of code across all components, including the newly introduced ones, is 10000, enough test classes must be written with appropriate test scenarios so as to cover at least 7500 lines of the lump. This rule is enforced by Salesforce itself, so there’s no going around it. Asserts, on the other hand, could be done without.
If the movement of your components causes a shift in balance in production and tips its overall coverage to below 75%, you are supposed to work on the new components and raise their coverage before deployment. A nightmare of sorts, because there is a good chance your code is all clean and the issue occurs only because of a history of dirty code that had already gone in over years to drag the overall coverage to its teetering edges.
Someone in my previous company found out a sneaky way to smuggle in some code of his (or hers) without having to worry about this problem.
So this is simple math, right? If you have got 5000 lines of code, 3750 must be covered. But what if I have managed to cover only 2500 (50%) and my deadline is dangerously close?
Simple. I add 5000 lines of unnecessary code that I can surely cover by just one function call, so that the overall line number now is 10000 and covered lines are 7500, making my coverage percentage a sweet 75.
For this purpose they introduced a few full classes with a lone method in each of them. The method starts with,
Integer i = 0;
and continues with a repetition of the following line thousands of times.
i++;
And they had the audacity to copy and paste this repetitive ‘code’ throughout a bulky method and across classes in such a reckless manner that you could see a misplaced tab in first line replicated exactly in every 100th line or so.
Now all that is left for you to do is call this method in a test class, and you can cover scores of lines without breaking a sweat. All the code that actually matters may lie untested in automated coverage check, glaring red if one should care to take a look at, but you have effectively hoodwinked Salesforce deployment mechanism.
And the aftermath is even crazier. Seeing the way hoards of components could be moved in without having to embark on the tedious process of writing test classes, this technique acquired a status equivalent to ‘Salesforce best practices’ in our practice. In almost all the main orgs, if you search for it, you can find a class with streams of ‘i++;’ flowing along the screen for as far as you have the patience to scroll down.
Well, these cloaked dastards remained undetected for years before some of the untested scenarios started reeking. More sensible developers fished out the ‘i++;’ classes, raised the alarm and got down to clean up the mess. Just removing those classes drove the overall production coverage to abysmal low, preventing any form of interaction with production. What can I say, that kept many of us busy for at least a month.
I wouldn’t call the ‘developers’ that put this code in dumb. I would rather go for ‘wicked’. The higher heads and testers who didn’t care to look while this passed under their noses do qualify as dumb.
And the code… Man, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.
If you are in the pipeline and you have interviews scheduled, then your recruiter will know exactly what loop will be set up for you and what kind of questions you may have. Recruiters try to get their candidates all the information they need to approach the interviews at the top of their potential, so ask the everything you need to know.
The actual answer depends on the candidate level and profile, the composition of the interviews is pretty much bespoke.
Dev: Alright, let the competition begin! Startup A: We will give you 50% of the revenue! Startup B: To hell with it, we will give you 100%! Startup A: Eh… we will give you 150%!
TL;DR: Nearly impossible. If you are a Google-sized company, of course. Totally impossible in other cases.
I run an outsourcing company. Our statistics so far:
500 CVs viewed per month
50 interview invitations sent per month
10 interviews conducted per month
1 job offer made (and usually refused) per month
And here we are looking for a mid-level developers in Russia.
Initially we wanted to hire some top-notch engineers and were ready to pay “any sum of money that would fit on the check”. We sent many invitations. Best people laughed at us and didn’t bother. Those who agreed – knew nothing. After that we had to shift our expectations greatly.
Still, we manage to find good developers from time to time. None of them can be considered super-expert, but as a team they cooperate extremely effectively, get the job done and all of them have that engineering spirit and innate curiosity that causes them to improve.
It takes constant human effort to keep sites like Google and Gmail online. Right now a Google engineer is fixing something that no one will ever know was broken. Some server somewhere is running out of memory, a fiber link has gone down, or a new release has a problem and needs to be rolled back. There are careful procedures, early warnings, and multiple layers of redundancy to ensure that problems never become visible to end users, but.
Sometimes problems do become visible but not in a way that an individual user can attribute to the site. A request might not get a prompt response, or any at all, but the user will probably blame the internet or their computer, not the site. Google itself is very rarely glitchy, but services like image search do sometimes have user visible problems.
And then of course, very rarely, a giant outage brings down something giant like YouTube or Google Cloud. But if it weren’t for an army of very smart, very diligent people, outages would happen much more often.
It’s what they don’t understand. 10x software engineers don’t really understand their job description.
They tend to think all these other things are their responsibility. And they don’t necessarily know why they’re doing all these other things. They just sense that it’s the right thing to do. If they spot something is wrong, they will just fix it. Sometimes it even seems like they’re not in control of what they do. It’s like a conscientiousness overdose.
10x engineers are often all over the code base. It is like they had no idea they were just part of one eng team.
I don’t think the premise behind the question is entirely true. These companies rely completely on programming problems with junior candidates that are not expected to have significant experience . Senior candidates do, in fact, get assessed based on their experience, although it might not always feel like it.
Let me illustrate this with an interview process I went through when interviewing for one of the aforementioned companies (AFAIK it’s typical for all the above). After the phone screen, there was a phone site interview with 5 consecutive interviews – 2 whiteboard coding + 2 whiteboard architecture problems + 1 behaviour interview. On the surface, it looks like experience doesn’t play a part, but, SURPRISE, experience and past projects play part in 3 interviews out of 5. A large part of the behavioural interview was actually discussing past projects and various decisions. As for the architecture problems – it’s true that the problem discussed is a new one, but those are essentially open ended questions, and the candidates experience (or lack thereof) clearly shines through. Unlike the coding exercises, these questions are almost impossible to solve without tackling something similar in the past.
Now, here a few reasons to why the emphasis is still on solving new problems and not diving into the candidates home territory, in no particular order:
Companies do not want to pass over strong candidates that just happen to be working on some boring stuff.
Most times companies do not want to clone a system that the candidate has worked on, so the ability to learn from experience, and apply it to new problems is much more valuable.
When the interviewer asks different candidates to design the same system, they can easily compare different candidates against one another. The interviewer is also guaranteed to have a deep understating of the problem they want the candidate to solve.
People can exaggerate (if not outright lie) their role in working on a particular project. This might be hard to catch-on in one hour, so it’s to avoid in the first place.
(This one is a minor concern, but still) Large companies hire by committee, where interviewers are gathered from the whole company. The fact that they shouldn’t discuss previous projects, removes the need to coordinate on questions, by preventing a situation where two interviewers accidentally end up talking about the same system, and essentially doing the interview twice.
Originally Answered: What can I, currently 17 years old, do to become an engineer/entrepreneur like Elon Musk?
This is a quick recap of my earlier response to a similar question on Quora:
I would recommend that you take a close look at the larger scheme of things in your life, by spending some time and effort to design your life blueprint, using Elon Musk as your inspiration and/or visual model.
By the way, here’s my quick snapshot of his beliefs and values:
1) Focus on something that has high value to someone else;
2) Go back to first principles, so as to understand things more deeply and widely, especially their implications;
3) Be very rigourous in your own self analysis; constantly question yourself, especially on the practicality of the idea(s) you have;
4) Be extremely tenacious in your pursuits;
5) Put in 100 hours or more every week, as sweat equity of intense efforts and focused execution count like hell;
6) Constantly think about how you could be doing better, faster, cheaper and smarter;
7) Relentlessly and ruthlessly think about how to make a better world;
Again, here’s my quick snapshot of his unique traits and characteristics:
ix) spiritual development (including contributions to society, volunteering, etc.);
2) Translate all your long-range goals and objectives in (1) into specific, prioritised and executable tasks that you need to accomplish daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and even annually;
3) With the end in mind as formulated in (1) and (2), work out your start-point, endpoint and the developmental path of transition points in between;
4) Pinpoint specific tasks that you need to accomplish at each transition point till the endpoint;
5) Establish metrics to measure your progress, or milestone accomplishments;
6) Assign and allocate personal accountability, as some tasks may need to be shared, e.g. with team members, if any;
7) Identify and marshal resources that are required to get all the work done;
[I like to call them the 7 M’s: Money; Methods; Men; Machines; Materials; Metrics; and Mojo!]
8) Schedule a timetable for completion of each predefined task;
9) Highlight potential problems or challenges that may crop up along the Highway of Life, as you traverse on it;
10) Brainstorm a slew of possible strategies to deal with (9);
This is your contingency plan.
11) Institute some form of system, like a visual Pert Chart, to track, control and monitor your forward trajectory, as laid out in your systematic game plan, in conjunction with all the critical elements of (4) to (10);
12) Follow-up massively and follow-through consistently your systematic game plan;
13) Put in your sweat equity of intense effort and focused execution;
14) Stay focused on your strategic objectives, but remain flexible in your tactical execution;
You aren’t so stressed and nervous when you are practicing LeetCode, because your career doesn’t depend on how well you do while solving LeetCode.
When solving LeetCode, you aren’t expected to talk to the interviewer to get clarifications on the problem statement or input format. You aren’t expected to get hints and guidance from the interviewer, and to be able to pick them up. You aren’t expected to be able to communicate with other human beings in general, and to be able to talk about technical details of your solution in particular. You aren’t expected to be able to prove and explain your idea in clear, structured way. You aren’t expected to know how to test your solution, how to scale it, or how to adjust it to some unexpected additional constraints or changes. You may not be able to simply get constraints on input size and use them to figure out what is the complexity of expected solution. You have limited amount of time, so if you slowly got through most of the LeetCode, you may still struggle to get stuff done in 45 minutes. And many more… For all these things, you don’t need them to solve LeetCode, so you usually don’t practice them by solving LeetCode; you may not even know that you need to improve something there.
To sum it up: two main reasons are:
Higher stakes.
Lack of skills that are required at typical Google/Facebook interview, but not covered by solving LeetCode problems on your own.
You should also keep in mind that LeetCode isn’t the list of problems being asked at Google or Facebook interviews. If anything, it is more of a list of problems that you aren’t going to be asked, because companies ban leaked questions 🙂 You may get a question that is surprisingly different from what you did at LeetCode.
Originally Answered: I failed all technical interviews at Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple. Should I give up the big companies and try some small startups?
Wanted to go Anonymous for obvious reasons.
Reality is stranger than Fiction.
In 2010: After graduation, I was interviewed by one of the companies mentioned above for an entry level Software Engineering Role. During the interview, the person tells me: ‘You can never be a Software Engineer’. Seriously? Of-course I didn’t get hired.
In 2013: I interviewed again with the same company but for a different department and got hired.
Fast Forward to 2016 Dec: I received 2 promotions since 2013 and now I am above the grade level of the guy who interviewed me. I remember the date, Dec 14 2016, I went to his desk and asked him to go out for a coffee. Initially he didn’t recognize me but later he did and we went out for a coffee. Needless to say, he was apologetic for his behavior.
For me, it felt REALLY GOOD. Its a story I’ll tell my Grandkids! 🙂
Big tech interviews at FAANG companies are intended to determine – as much as possible – whether you’ve got the knowledge and attributes to be a successful employee. A big part of that for software developers is familiarity with a good set of data structures and algorithms. Interview loops vary, but a good working knowledge of common algorithms will almost always come in handy for both interviews and the job.
Algorithm-related to questions I was asked in my first five years, or that I ask people with less than 5 years: sorting, searching, applying hashes correctly, mapping, medians and averages, trees, linked lists, traveling salesman (I was asked this a couple times, never asked it), and many more.
I never recommend an exhaustive months-long review before an interview, but it’s always a good idea to make sure you’re current on your basics: hash tables and sets, string operations, working with arrays and vectors and lists, binary trees, and linked lists.
Compared to other modern languages, python has two features that make it attractive, and then also make learning a second language difficult if you started with python. The first is that, despite some minor steps to allow annotation, python is loosely and dynamically typed. The second is that python provides a lot of syntactic sugar; this is shorthand, like a map function, where you can apply a function to each element in a data structure.
Do these features make it harder to switch to another language that is strongly and statically typed? For some people, yes, and for others, no.
Some programmers are naturally curious what’s happening under the hood. How are data being represented and manipulated? Why does an operation produce one type of result in one situation, and another type of result in another situation? If you are the kind of person who asks these questions, you are more likely to have an easier time transitioning. If you are a person who finds these questions uninteresting or even distasteful, transitioning to another language can be very painful.
I have excellent skills and experience on my resume, which makes it stand out.
Seriously, there is no magical spell that will make a crappy resume attractive to recruiters. Most people give up believing in magic after they are 5 or 6 years old. A software engineer who believes in magic is not a good candidate for hire.
All those complaints you have about their products? The people working there complain about the same exact things. Microsoft employees complain about how slow Outlook is. Google employees complain about everything changing all the time. Salesforce employees complain about how hard our products are to use.
So why don’t we do something about it? There are a few possible answers:
We are actively doing something about it right now and it will be fixed soon.
The problem is technically difficult to fix. For example, it’s currently beyond the state of the art to change the wake word (“Alexa”/”OK Google”) to a user-selected word. A variation of this is the problem that’s more expensive to fix than the amount of annoyance saved.
The team responsible for that functionality has problems. Maybe they have a bad manager or have been reorged a lot, and as a result they haven’t been doing a good job. Even once the problem is solved, it can take a long time to catch up.
The problem is related to making money. For example, Microsoft used to have a million different versions of Office, each including different programs and license restrictions. It was super confusing. But the bean counters knew how much extra money the company made from these bundles, compared to a simpler scheme, and it was a lot. So the confusion stayed.
The problem is cultural. For example, Google historically made its reputation by offering new features constantly. Everything about the culture was geared towards change and innovation. When they started making enterprise products, that cultural became baggage.
But none of that keeps the employees from complaining.
That’s perhaps the first stage of learning, recitation.
Using the four-stage model of learning that goes
Unconscious Incompetence
Conscious Incompetence
Conscious Competence
Unconscious Competence
that’s maybe a 2 to 2.5 there. You know you haven’t really understood why you are doing things that way and without detailed step-by-step, you don’t yet know how you would design those solutions.
You need to step back a bit, by reviewing some working solutions and then using those as examples of fundamentals. That might mean observing that there is a for() loop, for example – why? What is it there for? How does it work? What would happen if you changed it? If you wanted to use a for loop to write out “hello!” 8 times, how would you code that?
As you build up the knowledge of these fundamental steps, you’ll be able to see why they were strung together the way they were.
Next, practice solving smaller challenges. Use each of these tiny steps to create a solution – one where you understand why you chose the pieces you chose, what part of the problem it solves and how.
Early 2020 has been a very rough period for many companies who laid off tons of good people, many of which have bounced to a company who was not a good fit and eventually went to a third one. Forced remote work was also difficult for many folks. So in the current context, having changed 3 jobs in the last 4 years is really a non-event.
Now more generally, would my hiring recommendation be influenced by a candidate having changed jobs several times in a short period of time?
The assumption here is that if a candidate has switched jobs 3 times in 4 years, there must be something wrong.
I think this is a very dangerous assumption. There are lots of things that cause people to change jobs, sometimes choice, sometimes circumstances, and they don’t necessarily indicate anything wrong in the candidate. However, what could be wrong in a candidate can be assessed in the interview, such as:
is the candidate respectful? Is the candidate able to disagree consrtuctively?
does the candidate collaborate?
Does the candidate naturally support others?
Has the candidate experience navigating difficult human situations?
etc, etc.
There are a lot of signals we can detect in the interview and we can act upon them. Everything that comes outside of the interview / outside of reference check is just bias and should be ignored.
My IQ was around 145 the last time I checked (I’m 19).
I feel lots of gratitude for my ability to deeply understand and comprehend ideas and concepts, but it has definitely had its “downsides” throughout my life. I tend to think very deeply about things that I find interesting and this overwhelming desire to understand the world has led me to some dark places. When I was around 9 or 10, I discovered the feeling of existential panic. I had watched an astronomy documentary with my father (who is a geoscience professor) and was completely overwhelmed with the fact that I was living on an unprotected orb, orbiting around a star at speeds far faster than I could even comprehend. I don’t think anyone in my family expected me to really grasp what the documentary was saying so they were a bit alarmed when I spent that whole night and most of the next week panicking and hyperventilating in my bedroom.
I lost my mom to suicide when I was 11 which sent me into a deep depression for several years. I found myself thinking a lot about death and the meaning of human existence in my earlier teenage years. I was really unmotivated to do school work all throughout high school because I found no meaning in it. I didn’t understand why I was alive, or what being alive meant, or if there even was any true meaning to life. I constantly struggled to see how any of it truly mattered in the long run. What was the point of going to the grocery store or hanging out with my friends or getting a drivers license? I was an overdeveloped primate forced to live in and contribute to a social group that I didn’t ask to be in. I was living in a strange universe that made no sense and I was being expected to sit at a desk for 8 hours every day? Surrounded by people who didn’t care about anything except clothing and football games? No way man, count me out. I spent a lot of nights just sitting in my bedroom wondering if anything I did really mattered. Death is inevitable and the whole universe will one day end, what’s the point. I frequently wondered if non-existence was inherently better than existence because of all of the suffering that goes hand in hand with being a conscious being. I didn’t understand how anyone could enjoy playing along in this complex game if they knew they were all going to die eventually.
Heavy stuff, yeah.
When I was 18 I suddenly experienced what some people label as an “ego death” or a “spiritual awakening” in which it suddenly occurred to me that the inevitably of death doesn’t mean that life itself is inherently meaningless. I realized that all of my actions affect the universe and I have the ability to set off chain reactions that will continue to alter the world long after I’m gone. I also realized that even if life is inherently meaningless, then that is all the more reason to enjoy being alive and to experience the beauty and wonder of the world while I’m still around. After that day I began meditating daily to achieve a deeper awareness of myself and try to find inner peace. I began living for the experience of being alive and nothing else. All of this has brought me great peace and has allowed me to enjoy learning again. For so long learning was terrifying to me because it meant that I was going understand new information that could potentially terrify me. Information that I could not unlearn. I have become a very emotionally sensitive person after the death of my mother, so I simply could not handle the weight of learning about existential concepts for a while. Now that I’ve been able to find a state of peace within myself and radically accept the fact that I will die one day (and that I do not know what occurs after death) I have begun to enjoy learning again! I read a lot of nonfiction and fiction alike. I enjoy traveling and seeing the world from as many different perspectives as possible. Talking to new people and attempting to see my world through their eyes is very enjoyable for me. Picking up new skills is generally very easy for me and I spend a lot of my free time pondering philosophical issues, just because it’s fun for me. I’m not a very social person, I like having a few close friends, but I mostly enjoy being alone.
So all in all, I think having an IQ of 140+ is a very turbulent experience that can be very beautiful! When you are able to truly understand deep concepts, it can seriously freak you out, especially when you’re searching for meaning and answers to philosophical problems. If I hadn’t embraced a way of life that revolves around radically acceptance, I don’t think I would have the guts to look as deeply into some things as I do. However, since I do have that safety cushion, I’m able to shape my perception of the world with the knowledge that I learn. This allows me to see incredible beauty in our world and not take things too personally. When I have a rough day, all I need to do is sit on my roof for half an hour and look at the stars. It reminds me that I am a very small animal in a very big place that I know very little about. It really puts all of my silly human problems in perspective.
If you can explain to me how “no-code is the future”, maybe there’s a useful response to this.
As far as I can tell, “no-code” means that somebody already coded a generic solution and the “no-code” part is just adapting the generic solution for a specific problem.
Somebody had to code the generic solution.
As to the second part, “is a CS major even worth it?” I’ve had a 30+ year career in software engineering, and I didn’t major in CS. That hasn’t kept me from learning CS concepts, it hasn’t kept me from delivering good software, and it hasn’t stopped me from getting software jobs.
Is a CS major even worth it? Only the student knows the answer to that.
People have written no-English versions of many programming languages – but they aren’t used as much as you’d think because it’s just not that useful.
Consider the C language – there are no such English words as “int”, “bool”, ”enum”, “struct”, “typedef”, “extern”, or “const”. The words “auto”, “float” and “char” are English words – but with completely different meanings to how they are used in C.
This is the complete list of C “reserved words” – things you’d have to essentially memorize if you’re a non-English speaker…
…but very few of those words are used in their usual English meanings…and you have to just know what things like “union” mean – even if you’re a native english speaker.
But if you really think there is an advantage to this being your native language then:
#define changer switch
#define compteur register
#define raccord union
…and so on – and now all of your reserved words are in French.
I don’t think it’s going to help much.
IT”S ABOUT LIBRARIES AND DOCUMENTATION:
The problem isn’t something like the C language – we could easily provide translations for the 30 or so reserved words in 50 languages and have a #pragma or a command to the compiler to tell it which language to use.
No problem – easy stuff.
However, libraries are a much bigger problem.
Consider OpenGL – it has 250 named function, and hundreds of #defined tokens.
glBindVertexArray would be glLierTableauDeSommets or something. Making versions of OpenGL for 50 languages would be a hell of a lot more painful.
Then, someone has to write documentation for all of that in all of those languages.
But a program written and compiled against French OpenGL wouldn’t link to a library written in English – which would be a total nightmare.
Worse still, I’ve worked on teams where there were a dozen US programmers, two dozen Russians and a half dozen Ukrainians – spread over two continents – all using their own languages ON THE SAME PIECE OF SOFTWARE.
Without some kind of control – we’d have a random mix of variable and function names in the three languages.
So the rule was WE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH.
But that didn’t stop people from writing comments and documentation in Russian or Ukranian.
SO WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?
I don’t think there actually is a good solution for this…picking one human language for programmers to converse in seems to be the best solution – and the one we have.
There are 1.3 billion English speakers, 1.1 billion Mandarin speakers, 600 million Hindi speakers, 450 Spanish speakers…and no other language gets over half of that.
So if you have to pick a single language to standardize on – it’s going to be English.
Those who argue that Mandarin should be the choice need to understand that typing Mandarin on any reasonable kind of keyboard was essentially impossible until 1976 (!!) by which time using English-based programming languages was standard. Too late!
SO – ENGLISH IT IS…KINDA.
Even though we seem to have settled on English the problems are not yet over.
British English or US English – or some other dialect?
As a graphics engineer, it took me the best part of a decade to break the habit of spelling “colour” rather than “color” – and although the programming languages out there don’t use that particular word – the OpenGL and Direct3D libraries do – and they use the US English spelling rather than the one that people from England use in “English”.
ARE PROGRAMMERS UNIQUE IN THIS?
No – we have people like airline pilots, ships’ captains.
ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization), require all pilots to have attained ICAO “Level 4” English ability. In effect, this means that all pilots that fly international routes must speak, read, write, and understand English fluently.
However, that’s not what happened for ships. In 1983 a group of linguists and shipping experts created “Seaspeak”. Most words are still in English – but the grammar is entirely synthetic. In 1988, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) made Seaspeak the official language of the seas.
Here’s the thing. The compensation will never be comparable.
When you join a big tech, public company, all of your compensation is public. Also it’s relatively easy to get a fair estimate of what comp looks like a few years down the road.
When you join a private company, the comp is a bet on a successful exit.
In 2015, Zenefits was a super hot company. Zoom had been around for.4 years and was very confidential.
In a now infamous Quora question[1] a user asked wether they should take an offer at Zenefits or Uber. As a result, The Zenefits CEO rescinded their offer. But most people would have chosen an offer at Zenefits or Uber, whose IPO was the most anticipated back then, over one at Zoom.
And yet Zenefits failed spectacularly, Uber’s IPO was lackluster, while Zoom went beyond all expectations.
So this is mostly about to risk aversion. Going to a large co means a “golden resume” that will always get you interviews, so it has a lot of long term value.
Working in a large company has other benefits. Processes are usually much better and there’s a lot to learn. This is also the opportunity to work on some problems at a huge scale. No one has billions of users outside of Google, Meta, Apple or Microsoft.
But working in a small private company whose valuation explodes is the only way for a software engineer to become very wealthy. The thing is though that it’s impossible for an aspiring employee to tell which company is going to experience that growth versus fail.
The pro’s and con’s really depend on the specific situation.
(1) When quitting for a new position…
Pros:
Better pay & benefits
More promotion opportunities
New location
New challenges (old job may have been boring)
New job aligned to your interests.
Cons:
New job/company was seriously misrepresented
“New boss same as the old boss” (no company is perfect!)
You might have wanted a new challenge, but you are now over your head.
Note: if you have a job and are not desperate, please do your homework and remember you are also interviewing them! You want a better job in most cases (unless that moving thing is going on).
(2) When quitting over a conflict…
Pros:
Can sleep at night (providing it was a ethical issue and you were in the right)
You showed them who is the boss!
Plus, you wont be on the local news if they get sued, or the IRS does a audit.
Again, if it was a toxic environment that you get to live as opposed to a stroke on the job! No job is worth it that is impacting your health, including mental health.
Cons:
No unemployment in most states if you just up and quit.
Job search with no income puts a lot of pressure at some point to take any job
the good news though, is you can continue looking while earning a paycheck (and hopefully still growing skills & experience)
The reason so many people are quitting now…
Note there is a third category, when you quit due to a lifestyle change. In this case, we are looking a women quitting to be a full-time mother, or someone going back to school. A spouse getting promoted but with a move might also place the other mate in this position…
Pro:
You get to live the life you want.
You are preparing for a better career
Con:
Loss of income
Reduced social interaction (for the full-time mom)
Note here that most couples that decide to do the stay at home mom generally plan ahead so one income will cover their expenses.
Second, I also don’t consider serious health issues when you leave the work force in general to fall under the scope of this discussion.
Originally Answered: Is practicing 500 programming questions on LeetCode, HackerEarth, etc enough to prepare for Google interview?
If you have 6 months to prepare for the interview I would definitely suggest the following things assuming that you have a formal CS degree and/or you have software development experience in some company:
Step 1 (Books/Courses for good understanding)
Go through a good data structure or algorithms book and revise all the topics like hash tables, arrays and strings, trees, graphs, tries, bit hacks, stacks, queues, sorting, recursion, and dynamic programming. Some good books according to me are:
The Stanford Coursera algorithms courses are also very good and you can look at them if you have time. It’s a bit more theoretical though.
Step 2 (Programming practice for algorithms and data structures)
Once you are done with Step 1 you need a lot of practice. It need not be a set number of problems like 500 or 1000. The best way to practice problems is to mimic an interview setting and time yourself for half an hour and solve a problem without any distraction. The steps here are to read a problem, think of a brute force solution that works very quickly, and then think of an optimized version that works and then write clean working code and come up with test cases within half an hour. Most of the top companies ask you 1 or 2 medium problems or 1 hard problem in 45 mts to 1 hour. Once you are done solving the problem you can compare your solution with the actual solution and see if there is scope to improve your solution or learn from the actual solution.
If you do the math it takes half an hour to solve a problem and at least 15 mts to look and compare with the correct solution. So 500 problems take 500 * 45 mts = 375 hours. Even if you spend 5 solid hours a day for problem-solving it comes to 75 days (2.5 months). If you are in a full-time job it’s hard to spend so much time every single day. Realistically if you spend 2–3 hours a day we are talking about 5 months just for practicing 500 problems. In my opinion, you don’t need to solve so many problems to crack the interview. All you need is a few problems in each topic and understand the fundamentals really well. The different topics for algo and ds are:
arrays and strings, bit hacks, dynamic programming, graphs, hash tables, linked lists, math problems, priority queues, queues, recursion, sorting, stacks, trees, and tries. As a starter try to solve 4–5 problems in each topic after you finish step 1 and then if you have time solve 2–3 problems a day for fun in each topic and you should be good. Also, it is far better to solve 5 problems than to read 50 problems. In fact, trying to cover problems by reading problems is not going to be of any use.
Step 3 (this can be done in parallel with step 1) (Systems Design)
Practice problems in systems, design (distributed systems, concurrency, OO design). These questions are common in Google and other top companies. The best way to crack this section is to actually do complex systems projects at work or school projects. There are lots of resources online which are very good for preparation for this topic.
Edit: Since I have received some request to point some resources I am listing some of my favorite ones:
Please know your resume in and out and make sure you can explain all the projects mentioned in the resume. You should be able to dive as deep as needed (technically) for the projects mentioned. Also do enough research about the company you are interviewing, the product, engineering culture and have good questions to ask them
Step 5 (mock interviews)
Last but not least please make sure you have some good friends working in a good company or your classmate mock interview you. You also have several resources online for this service. Also, work on the feedback you get from the mock interview. You can also interview a few companies you are not interested to work as a practice interview before your goal companies.
It is possible for some people; I don’t know whether it is possible for you.
You’re solving 50% of easy problems. Reality check: that’s…cute. Your target success rate, to have a good chance, should be near-100% on Easy, 75% on Medium, and 50% on Hard. On top of that, non-Leetcode rounds like system design should be solid, too.
You can see there’s a big gap between where you are and where you need to be.
The good news is that despite how large that gap is, without a doubt, there have been cases of people being able to learn fast enough to cover that gap in 90 days. These cases are not at all common, and I will warn you that the vast majority of people who are where you are now cannot get to where you need to be in 90 days. So, the odds are against you, but you might be better than the odds would say.
What is special about the situations of the people who can get there that fast? Off the top of my head, the key factors are:
A strong previous background in CS and algorithms
Being able to spend a significant amount of time daily to study
High aptitude / talent / intelligence for learning these sorts of concepts
Having an effective methodology for learning. The fact that you’re actively solving problems on Leetcode is a decent start here.
If the above factors describe you, you might be better off than the odds would suggest. It is at least possible that you could achieve your goal.
(Note: I’ve interviewed hundreds of developers in my time at Facebook, Microsoft and now as the co-founder and CEO of Educative. I’ve also failed several coding interviews because I wasn’t prepared. At Educative, we’ve helped thousands of developers level up their careers with hands-on courses on programming languages, system design, and interview prep.)
Is Interview Prep a Full-time Job?
Let’s break it down. A full-time job – 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year – encompasses 2080 hours. If you take two weeks of vacation, you’re actually working 2,000 hours. The 1,000 hours recommendation is saying you need six months of full-time work to prepare for your interview at a top tech company. Really?
I think three months is a reasonable timeframe to fully prepare. And if you’ve interviewed more recently, studying the specific process of the company where you’re applying can cut that time down to 4-6 weeks of dedicated prep.
I’ve written more about the ideal interview prep roadmap for DEV Community, but I’ll give you the breakdown here.
The “Secret” to a Successful Interview Prep Plan
First of all, I want to be clear that there’s no silver bullet to interview prep. But during my time interviewing candidates at Facebook and Microsoft, I noticed there was one trait that all the best candidates shared: they understood why companies asked the questions they did.
The key to a successful interview prep program is to understand what each question is actually trying to accomplish. Understanding the intent behind every step of the interview process helps you prepare in the right way.
A lot of younger developers think they need to be experts in a few programming languages, or even just one language in order to crack the developer interview. Writing efficient code is a crucial skill, but what software companies are actually looking for (especially the big ones with custom libraries and technology stacks that you will be expected to learn anyway) is an understanding of the various components of engineering, as well as your creative problem-solving ability.
That breaks down into five key areas that “Big Tech” companies are focused on in the interview process:
1. Coding
Interviewers are testing the basics of your ability to code. What language should you be using? Start with the language you know best. Especially in larger companies, new syntaxes can be taught or libraries used if you establish you can execute well. I have interviewed people that used programming languages that I barely know myself. I know C++ inside and out, so even though Python is a more efficient language, I would always personally choose to interview using C++. The most important thing is just to brush up on the basics of your favorite programming language.
The questions in coding interviews focus on generic problem-solving, data structures (Mastering Data Structures: An interview refresher), and algorithms. So revisit concepts that you haven’t touched since undergrad to have a fresh, foundational understanding of topics like complexity analysis (Algorithms and Complexity Analysis: An interview refresher), arrays, queues, trees, tries, hash tables, sorting, and searching. Then practice solving problems using these concepts in the programming language you have chosen.
Whether you’re building a mobile app or web-scale systems, it’s important to understand threads, locks, synchronization, and multi-threading. These concepts are some of the most challenging and factor heavily into your “hiring level” at many organizations. The more expert you are at concurrency, the higher your level, and the better the pay.
Since you’ve already determined the language you’re using in (1), study up on process handling using that same language. Prepare for an interview – Concurrency
3. System Design
Like concurrency problems, system design is now key to the hiring process at most companies, and has an impact on your hiring level.
There isn’t a clear-cut answer to an open-ended question where a candidate must work their way to an efficient, meaningful solution to a general problem with multiple parts.
Most candidates don’t have a background designing large-scale systems in the first place, as reaching that level is several years into a career path and most systems are designed collaboratively anyway.
For this reason, it is important to spend time clarifying the product and system scope, a quick back-of-the-envelop estimation, defining APIs to address each feature in the system scope and defining the data model. Once this foundational work is done, you can take the data model and features to actually design the system.
In Object-Oriented Design questions, interviewers are looking for your understanding of design patterns and your ability to transform the requirements into comprehensible classes. You spend most of your time explaining the various components, their interfaces and how different components interact with each other using the interfaces. Interviewers are looking for your ability to identify patterns and to apply effective, time-tested solutions rather than re-inventing the wheel. In a way, it is the partner of the system design interview.
This is the one that doesn’t have a clear cut learning path, and because of that, it is often overlooked by developers. But for established companies like Google and Amazon, culture is one of the biggest factors. The skills you demonstrate in coding and design interviews prove that you know programming. But without the right attitude, are you open to learning? Are you passionate about the product and want to build things with the team? If not, companies can think you’re not worth hiring. No organization wants to create a toxic work environment.
Since every company has a few different distinguishing features in their culture, it’s important to read up on what their values and products are (Coding Interview Preparation | Codinginterview has information on many top tech companies, including Google and Facebook). Then enter the interview track ready to answer these basics:
Interest in the product, and demonstrate understanding of the business. (Don’t mistake Facebook’s business model, which relies on big data, for AWS or Azure, which facilitate big data as a service. If you’re going into Google, know how user data and personalization is the core of Google’s monetization for its various products and services, while knowing what makes Android unique compared to iOS. Be an advocate.)
Be prepared to talk about disagreements in the workplace. If you’ve been working for more than a few years, you’ve had disagreements. Even if you’re coming out of school, group projects apply. Companies want to know how you work on a team and navigate conflict.
Talk about how the company helps you build and execute your own goals both as a technologist and in your career. What are you passionate about?
Talk about significant engineering accomplishments – what have you built; what crazy/difficult bugs have you solved?
Conclusion
Strategic interview prep is essential if you want to present yourself as the best candidate for an engineering role.
It doesn’t have to take 1,000 hours, nor should it – but at big companies like Google and Facebook where the interview process is so intentional, it will absolutely benefit you to study that process and fully understand the why behind each step.
There are plenty of battle-tested resources linked in my answer that will guide you throughout the prep process, and I hope they can be helpful to you on your career journey.
Originally Answered: I have practiced over 300 algorithms questions on LintCode and LeetCode but still can’t get any offer, what should I do?
I have interviewed and been interviewed a number of times, and I have found out that most of the time people (including myself) flunk an interview due to the following reasons:
Failing to come up with a solution to a problem: If you can’t come up with even one single solution to a problem, then it’s definitely a red flag since that reflects poorly on your problem solving skills. Also, don’t be afraid to provide a non-optimal solution initially. A non-optimal solution is better than no solution at all.
Coming up with solutions but can’t implement them: That means you need to work more on your implementation skills. Write lots and lots of code, and make sure you use a whiteboard or pen and paper to mimic the interview experience as much as possible. In an interview you won’t have an IDE with autocomplete and syntax highlighting to help you. Also make sure that you’re very comfortable in your programming language of choice.
Solving the problem but not optimally: That could mean that you’re missing some fundamental knowledge of data structures and algorithms, so make sure that you know your basics well.
Solving the problem but after a long time, or after receiving too many hints: Again, you need more problem solving practice.
Solving the problem but with many bugs: You need to properly test your code after writing it. Don’t wait for the interviewer to point out the bugs for you. You wouldn’t want to hire someone who doesn’t test their code, right?
Failing to ask the interviewer enough questions before diving into the code: Diving right into the code without asking the interviewer enough questions is definitely a red flag, even if you came up with a good solution. It tells the interviewer that either you’re arrogant, or that you’re reckless. It’s also not in your favor, because you may end up solving the wrong problem. Discussing the problem and asking questions to the interviewer is important because it ensures that both of you are on the same page. The interviewer’s answers to your questions may also provide with some very useful hints that may greatly simplify the problem.
Being arrogant: If you’re perceived as arrogant, no one will want to hire you no matter how good you are.
Lying on the resume: Falsely claiming knowledge of something, or lying about employment history is a huge red flag. It shows dishonesty, and no one wants to work with someone who is dishonest.
I hope this helps, and good luck with your future interviews.
Unless we’re talking about Google, which has problems that are unique to them in comparison to the rest, you can be sure that big tech companies ask LeetCode-style questions quite often. Seeing LeetCode Hard problems specifically, however, is not that common in these interviews, and it’s more likely that you’ll be facing LeetCode Medium questions and one or two Hard questions at best. This is because having a time limit to solve them as well as an interviewer right beside you already adds enough pressure to make these questions feel harder than they normally would be; increasing their difficulty would simply be detrimental to the interviewing process.
I suggest that you avoid using the difficulty of LeetCode questions that you can solve as a way of telling if you’re prepared for your interviews as well because it can be pretty misleading. One reason this is the case is that LeetCode’s environment is different from an interviewing environment; LeetCode cares more about running time and the optimal solution to a problem, while an interviewer cares more about your approach to the question (an intuitive solution can always be optimized further with a discussion between you and the interviewer).
Another reason you should avoid worrying too much about LeetCode-style questions is that FAANG companies are starting to refrain from asking them, as they’re noticing that many candidates come to their interviews already knowing the answer to some of their questions; currently, if your interviewer notices that you already know the answer to the question you’re given, they won’t take it into account and instead will move on to another question, as already knowing how to solve the problem tells them nothing about the way you approach challenging situations in the first place.
Also, you should consider that LeetCode only lets you practice what you already know in coding; if you don’t have a good knowledge of data structures & algorithms beforehand, LeetCode will be a difficult resource to use efficiently, and it also won’t teach you anything about important non-technical skills like communication skills, which is a crucial aspect that interviewers also evaluate. Therefore, I also suggest that you avoid using LeetCode as your only resource to prepare for your technical interviews, as it doesn’t cover everything that you need to learn on its own.
For example, you may want to enroll in a program like Tech Interview Proas you use LeetCode. TIP is a program that was created by an ex-Google software engineer and was designed to be a “how to get into big tech” course, with over 20 hours of instructional video content on data structures & algorithms and system design.
Another good resource that you could use, this time to cover the behavioral aspect of interviews, is Interviewing.io. With it, you can engage in mock interviews with other software engineers that have worked with Facebook and Google before and also receive feedback on your performance.
You could also read a book like Cracking the Coding Interview, which offers plenty of programming questions that are very similar to what you can expect from FAANG companies, as well as valuable insight into the interviewing process.
Harvard is seen in popular culture as being very selective, and so any funnel which has a conversion rate lower than 5% is going to describe itself as “more selective than Harvard”. “More selective than Harvard” has 70m hits on Google. When Walmart opened a DC store, it hired about 2.5% of the people that sent applications, and ran a story that it was “twice as selective as Harvard”. Tech internships, somewhat unsurprisingly, are harder to get as jobs at Walmart.
Generally speaking, the more LeetCode problems you solve, the better your odds of getting an offer will be. Be careful, however, as using the number of problems you solve on LeetCode as a reference for how ready you are for your technical interviews is misleading, especially if it’s for Google and Facebook. Even if you solve every problem on LeetCode (please don’t try this), there’s still a chance you won’t get an offer, and there are several reasons why.
First of all, coding is not the only thing taken into consideration by interviewers from big tech companies. One of the main things they look for in a candidate is the presence of strong soft skills like teamwork, leadership, and communication. If you’re raising red flags in that department—if the interviewer doesn’t think you have the leadership skills to lead a team down the road, for example—odds are that you’re going to get overlooked. They also expect you’ll be able to clearly explain your thought process before solving a given coding problem, which is something a surprising number of developers have trouble with.
The second problem with using LeetCode alone is that it can only help you practice data structures & algorithms and system design, but not exactly teach you about them. This might not be an issue if you’re solving questions from the Easy section of LeetCode, but once you get to the Medium and Hard problem sets, you’ll need more theoretical knowledge to properly handle these problems.
So, ideally, you’ll want to prepare using resources that help you learn more about DS&A and systems design before you start practicing on LeetCode, and you’ll also want to work on your behavioral skills to ensure you do well there, too. Here are some tools that can help:
Interviewing.io: A site where you can engage in mock interviews with other software engineers—some of whom have worked at Google and Facebook—and receive immediate, objective feedback on your performance.
Tech Interview Pro: An interview prep program designed by a former Google software engineer that includes 150+ instructional video lessons on data structures & algorithms, systems design, and the interview process as a whole. TIP members also get access to a private Facebook group of 1,500+ course graduates who’ve used what they learned in the course to land jobs at Google, Facebook, and other big tech companies.
So, using LeetCode on its own would prepare you well for questions about data structures & algorithms, but may leave you unprepared for questions related to systems design and the behavioral aspect of your interviews. But by complementing LeetCode with other resources, you’ll put yourself in a much better position to receive an offer from Google, Facebook, or anyone else. Best of luck.
Dmitry Aliev is correct that this was introduced into the language before references.
I’ll take this question as an excuse to add a bit more color to this.
C++ evolved from C via an early dialect called “C with Classes”, which was initially implemented with Cpre, a fancy “preprocessor” targeting C that didn’t fully parse the “C with Classes” language. What it did was add an implicit this pointer parameter to member functions. E.g.:
struct S {
int f();
};
was translated to something like:
int f__1S(S *this);
(the funny name f__1S is just an example of a possible “mangling” of the name of S::f, which allows traditional linkers to deal with the richer naming environment of C++).
What might comes as a surprise to the modern C++ programmer is that in that model this is an ordinary parameter variable and therefore it can be assigned to! Indeed, in the early implementations that was possible:
struct S {
int n;
S(S *other) {
this = other; // Possible in C with Classes.
this->n = 42; // Same as: other->n = 42;
}
};
Interestingly, an idiom arose around this ability: Constructors could manage class-specific memory allocation by “assigning to this” before doing anything else in the constructor. E.g.:
struct S {
S() {
this = my_allocator(sizeof(S));
…
}
~S() {
my_deallocator(this);
this = 0; // Disabled normal destructor post-processing.
}
…
};
That technique (brittle as it was, particularly when dealing with derived classes) became so widespread that when C with Classes was re-implemented with a “real” compiler (Cfront), assignment to this remained valid in constructors and destructors even though this had otherwise evolved into an immutable expression. The C++ front end I maintain still has modes that accept that anachronism. See also section 17 of the old Cfront manual found here, for some fun reminiscing.
When standardization of C++ began, the core language work was handled by three working groups: Core I dealt with declarative stuff, Core II dealt with expression stuff, and Core III dealt with “new stuff” (templates and exception handling, mostly). In this context, Core II had to (among many other tasks) formalize the rules for overload resolution and the binding of this. Over time, they realized that that name binding should in fact be mostly like reference binding. Hence, in standard C++ the binding of something like:
struct S {
int n;
int f() const {
return this->n;
}
} s = { 42 };
int r = s.f();
is specified to be approximately like:
struct S { int n; } s = { 42 };
int f__1S(S const &__this) {
return (&__this)->n;
}
int r = f__1S(s);
In other words, the expression this is now effectively a kind of alias for &__this, where __this is just a name I made up for an unnamable implicit reference parameter.
C++11 further tweaked this by introducing syntax to control the kind of reference that this is bound from. E.g.,
struct S {
int f() const &;
int g() &&;
};
can be thought of as introducing hidden parameters as follows:
int f__1S(S const &__this);
int g__1S(S &&__this);
That model was relatively well-understood by the mid-to-late 1990s… but then unfortunately we forgot about it when we introduced lambda expression. Indeed, in C++11 we allowed lambda expressions to “capture” this:
struct S {
int n;
int f() {
auto lm = [this]{ return this->n; };
return lm();
}
};
After that language feature was released, we started getting many reports of buggy programs that “captured” this thinking they captured the class value, when instead they really wanted to capture __this (or *this). So we scrambled to try to rectify that in C++17, but because lambdas had gotten tremendously popular we had to make a compromise. Specifically:
we introduced the ability to capture *this
we allowed [=, this] since now [this] is really a “by reference” capture of *this
even though [this] was now a “by reference” capture, we left in the ability to write [&, this], despite it being redundant (compatibility with earlier standards)
Our tale is not done, however. Once you write much generic C++ code you’ll probably find out that it’s really frustrating that the __this parameter cannot be made generic because it’s implicitly declared. So we (the C++ standardization committee) decided to allow that parameter to be made explicit in C++23. For example, you can write (example from the linked paper):
struct less_than {
template <typename T, typename U>
bool operator()(this less_than self,
T const& lhs, U const& rhs) {
return lhs < rhs;
}
};
In that example, the “object parameter” (i.e., the previously hidden reference parameter __this) is now an explicit parameter and it is no longer a reference!
Here is another example (also from the paper):
struct X {
template <typename Self>
void foo(this Self&&, int);
};
struct D: X {};
void ex(X& x, D& d) {
x.foo(1); // Self=X&
move(x).foo(2); // Self=X
d.foo(3); // Self=D&
}
Here:
the type of the object parameter is a deducible template-dependent type
the deduction actually allows a derived type to be found
This feature is tremendously powerful, and may well be the most significant addition by C++23 to the core language. If you’re reasonably well-versed in modern C++, I highly recommend reading that paper (P0847) — it’s fairly accessible.
When an employee is hired, there is a step in the process where they are given a stack of documents to sign that (anecdotally) I’ll venture maybe 1 in 1,000 actually read. One of the least understood (or read) is the notice that the company controls, collects and analyzes all communications, internet activity and data stored on company-owned or -managed devices and systems.
This includes network traffic that flows across their servers. It’s safe to assume that mid-to-large employers are fully aware of the amount of on-the-clock time employees spend shopping, tweeting or watching YouTube, and know which employees are spending inordinate amounts of ‘company time’ shopping on Amazon rather than tackling assignments.
This also include Bring Your Own Device policies— where employees are allowed to use their personal smartphone, tablet or laptop for business purposes. Companies don’t always ‘exploit’ the policy for nefarious surveillance purposes, but employers are within their rights to collect information like location data from your BYOD smartphone both on and off the clock.
An example of where this can hurt employees is when they start to look for another job.
If you email/Slack/message your supervisor and ask for a personal day off to attend to a family matter, but your device logs show you are accessing job-search sites and your location data suggests your aren’t at home or even within the radius of a competitor’s office, they know. This tends to make your boss cranky, and can adversely impact your employment to the point of losing your job.
I disagree with this kind of intrusive surveillance, and the presumption of guilt employees face when they take steps to protect themselves by using encrypted tools like Signal, proxy servers or switching devices to Airplane Mode intrudes on the employee’s legitimate rights to privacy: you may not want your employer to know that you’re seeing a psychiatrist on your lunch hour, and they really have no reasonable expectation for you to disclose this (or not take steps to conceal it.)
I think so. I remember there was a noticeable number of people going to Facebook, and some discussion of it among the employees. And then there was an explicit event where Google rearranged its compensation strategy. Everyone got a huge raise just at that moment, and from that point on the salaries and stock grants became close to the top of the market, as they need to be for a company that hires top talent.
If you can’t get FAANG to pay attention to you, you probably need to get another job first. Perhaps one of the companies that are considered to be pretty good would be interested.
It is actually quite hard to get an entry-level role at a top tech company, because where you went to college (and internships, which you don’t have) plays a disproportionate role. It’s not surprising, because what else can they go on? Interviewing is expensive, and there are hundreds of applicants per opening, so they want to pre-filter candidates somehow.
Once you have a few years of experience, things look a little better, especially if you climb up the prestige pole. For instance, Microsoft (or Twitter where I work today) isn’t FAANG, but you can be sure that recruiters would take applicants from there seriously, and you would have a good chance to get an interview. But the main factor is what you manage to do in your time at work. If you do well, get promoted, demonstrate clear impact (that you can articulate externally), build your professional network, that would improve your chances to both get your foot in the door, and also to pass the interviews.
There are also other things you can do, but I think they depend on luck too much. Slowly improving your portfolio is the way to go, I think.
All of these companies assume that if you know the front-end domain, you can learn whatever technology du jour to become a front-end developer, and besides, if you don’t know anything about front-end, you can still grow into a front-end developer if that’s the path you’re interested in.
That being said, TypeScript is increasingly becoming the standard way to write client-side web code. Both Microsoft and Google are very committed to TS, while Facebook uses JavaScript with Flow. Google also uses Dart for some of its front end.
Likewise, there are a number of technologies on which the larger companies have taken diverging choices. Google is very committed to gRPC, I mean, g stands for Google; while Facebook is behind graphQL. (graph being, originally. the “social graph” of Facebook). AFAIK, Microsoft uses both.
Neither Google nor Facebook have ever really embraced node.js. This would have seemed odd a few years ago but now the web ecosystem is generally turning away from tools and web servers written in node.js. I don’t know for sure what Microsoft uses for its web servers.
Facebook is unsurprisingly very committed to React and React Native. Google though uses a number of web frameworks, including non-open sourced ones, and among others Angular and Flutter. Microsoft, AFAIK, uses React and React Native and Angular.
But all these skills are transferable. If you understand React, it’s easy to learn Angular and conversely; TypeScript and Flow have similarities, etc.
One common denominator is HTML, CSS, web APIs and web standards, which are always relevant.
Your goal, in an interview, is not to impress your interviewer, but to demonstrate that you have the necessary skill set to be hired.
In a large tech company, the threshold to be considered “impressive” is pretty high… you have people that had superlative achievements in their field (or outside of tech), and in their day to day they’re just treated like normal people. I never interviewed for Amazon, but I interviewed (and got hired) at both Facebook and Google, and both of my interviewer brackets included folks who had their own Wikipedia entry (and since then, all of my Facebook interviewers had amazing careers and most got their own Wikipedia page). So that’s the caliber of folks that your interviewers work with on a daily basis.
So your interviewer is not going to be impressed by your interview performance. That said, I’ve observed that many tech employees treat others as if they could be the next Ada Lovelace or the next Steve Jobs no matter their current achievements. This is not forced, but it’s an attitude that comes naturally because we’ve observed so many people achieve greatness. Interviewers would love nothing more than to give the highest recommendation for the candidate that they are seeing right now, it’s very fulfilling (conversely, having to reject a candidate is always a bit frustrating). So I think it’s fair that your interviewer is hoping you can become a superstar, but that hope is the same as for every other candidate and not directly linked to how well you are doing right now.
Google’s interview process leans towards making sure that an unsuitable candidate is not hired, they are ok if a few suitable candidates are missed in the process.
There is also a factor of chance involved in the process. Here is a story to prove that:
I have personally asked at least 5 engineers at Google if they would be willing to interview again assuming they would be offered 1.5 times their current compensation. Obviously they loose the job if they don’t clear the interview. I am yet to meet somebody willing to take this bargain , I wont take it either.
Btw google also offers anybody who leaves google to comeback and join at the same level without an interview if they comeback within 2 years. My guess is that they also realize the chance involved.
Not clearing an interview at google is an indicator of only one thing, that you did not clear a google interview. Don’t draw conclusions about your ability based on this.
At Google there’s a selection of laptops you can choose from: a couple of Macs, a couple of Chromebooks, a couple of Linux laptops and a couple of windows laptops. Usually there’s a smaller, lighter version, for people who favor portability, and a larger version if you prefer a larger screen.
I’ve seen developers use all. I’d guess that Macs are most common (but under 50%} and Windows machines are least common.
I use a Chromebook (well, two Chromebooks). You turn it on, you log in and it looks exactly the same as your other Chromebook. This saves me carrying a laptop between work and home. If you work from another office, you don’t need to carry your laptop, you just grab one off the shelf, log in, and it looks the same as the computer you left at home.
(I tried using a Mac, I couldn’t get used to it, I didn’t know how to do anything, the keyboard shortcuts drove me crazy and so I gave it back and got a Chromebook).
Google and Meta (formerly Facebook) have a long-standing culture where employees believe that they’re hot stuff and that the company has to keep them happy because the company needs them as much as they need the company. Amazon doesn’t have that, probably because they fire people pretty often, making many of the remaining employees feel disposable.
Google and Meta have different concepts of culture fit—or at least they did historically. At Google, culture fit means “don’t be a person who’s hard to work with”. At Meta, culture fit means “be a person who believes that we are doing great things here and who will be excited to work hard on those great things”. As a result, it tends to be easy for Meta to keep convincing their existing employees that the company is doing the right thing. Google, on the other hand, ends up with a significant proportion of employees who are not easily convinced, and demand change.
Though it’s been so long since I’ve actually worked in the tech industry that I’m not sure if Meta still fits the description I gave above, and there are signs that Google has been trending away from the description I gave above.
The question was:
Why is employee activism seen more in Google but not in other companies like Facebook and Amazon?
Just to add a small note to Dimitriy’s great answer, computer science PhDs tend to be analytical and hyperrational. Working for Google is probably the single best “pass” to choosing whatever the hell you want for the rest of your career, or at least for the next step or two. I think some CS PhDs work for Google not because it’s what they want, but because they don’t know what they want, and if you don’t know what you want and you can get a job there, it would be hard to do better than Google. Why not make $250,000 a year while figuring out your next step? The other companies in this so-called “top-tier” have issues; they are potentially great employers, but their issues make them anywhere from slightly to dramatically less attractive.
The main factor why top prop trading firms and hedge funds are difficult to get into compared to tech companies is their size.
According to Wikipedia Two Sigma has about 1600 employees[1] and Jane Street has about 1900 employees .[2] Even the largest hedge fund, Bridgewater, only has 1500[3] and the third largest hedge fund, Renaissance Technology manages $130 billion with 310 employees.
Maybe these numbers on Wikipedia aren’t exact but I’d bet they’re well within the ballpark of being accurate.
Facebook has nearly 60,000 employees ,[4] Amazon has 160,000 ,[5] Apple has 154,000,[6] Netflix has around 12,000[7], and Google has 140,000[8]. Again, maybe these number aren’t precise but I don’t feel like doing more in depth research.
However, it’s pretty obvious to see that the big tech companies employ multiples of what those finance firms do and quite simply there are far more opportunities at those tech companies. More seats mean it’s going to be less competitive to be hired.
Second, those top hedge funds and prop trading firms pay well. Like really well.
And Jane Street’s 2020 graduate hires straight from college were paid a $200k annual base salary, plus a $100k sign-on bonus, plus a $100k-$150k guaranteed performance bonus. Junior bankers’ high salaries look a little paltry by comparison.[9]
So a new college grad makes $400-$450k. That’s a 22–23 year old making that. That same article found documents that said the average per employee in their London office was $1.3 million. Some make more and some make less, but that’s an eye wateringly high number when you consider all of the admin and support aren’t making close to that.
A friend’s younger brother worked at Jane Street about 10 years ago. He may still but I haven’t talked to her much since we moved. He was a rock star at Jane Street, and while I’m relying on my memory of a 10 year old conversation so I may not be totally accurate, he was in his late 20’s or early 30’s and made $4 million (and it may actually have been $8M) that year.
I know tech people are paid well but I doubt many, if any, make $400-$450k in year one and are making millions by their late 20’s is unheard of unless they founded or join a startup at the right time.
In addition, the interview processes at those firms is insanely difficult. I’ve never worked or interviewed at them but I’ve heard war stories. Just to get your foot in the door is nearly impossible then getting an offer to work there is basically impossible
My friend’s brother was half way through an absolutely top PhD program in Physics when he was recruited by them. I don’t consider myself a slouch and I’ve met a ton of highly intelligent people, but this guy was like his brain was plugged into a computer and the internet. And he was a dynamic personality.
They hire the absolute best of the best and because they’re small and privately held they don’t actually ever need to hire or grow because the public markets can’t punish their stock price because they don’t have one. If some of those top investment firms can’t find the right fit they may simply not need to make a hire right then and can wait. They’re not big banks like Goldman that need to hire X number of analysts and associates because they need to replace the people who left.
So the main reasons that it’s tougher to get into a top hedge fund or prop trading firm than big tech is because they’re much smaller, they pay more, they are even more diligent in their hiring practices, and they hire very intelligent people.
If that were to happen, we’ll have bigger problems to deal with. The Google monorepo exists on tens of thousands of machines. That would mean: every data center, every workstation used by Google would suddenly be out of commission – not just turned off, but so that storage isn’t even available. This is only possible in a complete doomsday scenario.
It’s generally possible to find better compensated jobs for people with experience in big tech cos. This experience is very desirable for companies in fast growth mode – not just the technical expertise but also knowledge of processes of world-class engineering organizations. Smaller but fast-growing companies can offer better packages but with an element of risk – if the company ends up failing, the employee will only get their salary.
To Conclude:
The tech industry is booming, and there are a lot of great opportunities for those with the skills and experience to land a job at one of the FAANG companies. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Microsoft are all leaders in the tech industry, and they offer competitive salaries and benefits. The interview process for these companies can be intense, but if you’re prepared and knowledgeable about the company’s culture and values, you’ll have a good chance of landing the job. Perks at these companies can include free food and transportation, stock options, and generous vacation time. If you’re looking for a challenging and rewarding career in the tech industry, consider applying for a job at one of the FAANGM companies.
My headband just snapped with no apparent reason or brute force breakage. It was just sitting on my head. I’ve looked around and found this is a fairly common issue, but has anyone in this sub had any luck getting a replacement from Microsoft? submitted by /u/psychotic11ama [link] [comments]
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I was so close to canceling my Netflix subscription but I decided to wait until Wednesday came out and give it a chance. Wow what an amazing show, just finished binging it a few days ago and loved every minute of it. Now I do have 2 questions though. Firstly - I'm a bit confused about the situation with Tyler. Was he a good guy at first and turned bad by Thornhill or she just set him on the path? Was it a split personality? Or was he playing Wednesday all along? Secondly- who do you guys think is stalking Wednesday? submitted by /u/iamre [link] [comments]
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On my Android. Several times a min This pops up. And I don't even have GOOGLE OPEN! What's going on?. submitted by /u/Threedognite321 [link] [comments]
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In this real world-based project, I acted as a Cloud Specialist to create a solution for people who were working in the office to start…Continue reading on Medium »
In this real world-based project, I acted as a Cloud Specialist to create a solution for people who were working in the office to start…Continue reading on Medium »
I've had a lot of troubles with netflix since years. I would see netflix advertise shows in my country (Belgium) but when i looked them up, they were not available on netflix. People told me to modify the language options for subtitles and sound, wich i looked up, but those were already set to french and english. Today i changed the language interface just to see, and now all those shows are available to me... so i just have one question, who thought it was a good idea to lock content behind the language interface? I speak both english AND french, and want to see shows in both languages. Now i know people will say "but you can", and yes i can, but only if they are available in both language. For exemple, now that my netflix app is in english, i wont be able to see french shows that are not available in english. So once in a while i will need to change the language of the interface just to see if new shows are availbles. You can tell that whoever made this design choice only speak one language, and it's infuriating submitted by /u/NebNay [link] [comments]
2 days or so ago I saw a random new account being added to my netflix, I immeditaley signed out of all devices and removed it. Then I logged in and it was removed. Today I was using it and suddenly a new user called Uncle Kendo or something was there, I have immediately logged out of all devices and changed the password. I didnt change the password the first time, but I have now. the new user's location was turkey what do i do if a new account has been added again? we use devices: two android phones,two windows pc, and a fire tv submitted by /u/Faang_Sexual [link] [comments]
In this short post, I will cover the foundation of network security. If you want to make your first steps in cloud security network…Continue reading on Medium »
We run our selenium grid using Docker containers in AWS. We have been plagued by 504 errors recently and this post will outline what we…Continue reading on Medium »
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as the GPT series from OpenAI has the potential to revolutionize the way we access…Continue reading on lukepuplett »
New code I just received: B93JPSUOWIF3HSQZBWFXTWL Must be logged into your Google account to use. Please let me know when it's been used. submitted by /u/HawaiiDeuce [link] [comments]
Hi everyone, I’m quite young (23) and I’ve only been using Apple for like 8 years. My first Apple products were hang me downs from my parents (every time they upgraded, they gave me the old one, and when I upgraded I gave my old one to my sister….. that’s how my family works). I’m not sure what the age demographic is on this sub, so I’m wondering how long other people have been using Apple products. Edit: I forgot about the iPod. So I actually started using Apple products are age 9, when my dad got me an iPod for Christmas. submitted by /u/TheClassyWomanist [link] [comments]
Getting occasional messages from strange sources is a fact of life these days. And as far as the global Internet is concerned, we're all naive children, mostly ignorant of threats that might be lurking out there. A stranger says hello? A message alerts you to your package status when you haven't ordered anything? On iOS, long press -> Delete -> Delete and Report Junk (or click the Report Junk hyperlink if available). Optionally, skip the report and just delete if you're not sure. Clicking to find out is never worth the risk. In this example, I was expecting a package and had even received email indicating shipping was delayed. So, I went ahead and clicked on the link. Just kidding. I pasted the URL into one of the websites that let you check URL's for free (in this case urlvoid.com). The report returned zero indications of it being an unsafe URL engaged in phishing or other malware attacks. This can be the case for new URLs whether safe of not. But the server location was revealed to be in the Netherlands. Amazon and it's sellers are international, but I'm guessing shipping updates for a cheap XKX USB speaker shipping from a nearby Amazon warehouse in the U.S. wouldn't be sent from a server in Amsterdam. And reverse phone lookup for this U.S. number came back empty. Any other thoughts/tips for dealing with messaging spam/phishing? submitted by /u/archimedeancrystal [link] [comments]
In this exercise based on a real-world scenario, I created an executive presentation of infrastructure costs for the migration of an SAP…Continue reading on Medium »
Apple claims "When you make a purchase, Apple Pay uses a device-specific number and unique transaction code. So your card number is never stored on your device or on Apple servers. And when you pay, your card numbers are never shared by Apple with merchants. Your purchases stay private." But they save your cards in the apple wallet app, so how are they saved if they don't store your details on their servers or on the actual apple device? I have a theory but I'm not sure. submitted by /u/ModalityInSpace [link] [comments]
Iniciei a certificação do google no início de novembro/2022, vou compartilhar um pouco de como está sendo a experiência. Estou migrando…Continue reading on Medium »
so basically on my pc i want to watch some shows on netflix like the flash or breaking bad but i keep having this issue where those shows dont show up when i search them on my pc but they do show up on my phone/other devices. and when i try to find the link to the shows through google it just says "remind me" when i click the link. i live in canada and i dont have any vpns on. does anyone have a solution? submitted by /u/LapisLukii [link] [comments]
I do not want to use Lens. I hate that thing. I'm looking for a keyword search or bookmarklet solution so I can entirely avoid Lens. tl;dr I do not want to use Lens ever. Test image Methods that used to work - no longer work. Here are two examples (that could be used in a keyword searhc or a bookmarklet. They use the test image... https://www.google.com/searchbyimage?image_url=https://i.imgur.com/T2p7pTT.jpg https://www.google.com/searchbyimage?site=search&sa=X&image_url=https://i.imgur.com/T2p7pTT.jpg If you open the links in a new tab - you get redirected to https://www.google.com/imghp?sbi=1 In a chrome browser if you right click an image - the browser can do a search via http://google.com/searchbyimage/upload. I'm not a programmer so I can't figure out how to use that to do what I want. submitted by /u/OppositeDirt [link] [comments]
My 64gb iPhone 11 pro trade in was a success! It took 2 weeks for their system to show they received the device but then just a couple days after for it to be evaluated. I received the full $560 value with my P7 order. I also was able to get Google to price match the Black Friday deals when it went live on the 17th. Since that priceatch applied it says my trade-in value is more than what I paid and the difference was going to be store credit too! Combined with the 10% back (Google one) plus a Superfan $100 store credit code, I'd say this was a win! 🙂 submitted by /u/tlxxxsracer [link] [comments]
I was surprised but pleasantly so to see Inside Job actually got a second season. The show for me is basically just Rick and Morty but translated from family sitcom to workplace sitcom (sort of). The first season was hit and miss but I think they need to do what Disenchanted did. Disenchanted was shaky as a sitcom but when they made it into a serial it worked so much better. Seeing Regan (it's so hard not to crush on her) go on an emotional journey to possibly topple the shadow government would be ambitious but very entertaining for me. I wonder if anyone shares my point of view. submitted by /u/ArcticFlower00 [link] [comments]
Hey folks, Apple support are being as helpful as ever so hoping someone can help here. Simple question: when you preorder a book on Apple Books, do you definitely get charged the price at which you preordered (similar to Amazon’s preorder price guarantee)? The book I’ve ordered is on offer at the moment and don’t want to wait a few months and be charged full price. Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/callopallo [link] [comments]
I'm shocked how popular this show is since it is such an old case. It really hits home because when they talk about the "Calder Killing Fields" being a place where boys come to ride dirt bikes...me and my brother were those boys along with several of our friends. I grew up less than a mile from these killing fields and we played out there in those woods and rode our dirt bikes in those trails all through the mid-80s to early 90s. We were aware that the police had found bodies dumped out there, but still played out there almost daily. Thinking back I find it insane that was our "go to" area to run around and just be kids when so much death and horror had occurred there. submitted by /u/KSims1868 [link] [comments]
’ve been trying to get this bug resolved and brought to attention for months but struggling. Since Pages 11.2, I noticed when pasting a table from Page 1 to Page 2 (and so on), it moves slightly. If on Page 1, it is at 1cm left and 1cm top margins - when pasted on Page 2, it moves to 0.96cm left and 0.96cm top. This is despite “stay on page”, or being a new document with nothing forcing it to be moved. The changes are small and seem to have no pattern. But each paste it moves, and never places is the same spot as it’s origin. This has never been an issue in older versions of pages. I use Pages for work and I cannot function making 300-500 page documents with tables that don’t paste in the same spot each time. If you have time to test it out yourself or just want to help, please submit feedback at https://www.apple.com/feedback/pages.html saying that tables are unaligned when pasted on new pages. Thank you so much. This is the only way I think it will get fixed 🙁 My one support claim might not be enough right now submitted by /u/ClassicGeorgia [link] [comments]
So when I run a speed test from fast.com which is Netflix’s servers I get around 25mbps. But when I play a video all I’m getting is 2-4mbps. Anyone know why? I thought fast.com would show how fast you’d get watching a videos submitted by /u/Homeguy123 [link] [comments]
Whenever I skip forward in an episode, or click the skip intro button, it stops playing the episode and gives error code M7333, which doesn't even seem to exist. The episode won't even play if I restart the Netflix window, but will play on my phone. Anyone have a clue what's going on? submitted by /u/Flynn230103 [link] [comments]
Originally Answered: What can I improve on for my next FAANG Sr SWE interview?
I’m going to read between the lines and assume that you are working at a grade below senior at a company which is not a FAANG. I’m also assuming that you feel that you are ready and that you’ve already done the obvious, read the books, practiced questions etc.
Your senior eng interview has 3 facets, coding, system design and behavioral.
Your levers to do better at each are:
To get better at coding interviews, interview more candidates. Seeing what others do well and less well is very helpful. This really applies to all sorts of interviews but IMO is most helpful for coding interviews.
To get better at system design interviews, read more design docs at your existing company, attend more design reviews, and force yourself to participate. Comment, ask questions. It doesn’t matter if you’re off the mark. See what doesn’t make sense to you and challenge it.
To get better at behavioral interviews, read your perf packets and the feedback from your coworkers. Read the docs that you wrote on your career plans (If you don’t have any, ask yourself why and start one). Reflect, regularly, on what has been hardest in your career, what you have done very well, where you struggled, what you would do differently.
I’d like to answer first in general — about attrition rates in the tech sector — and then about Amazon specifically.
Industry-Wide Retention
Retention in the US high-tech industry is very challenging. I believe there are two main reasons for that.
First, there is an acute shortage of qualified workers, which means companies are desperate to get employees anywhere they can, including — sometimes mainly — by poaching them from other companies. This is why so many companies moved into the Seattle East Side in the ’90s or South Lake Union in the last five years, for example: to poach from Microsoft and Amazon, respectively.
I remember the crazy late-90’s in the Israel high-tech industry. People would come in, work for 6–12 months, then jump ship for a fancier title and a bump in pay. It was insane; it was disgusting (I mean that literally: I would sometimes feel physically sick thinking about how stupid it all was.)
The second reason — which I’m not as certain about — is that the high-tech industry is so incredibly dynamic. Things change constantly: new companies spring up and grow like crazy (Uber anyone?); “old” companies that were considered the cream of the crop a couple of years ago are suddenly untouchable (Yahoo!). New technologies explode onto the scene and old ones stagnate.
Not only does that create a lot of churn as companies keep growing and shrinking; it also creates incredible pressure on tech workers to stay on top of their game. We’re always looking for the next big technology, the next big field, then next big product… The sad part is that a lot of it is just hype, but the psychological pressure is real enough, and it makes people move around always looking for the next great opportunity.
Amazon
The reason I want to talk about Amazon — which generally suffers from the same problems I’ve described above — is that there’s a perception in the public that Amazon is somehow worse than the rest of the industry; that it has awful attrition, because it’s a terrible place to work. I’ve tackled that in a couple of other answers (e.g. this one and this one), but it’s a very persistent myth.
Much of the fault is in reports like this one from PayScale, which then get regurgitated in hundreds of stories like this one (from BuzzFeed). The basic story seems very simple: the average tenure of an Amazon employee is about a year, which is — undoubtedly — really low, even in tech-industry terms.
That’s a great example of (supposedly) Benjamin Disraeli’s famous quote, “lies, damned lies and statistics”. There are at least two reasons why this number is completely meaningless:
Short tenure does not mean high attrition: in the last 6–7 years the number of employees at Amazon has grown exponentially, and I mean this literally:
This means that at any time, pretty much, about 20–40% of all Amazon employees have joined less than a year ago. It’s no really surprising that they have a short tenure, is it?
Measuring retention is not trivial, but this methodology is just plain dumb (or maybe intentionally misleading).
Amazon is not (only) a tech company: sure, if you compare Amazon to Google and Facebook it comes out bad. But unlike those companies, the majority of Amazon employees are not tech workers. They’re warehouse workers, drivers, customer-service people, etc. Many of them are temp workers, and many others are not considering the job as a career.
There is a good discussion to be had about how Amazon treats these workers and whether it can do better, but it makes no sense to compare it with Microsoft or Apple; Walmart and Target would be much better comparisons.
If you are looking for an all-in-one solution to help you prepare for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam, look no further than this AWS Cloud Practitioner CCP CLFC01 book below.
Invest in your future today by enrolling in this Azure Fundamentals - Microsoft Azure Certification and Training ebook below. This Azure Fundamentals Exam Prep Book will prepare you for the Azure Fundamentals AZ900 Certification Exam.
With average increases in salary of over 25% for certified individuals, you’re going to be in a much better position to secure your dream job or promotion if you earn your AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate or AWS Cloud Practitioner certification. Get the books below to for real practice exams:
We know you like your hobbies and especially coding, We do too, but you should find time to build the skills that’ll drive your career into Six Figures. Cloud skills and certifications can be just the thing you need to make the move into cloud or to level up and advance your career. 85% of hiring managers say cloud certifications make a candidate more attractive. Start your cloud journey with these excellent books below:
Use AWS Cheatsheets – I also found the cheatsheets provided by Tutorials Dojo very helpful. In my opinion, it is better than Jayendrapatil Patil’s blog since it contains more updated information that complements your review notes. #AWS Cheat Sheet
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Watch this exam readiness 3hr video, it very recent webinar this provides what is expected in the exam. #AWS Exam Prep Video
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Start off watching Ryan’s videos. Try and completely focus on the hands on. Take your time to understand what you are trying to learn and achieve in those LAB Sessions. #AWS Exam Prep Video
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Do not rush into completing the videos. Take your time and hone the basics. Focus and spend a lot of time for the back bone of AWS infrastructure – Compute/EC2 section, Storage (S3/EBS/EFS), Networking (Route 53/Load Balancers), RDS, VPC, Route 3. These sections are vast, with lot of concepts to go over and have loads to learn. Trust me you will need to thoroughly understand each one of them to ensure you pass the certification comfortably. #AWS Exam Prep Video
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Make sure you go through resources section and also AWS documentation for each components. Go over FAQs. If you have a question, please post it in the community. Trust me, each answer here helps you understand more about AWS. #AWS Faqs
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Like any other product/service, each AWS offering has a different flavor. I will take an example of EC2 (Spot/Reserved/Dedicated/On Demand etc.). Make sure you understand what they are, what are the pros/cons of each of these flavors. Applies for all other offerings too. #AWS Services
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Follow Neal K Davis on Linkedin and Read his updates about DVA-C01 #AWS Services
What is the AWS Certified Developer Associate Exam?
The AWS Certified Developer – Associate examination is intended for individuals who perform a development role and have one or more years of hands-on experience developing and maintaining an AWS-based application. It validates an examinee’s ability to:
Demonstrate an understanding of core AWS services, uses, and basic AWS architecture best practices
Demonstrate proficiency in developing, deploying, and debugging cloud-based applications using AWS
There are two types of questions on the examination:
Multiple-choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors).
Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the lifecycle of the project.
Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or incorrect answers, are response options that an examinee with incomplete knowledge or skill would likely choose. However, they are generally plausible responses that fit in the content area defined by the test objective. Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing.
To succeed with the real exam, do not memorize the answers below. It is very important that you understand why a question is right or wrong and the concepts behind it by carefully reading the reference documents in the answers.
Understand bastion hosts, and which subnet one might live on. Bastion hosts are instances that sit within your public subnet and are typically accessed using SSH or RDP. Once remote connectivity has been established with the bastion host, it then acts as a ‘jump’ server, allowing you to use SSH or RDP to login to other instances (within private subnets) deeper within your network. When properly configured through the use of security groups and Network ACLs, the bastion essentially acts as a bridge to your private instances via the Internet.” Bastion Hosts
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Know the difference between Directory Service’s AD Connector and Simple AD. Use Simple AD if you need an inexpensive Active Directory–compatible service with the common directory features. AD Connector lets you simply connect your existing on-premises Active Directory to AWS. AD Connector and Simple AD
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Know how to enable cross-account access with IAM: To delegate permission to access a resource, you create an IAM role that has two policies attached. The permissions policy grants the user of the role the needed permissions to carry out the desired tasks on the resource. The trust policy specifies which trusted accounts are allowed to grant its users permissions to assume the role. The trust policy on the role in the trusting account is one-half of the permissions. The other half is a permissions policy attached to the user in the trusted account that allows that user to switch to, or assume the role. Enable cross-account access with IAM
If you are looking for an all-in-one solution to help you prepare for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam, look no further than this AWS Cloud Practitioner CCP CLFC01 book below.
Invest in your future today by enrolling in this Azure Fundamentals - Microsoft Azure Certification and Training ebook below. This Azure Fundamentals Exam Prep Book will prepare you for the Azure Fundamentals AZ900 Certification Exam.
Know which services allow you to retain full admin privileges of the underlying EC2 instances EC2 Full admin privilege
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Know When Elastic IPs are free or not: If you associate additional EIPs with that instance, you will be charged for each additional EIP associated with that instance per hour on a pro rata basis. Additional EIPs are only available in Amazon VPC. To ensure efficient use of Elastic IP addresses, we impose a small hourly charge when these IP addresses are not associated with a running instance or when they are associated with a stopped instance or unattached network interface. When are AWS Elastic IPs Free or not?
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Know what are the four high level categories of information Trusted Advisor supplies. #AWS Trusted advisor
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Know how to troubleshoot a connection time out error when trying to connect to an instance in your VPC. You need a security group rule that allows inbound traffic from your public IP address on the proper port, you need a route that sends all traffic destined outside the VPC (0.0.0.0/0) to the Internet gateway for the VPC, the network ACLs must allow inbound and outbound traffic from your public IP address on the proper port, etc. #AWS Connection time out error
With average increases in salary of over 25% for certified individuals, you’re going to be in a much better position to secure your dream job or promotion if you earn your AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate or AWS Cloud Practitioner certification. Get the books below to for real practice exams:
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Be able to identify multiple possible use cases and eliminate non-use cases for SWF. #AWS
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Understand how you might set up consolidated billing and cross-account access such that individual divisions resources are isolated from each other, but corporate IT can oversee all of it. #AWS Set up consolidated billing
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We know you like your hobbies and especially coding, We do too, but you should find time to build the skills that’ll drive your career into Six Figures. Cloud skills and certifications can be just the thing you need to make the move into cloud or to level up and advance your career. 85% of hiring managers say cloud certifications make a candidate more attractive. Start your cloud journey with these excellent books below:
Know how you would go about making changes to an Auto Scaling group, fully understanding what you can and can’t change. “You can only specify one launch configuration for an Auto Scaling group at a time, and you can’t modify a launch configuration after you’ve created it. Therefore, if you want to change the launch configuration for your Auto Scaling group, you must create a launch configuration and then update your Auto Scaling group with the new launch configuration. When you change the launch configuration for your Auto Scaling group, any new instances are launched using the new configuration parameters, but existing instances are not affected. #AWS Make Change to Auto Scaling group
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Know how you would go about making changes to an Auto Scaling group, fully understanding what you can and can’t change. “You can only specify one launch configuration for an Auto Scaling group at a time, and you can’t modify a launch configuration after you’ve created it. Therefore, if you want to change the launch configuration for your Auto Scaling group, you must create a launch configuration and then update your Auto Scaling group with the new launch configuration. When you change the launch configuration for your Auto Scaling group, any new instances are launched using the new configuration parameters, but existing instances are not affected. #AWS Make Change to Auto Scaling group
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Know which field you use to run a script upon launching your instance. #AWS User data script
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Know how DynamoDB (durable, and you can pay for strong consistency), Elasticache (great for speed, not so durable), and S3 (eventual consistency results in lower latency) compare to each other in terms of durability and low latency. #AWS DynamoDB consistency
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Know the difference between bucket policies, IAM policies, and ACLs for use with S3, and examples of when you would use each. “With IAM policies, companies can grant IAM users fine-grained control to their Amazon S3 bucket or objects while also retaining full control over everything the users do. With bucket policies, companies can define rules which apply broadly across all requests to their Amazon S3 resources, such as granting write privileges to a subset of Amazon S3 resources. Customers can also restrict access based on an aspect of the request, such as HTTP referrer and IP address. With ACLs, customers can grant specific permissions (i.e. READ, WRITE, FULL_CONTROL) to specific users for an individual bucket or object. #AWS Difference between bucket policies
Understand how you can use ELB cross-zone load balancing to ensure even distribution of traffic to EC2 instances in multiple AZs registered with a load balancer. #AWS ELB cross-zone load balancing
Spot instances are good for cost optimization, even if it seems you might need to fall back to On-Demand instances if you wind up getting kicked off them and the timeline grows tighter. The primary (but still not only) factor seems to be whether you can gracefully handle instances that die on you–which is pretty much how you should always design everything, anyway! #AWS Spot instances
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The term “use case” is not the same as “function” or “capability”. A use case is something that your app/system will need to accomplish, not just behaviour that you will get from that service. In particular, a use case doesn’t require that the service be a 100% turnkey solution for that situation, just that the service plays a valuable role in enabling it. #AWS use case
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There might be extra, unnecessary information in some of the questions (red herrings), so try not to get thrown off by them. Understand what services can and can’t do, but don’t ignore “obvious”-but-still-correct answers in favour of super-tricky ones. #AWS Exam Answers: Distractors
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If you don’t know what they’re trying to ask, in a question, just move on and come back to it later (by using the helpful “mark this question” feature in the exam tool). You could easily spend way more time than you should on a single confusing question if you don’t triage and move on. #AWS Exa: Skip Questions that are vague and come back to them later
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Some exam questions required you to understand features and use cases of: VPC peering, cross-account access, DirectConnect, snapshotting EBS RAID arrays, DynamoDB, spot instances, Glacier, AWS/user security responsibilities, etc. #AWS
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The 30 Day constraint in the S3 Lifecycle Policy before transitioning to S3-IA and S3-One Zone IA storage classes #AWS S3 lifecycle policy
Watch Acloud Guru Videos Lectures while commuting / lunch break – Reschedule the exam if you are not yet ready #AWS ACloud Guru
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Watch Linux Academy Videos Lectures while commuting / lunch break – Reschedule the exam if you are not yet ready #AWS Linux Academy
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Watch Udemy Videos Lectures while commuting / lunch break – Reschedule the exam if you are not yet ready #AWS Linux Academy
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The Udemy practice test interface is good that it pinpoints your weak areas, so what I did was to re-watch all the videos that I got the wrong answers. Since I was able to gauge my exam readiness, I decided to reschedule my exam for 2 more weeks, to help me focus on completing the practice tests. #AWS Udemy
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Use AWS Cheatsheets – I also found the cheatsheets provided by Tutorials Dojo very helpful. In my opinion, it is better than Jayendrapatil Patil’s blog since it contains more updated information that complements your review notes. #AWS Cheat Sheet
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Watch this exam readiness 3hr video, it very recent webinar this provides what is expected in the exam. #AWS Exam Prep Video
41
Start off watching Ryan’s videos. Try and completely focus on the hands on. Take your time to understand what you are trying to learn and achieve in those LAB Sessions. #AWS Exam Prep Video
42
Do not rush into completing the videos. Take your time and hone the basics. Focus and spend a lot of time for the back bone of AWS infrastructure – Compute/EC2 section, Storage (S3/EBS/EFS), Networking (Route 53/Load Balancers), RDS, VPC, Route 3. These sections are vast, with lot of concepts to go over and have loads to learn. Trust me you will need to thoroughly understand each one of them to ensure you pass the certification comfortably. #AWS Exam Prep Video
43
Make sure you go through resources section and also AWS documentation for each components. Go over FAQs. If you have a question, please post it in the community. Trust me, each answer here helps you understand more about AWS. #AWS Faqs
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Like any other product/service, each AWS offering has a different flavor. I will take an example of EC2 (Spot/Reserved/Dedicated/On Demand etc.). Make sure you understand what they are, what are the pros/cons of each of these flavors. Applies for all other offerings too. #AWS Services
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Ensure to attend all quizzes after each section. Please do not treat these quizzes as your practice exams. These quizzes are designed to mostly test your knowledge on the section you just finished. The exam itself is designed to test you with scenarios and questions, where in you will need to recall and apply your knowledge of different AWS technologies/services you learn over multiple lectures. #AWS Services
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I, personally, do not recommend to attempt a practice exam or simulator exam until you have done all of the above. It was a little overwhelming for me. I had thoroughly gone over the videos. And understood the concepts pretty well, but once I opened exam simulator I felt the questions were pretty difficult. I also had a feeling that videos do not cover lot of topics. But later I realized, given the vastness of AWS Services and offerings it is really difficult to encompass all these services and their details in the course content. The fact that these services keep changing so often, does not help #AWS Services
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Go back and make a note of all topics, that you felt were unfamiliar for you. Go through the resources section and fiund links to AWS documentation. After going over them, you shoud gain at least 5-10% more knowledge on AWS. Have expectations from the online courses as a way to get thorough understanding of basics and strong foundations for your AWS knowledge. But once you are done with videos. Make sure you spend a lot of time on AWS documentation and FAQs. There are many many topics/sub topics which may not be covered in the course and you would need to know, atleast their basic functionalities, to do well in the exam. #AWS Services
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Once you start taking practice exams, it may seem really difficult at the beginning. So, please do not panic if you find the questions complicated or difficult. IMO they are designed or put in a way to sound complicated but they are not. Be calm and read questions very carefully. In my observation, many questions have lot of information which sometimes is not relevant to the solution you are expected to provide. Read the question slowly and read it again until you understand what is expected out of it. #AWS Services
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With each practice exam you will come across topics that you may need to scale your knowledge on or learn them from scratch. #AWS Services
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With each test and the subsequent revision, you will surely feel more confident.
There are 130 mins for questions. 2 mins for each question which is plenty of time.
At least take 8-10 practice tests. The ones on udemy/tutorialdojo are really good. If you are a acloudguru member. The exam simulator is really good.
Manage your time well. Keep patience. I saw someone mention in one of the discussions that do not under estimate the mental focus/strength needed to sit through 130 mins solving these questions. And it is really true.
Do not give away or waste any of those precious 130 mins. While answering flag/mark questions you think you are not completely sure. My advice is, even if you finish early, spend your time reviewing the answers. I could review 40 of my answers at the end of test. And I at least rectified 3 of them (which is 4-5% of total score, I think)
So in short – Put a lot of focus on making your foundations strong. Make sure you go through AWS Documentation and FAQs. Try and envision how all of the AWS components can fit together and provide an optimal solution. Keep calm. This video gives outline about exam, must watch before or after Ryan’s course.#AWS Services
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Walking you through how to best prepare for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C02 exam in 5 steps:
1. Understand the exam blueprint
2. Learn about the new topics included in the SAA-C02 version of the exam
3. Use the many FREE resources available to gain and deepen your knowledge
4. Enroll in our hands-on video course to learn AWS in depth
5. Use practice tests to fully prepare yourself for the exam and assess your exam readiness AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
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Storage:
1. Know your different Amazon S3 storage tiers! You need to know the use cases, features and limitations, and relative costs; e.g. retrieval costs.
2. Amazon S3 lifecycle policies is also required knowledge — there are minimum storage times in certain tiers that you need to know.
3. For Glacier, you need to understand what it is, what it’s used for, and what the options are for retrieval times and fees.
4. For the Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), make sure you’re clear which operating systems you can use with it (just Linux).
5. For the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), make sure you know when to use the different tiers including instance stores; e.g. what would you use for a datastore that requires the highest IO and the data is distributed across multiple instances? (Good instance store use case)
6. Learn about Amazon FSx. You’ll need to know about FSx for Windows and Lustre.
7. Know how to improve Amazon S3 performance including using CloudFront, and byte-range fetches — check out this whitepaper.
8. Make sure you understand about Amazon S3 object deletion protection options including versioning and MFA delete. AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
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Compute:
1. You need to have a good understanding of the options for how to scale an Auto Scaling Group using metrics such as SQS queue depth, or numbers of SNS messages.
2. Know your different Auto Scaling policies including Target Tracking Policies.
3. Read up on High Performance Computing (HPC) with AWS. You’ll need to know about Amazon FSx with HPC use cases.
4. Know your placement groups. Make sure you can differentiate between spread, cluster and partition; e.g. what would you use for lowest latency? What about if you need to support an app that’s tightly coupled? Within an AZ or cross AZ?
5. Make sure you know the difference between Elastic Network Adapters (ENAs), Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) and Elastic Fabric Adapters (EFAs).
6. For the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), make sure you understand how to assign IAM policies to ECS for providing S3 access. How can you decouple an ECS data processing process — Kinesis Firehose or SQS?
7. Make sure you’re clear on the different EC2 pricing models including Reserved Instances (RI) and the different RI options such as scheduled RIs.
8. Make sure you know the maximum execution time for AWS Lambda (it’s currently 900 seconds or 15 minutes). AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
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Network
1. Understand what AWS Global Accelerator is and its use cases.
2. Understand when to use CloudFront and when to use AWS Global Accelerator.
3. Make sure you understand the different types of VPC endpoint and which require an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) and which require a route table entry.
4. You need to know how to connect multiple accounts; e.g. should you use VPC peering or a VPC endpoint?
5. Know the difference between PrivateLink and ClassicLink.
6. Know the patterns for extending a secure on-premises environment into AWS.
7. Know how to encrypt AWS Direct Connect (you can use a Virtual Private Gateway / AWS VPN).
8. Understand when to use Direct Connect vs Snowball to migrate data — lead time can be an issue with Direct Connect if you’re in a hurry.
9. Know how to prevent circumvention of Amazon CloudFront; e.g. Origin Access Identity (OAI) or signed URLs / signed cookies. AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
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Databases
1. Make sure you understand Amazon Aurora and Amazon Aurora Serverless.
2. Know which RDS databases can have Read Replicas and whether you can read from a Multi-AZ standby.
3. Know the options for encrypting an existing RDS database; e.g. only at creation time otherwise you must encrypt a snapshot and create a new instance from the snapshot.
4. Know which databases are key-value stores; e.g. Amazon DynamoDB. AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
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Application Integration
1. Make sure you know the use cases for the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Simple Notification Service (SNS).
2. Understand the differences between Amazon Kinesis Firehose and SQS and when you would use each service.
3. Know how to use Amazon S3 event notifications to publish events to SQS — here’s a good “How To” article. AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
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Management and Governance
1. You’ll need to know about AWS Organizations; e.g. how to migrate an account between organizations.
2. For AWS Organizations, you also need to know how to restrict actions using service control policies attached to OUs.
3. Understand what AWS Resource Access Manager is. AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
The AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate Examination reparation and Readiness Quiz App (SAA-C01, SAA-C01, SAA) Prep App helps you prepare and train for the AWS Certification Solution Architect Associate Exam with various questions and answers dumps.
This App provide updated Questions and Answers, an Intuitive Responsive Interface allowing to browse questions horizontally and browse tips and resources vertically after completing a quiz.
Features:
100+ Questions and Answers updated frequently to get you AWS certified.
Quiz with score tracker, countdown timer, highest score saving. Vie Answers after completing the quiz for each category.
Ability to navigate through questions for each category using next and previous button.
Resource info page about the answer for each category and Top 60 Tips to succeed in the exam.
Prominent Cloud Evangelist latest tweets and Technology Latest News Feed
The app helps you study and practice from your mobile device with an intuitive interface.
SAA-C01 and SAA-C02 compatible
Resource info page about the answer for each category.
Helps you study and practice from your mobile device with an intuitive interface.
The questions and Answers are divided in 4 categories:
Design High Performing Architectures,
Design Cost Optimized Architectures,
Design Secure Applications And Architectures,
Design Resilient Architecture,
The questions and answers cover the following topics: AWS VPC, S3, DynamoDB, EC2, ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Code Pipeline, Code Deploy, TCO Calculator, AWS S3, AWS DynamoDB, CloudWatch , AWS SES, Amazon Lex, AWS EBS, AWS ELB, AWS Autoscaling , RDS, Aurora, Route 53, Amazon CodeGuru, Amazon Bracket, AWS Billing and Pricing, AWS Simply Monthly Calculator, AWS cost calculator, Ec2 pricing on-demand, AWS Pricing, AWS Pay As You Go, AWS No Upfront Cost, Cost Explorer, AWS Organizations, Consolidated billing, Instance Scheduler, on-demand instances, Reserved instances, Spot Instances, CloudFront, Web hosting on S3, S3 storage classes, AWS Regions, AWS Availability Zones, Trusted Advisor, Various architectural Questions and Answers about AWS, AWS SDK, AWS EBS Volumes, EC2, S3, Containers, KMS, AWS read replicas, Cloudfront, API Gateway, AWS Snapshots, Auto shutdown Ec2 instances, High Availability, RDS, DynamoDB, Elasticity, AWS Virtual Machines, AWS Caching, AWS Containers, AWS Architecture, AWS Ec2, AWS S3, AWS Security, AWS Lambda, Bastion Hosts, S3 lifecycle policy, kinesis sharing, AWS KMS, Design High Performing Architectures, Design Cost Optimized Architectures, Design Secure Applications And Architectures, Design Resilient Architecture, AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud, Resources, Questions, AWS, AWS SDK, AWS EBS Volumes, AWS read replicas, Cloudfront, API Gateway, AWS Snapshots, Auto shutdown Ec2 instances, High Availability, RDS, DynamoDB, Elasticity, AWS Virtual Machines, AWS Caching, AWS Containers, AWS Architecture, AWS Ec2, AWS S3, AWS Security, AWS Lambda, Load Balancing, DynamoDB, EBS, Multi-AZ RDS, Aurora, EFS, DynamoDB, NLB, ALB, Aurora, Auto Scaling, DynamoDB(latency), Aurora(performance), Multi-AZ RDS(high availability), Throughput Optimized EBS (highly sequential), SAA-CO1, SAA-CO2, Cloudwatch, CloudTrail, KMS, ElasticBeanstalk, OpsWorks, RPO vs RTO, HA vs FT, Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting, Access Management Basics, Shared Responsibility Model, Cloud Service Models, etc…
The resources sections cover the following areas: Certification, AWS training, Mock Exam Preparation Tips, Cloud Architect Training, Cloud Architect Knowledge, Cloud Technology, cloud certification, cloud exam preparation tips, cloud solution architect associate exam, certification practice exam, learn aws free, amazon cloud solution architect, question dumps, acloud guru links, tutorial dojo links, linuxacademy links, latest aws certification tweets, and post from reddit, quota, linkedin, medium, cloud exam preparation tips, aws cloud solution architect associate exam, aws certification practice exam, cloud exam questions, learn aws free, amazon cloud solution architect, amazon cloud certified solution architect associate exam questions, as certification dumps, google cloud, azure cloud, acloud, learn google cloud, learn azure cloud, cloud comparison, etc.
Abilities Validated by the Certification:
Effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies
Define a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements
Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the life cycle of the project
Recommended Knowledge for the Certification:
One year of hands-on experience designing available, cost-effective, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed systems on AWS.
Hands-on experience using compute, networking, storage, and database AWS services.
Hands-on experience with AWS deployment and management services.
Ability to identify and define technical requirements for an AWS-based application.
bility to identify which AWS services meet a given technical requirement.
Knowledge of recommended best practices for building secure and reliable applications on the AWS platform.
An understanding of the basic architectural principles of building in the AWS Cloud.
An understanding of the AWS global infrastructure.
An understanding of network technologies as they relate to AWS.
An understanding of security features and tools that AWS provides and how they relate to traditional services.
Note and disclaimer: We are not affiliated with AWS or Amazon or Microsoft or Google. The questions are put together based on the certification study guide and materials available online. We also receive questions and answers from anonymous users and we vet to make sure they are legitimate. The questions in this app should help you pass the exam but it is not guaranteed. We are not responsible for any exam you did not pass.
Important: To succeed with the real exam, do not memorize the answers in this app. It is very important that you understand why a question is right or wrong and the concepts behind it by carefully reading the reference documents in the answers.
What is the AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate Exam?
This exam validates an examinee’s ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies. It validates an examinee’s ability to:
Define a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements.
Multiple-response: Has two correct responses out of five options.
There are two types of questions on the examination:
Multiple-choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors).
Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the lifecycle of the project.
Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or incorrect answers, are response options that an examinee with incomplete knowledge or skill would likely choose. However, they are generally plausible responses that fit in the content area defined by the test objective. Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing.
To succeed with the real exam, do not memorize the answers below. It is very important that you understand why a question is right or wrong and the concepts behind it by carefully reading the reference documents in the answers.
You can translate the content of this page by selecting a language in the select box.
Wha are the Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is the new big thing in Information Technology. Everyone, every business will sooner or later adopt it, because of hosting cost benefits, scalability and more.
This blog outlines the Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing, Pros and Cons of Cloud Technology, Faqs, Facts, Questions and Answers Dump about cloud computing.
Cloud Practitioner Exam Prep AWS vs Azure vs Google
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is an information technology paradigm that enables ubiquitous access to shared pools of configurable system resources and higher-level services that can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the Internet. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, similar to a public utility. Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business needs change.
Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers
Go global in minutes
Benefits of AWS Cloud Computing
Cost effective & Time saving: Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters; the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, and the IT experts for managing the infrastructure.
The ability to pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs.
Powerful server capabilities and Performance: The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure datacenters, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate datacenter, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.
Powerful and scalable server capabilities: The ability to scale elastically; That means delivering the right amount of IT resources—for example, more or less computing power, storage, bandwidth—right when they’re needed, and from the right geographic location.
SaaS ( Software as a service). Software as a service is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on demand and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure, and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the application over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their phone, tablet, or PC.
PaaS ( Platform as a service). Platform as a service refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering, and managing software applications. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network, and databases needed for development.
IaaS ( Infrastructure as a service). The most basic category of cloud computing services. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure—servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systems—from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis
Serverless: Running complex Applications without a single server. Overlapping with PaaS, serverless computing focuses on building app functionality without spending time continually managing the servers and infrastructure required to do so. The cloud provider handles the setup, capacity planning, and server management for you. Serverless architectures are highly scalable and event-driven, only using resources when a specific function or trigger occurs.
Infrastructure provisioning as code, helps recreating same infrastructure by re-running the same code in a few click.
Automatic and Reliable Data backup and storage of data: Cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity easier and less expensive because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network.
Increase Productivity: On-site datacenters typically require a lot of “racking and stacking”—hardware setup, software patching, and other time-consuming IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks, so IT teams can spend time on achieving more important business goals.
Security: Many cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls that strengthen your security posture overall, helping protect your data, apps, and infrastructure from potential threats.
Speed: Most cloud computing services are provided self service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off capacity planning. In a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only a click away. This means that the time those resources are available to your developers is reduced from weeks to minutes. As a result, the organization experiences a dramatic increase in agility because the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is lower
Go global in minutes
Easily deploy your application in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks. This means that you can provide a lower latency and better experience for your customers simply and at minimal cost.
Privacy: Cloud computing poses privacy concerns because the service provider can access the data that is in the cloud at any time. It could accidentally or deliberately alter or delete information.Many cloud providers can share information with third parties if necessary for purposes of law and order without a warrant. That is permitted in their privacy policies, which users must agree to before they start using cloud services.
Security: According to the Cloud Security Alliance, the top three threats in the cloud are Insecure Interfaces and API’s, Data Loss & Leakage, and Hardware Failure—which accounted for 29%, 25% and 10% of all cloud security outages respectively. Together, these form shared technology vulnerabilities.
Ownership of Data: There is the problem of legal ownership of the data (If a user stores some data in the cloud, can the cloud provider profit from it?). Many Terms of Service agreements are silent on the question of ownership.
Limited Customization Options: Cloud computing is cheaper because of economics of scale, and—like any outsourced task—you tend to get what you get. A restaurant with a limited menu is cheaper than a personal chef who can cook anything you want.
Downtime: Technical outages are inevitable and occur sometimes when cloud service providers (CSPs) become overwhelmed in the process of serving their clients. This may result to temporary business suspension.
Security of stored data and data in transit may be a concern when storing sensitive data at a cloud storage provider[10]
Users with specific records-keeping requirements, such as public agencies that must retain electronic records according to statute, may encounter complications with using cloud computing and storage. For instance, the U.S. Department of Defense designated the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to maintain a list of records management products that meet all of the records retention, personally identifiable information (PII), and security (Information Assurance; IA) requirements
Cloud storage is a rich resource for both hackers and national security agencies. Because the cloud holds data from many different users and organizations, hackers see it as a very valuable target.
Piracy and copyright infringement may be enabled by sites that permit filesharing. For example, the CodexCloud ebook storage site has faced litigation from the owners of the intellectual property uploaded and shared there, as have the GrooveShark and YouTube sites it has been compared to.
Public clouds: A cloud is called a “public cloud” when the services are rendered over a network that is open for public use. They are owned and operated by a third-party cloud service providers, which deliver their computing resources, like servers and storage, over the Internet. Microsoft Azure is an example of a public cloud. With a public cloud, all hardware, software, and other supporting infrastructure is owned and managed by the cloud provider. You access these services and manage your account using a web browser. For infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) hold a commanding position among the many cloud companies.
Private cloud is cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third party, and hosted either internally or externally. A private cloud refers to cloud computing resources used exclusively by a single business or organization. A private cloud can be physically located on the company’s on-site datacenter. Some companies also pay third-party service providers to host their private cloud. A private cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network.
Hybrid cloud is a composition of a public cloud and a private environment, such as a private cloud or on-premise resources, that remain distinct entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. Hybrid cloud can also mean the ability to connect collocation, managed and/or dedicated services with cloud resources. Hybrid clouds combine public and private clouds, bound together by technology that allows data and applications to be shared between them. By allowing data and applications to move between private and public clouds, a hybrid cloud gives your business greater flexibility, more deployment options, and helps optimize your existing infrastructure, security, and compliance.
Community Cloud: A community cloud in computing is a collaborative effort in which infrastructure is shared between several organizations from a specific community with common concerns, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally. This is controlled and used by a group of organizations that have shared interest. The costs are spread over fewer users than a public cloud, so only some of the cost savings potential of cloud computing are realized.
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Other AWS Facts and Summaries and Questions/Answers Dump
Definition 1:Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed proprietary NoSQL database service that supports key-value and document data structures and is offered by Amazon.com as part of the Amazon Web Services portfolio. DynamoDB exposes a similar data model to and derives its name from Dynamo, but has a different underlying implementation. Dynamo had a multi-master design requiring the client to resolve version conflicts and DynamoDB uses synchronous replication across multiple datacenters for high durability and availability.
Definition 2:DynamoDB is a fast and flexible non-relational database service for any scale. DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases to AWS so that they don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, throughput capacity planning, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling.
Amazon DynamoDB explained
Fully Managed
Fast, consistent Performance
Fine-grained access control
Flexible
Amazon DynamoDB explained
AWS DynamoDB Facts and Summaries
Amazon DynamoDB is a low-latency NoSQL database.
DynamoDB consists of Tables, Items, and Attributes
DynamoDb supports both document and key-value data models
DynamoDB Supported documents formats are JSON, HTML, XML
DynamoDB has 2 types of Primary Keys: Partition Key and combination of Partition Key + Sort Key (Composite Key)
DynamoDB has 2 consistency models: Strongly Consistent / Eventually Consistent
DynamoDB Access is controlled using IAM policies.
DynamoDB has fine grained access control using IAM Condition parameter dynamodb:LeadingKeys to allow users to access only the items where the partition key vakue matches their user ID.
DynamoDB Indexes enable fast queries on specific data columns
DynamoDB indexes give you a different view of your data based on alternative Partition / Sort Keys.
DynamoDB Local Secondary indexes must be created when you create your table, they have same partition Key as your table, and they have a different Sort Key.
DynamoDB Global Secondary Index Can be created at any time: at table creation or after. They have a different partition Key as your table and a different sort key as your table.
A DynamoDB query operation finds items in a table using only the primary Key attribute: You provide the Primary Key name and a distinct value to search for.
A DynamoDB Scan operation examines every item in the table. By default, it return data attributes.
DynamoDB Query operation is generally more efficient than a Scan.
With DynamoDB, you can reduce the impact of a query or scan by setting a smaller page size which uses fewer read operations.
To optimize DynamoDB performance, isolate scan operations to specific tables and segregate them from your mission-critical traffic.
To optimize DynamoDB performance, try Parallel scans rather than the default sequential scan.
To optimize DynamoDB performance: Avoid using scan operations if you can: design tables in a way that you can use Query, Get, or BatchGetItems APIs.
When you scan your table in Amazon DynamoDB, you should follow the DynamoDB best practices for avoiding sudden bursts of read activity.
DynamoDb Provisioned Throughput is measured in Capacity Units.
1 Write Capacity Unit = 1 x 1KB Write per second.
1 Read Capacity Unit = 1 x 4KB Strongly Consistent Read Or 2 x 4KB Eventually Consistent Reads per second. Eventual consistent reads give us the maximum performance with the read operation.
What is the maximum throughput that can be provisioned for a single DynamoDB table?
DynamoDB is designed to scale without limits. However, if you want to exceed throughput rates of 10,000 write capacity units or 10,000 read capacity units for an individual table, you must Contact AWS to increase it.
If you want to provision more than 20,000 write capacity units or 20,000 read capacity units from a single subscriber account, you must first contact AWS to request a limit increase.
Dynamo Db Performance: DAX is a DynamoDB-compatible caching service that enables you to benefit from fast in-memory performance for demanding applications.
As an in-memory cache, DAX reduces the response times of eventually-consistent read workloads by an order of magnitude, from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds
DAX improves response times for Eventually Consistent reads only.
With DAX, you point your API calls to the DAX cluster instead of your table.
If the item you are querying is on the cache, DAX will return it; otherwise, it will perform and Eventually Consistent GetItem operation to your DynamoDB table.
DAX reduces operational and application complexity by providing a managed service that is API compatible with Amazon DynamoDB, and thus requires only minimal functional changes to use with an existing application.
DAX is not suitable for write-intensive applications or applications that require Strongly Consistent reads.
For read-heavy or bursty workloads, DAX provides increased throughput and potential operational cost savings by reducing the need to over-provision read capacity units. This is especially beneficial for applications that require repeated reads for individual keys.
Dynamo Db Performance: ElastiCache
In-memory cache sits between your application and database
2 different caching strategies: Lazy loading and Write Through: Lazy loading only caches the data when it is requested
Elasticache Node failures are not fatal, just lots of cache misses
Avoid stale data by implementing a TTL.
Write-Through strategy writes data into cache whenever there is a change to the database. Data is never stale
Write-Through penalty: Each write involves a write to the cache. Elasticache node failure means that data is missing until added or updated in the database.
Elasticache is wasted resources if most of the data is never used.
Time To Live (TTL) for DynamoDB allows you to define when items in a table expire so that they can be automatically deleted from the database. TTL is provided at no extra cost as a way to reduce storage usage and reduce the cost of storing irrelevant data without using provisioned throughput. With TTL enabled on a table, you can set a timestamp for deletion on a per-item basis, allowing you to limit storage usage to only those records that are relevant.
DynamoDB Security: DynamoDB uses the CMK to generate and encrypt a unique data key for the table, known as the table key. With DynamoDB, AWS Owned, or AWS Managed CMK can be used to generate & encrypt keys. AWS Owned CMK is free of charge while AWS Managed CMK is chargeable. Customer managed CMK’s are not supported with encryption at rest.
Amazon DynamoDB offers fully managed encryption at rest. DynamoDB encryption at rest provides enhanced security by encrypting your data at rest using an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) managed encryption key for DynamoDB. This functionality eliminates the operational burden and complexity involved in protecting sensitive data.
DynamoDB is a alternative solution which can be used for storage of session management. The latency of access to data is less , hence this can be used as a data store for session management
DynamoDB Streams Use Cases and Design Patterns:
How do you set up a relationship across multiple tables in which, based on the value of an item from one table, you update the item in a second table?
How do you trigger an event based on a particular transaction?
How do you audit or archive transactions?
How do you replicate data across multiple tables (similar to that of materialized views/streams/replication in relational data stores)?
As a NoSQL database, DynamoDB is not designed to support transactions. Although client-side libraries are available to mimic the transaction capabilities, they are not scalable and cost-effective. For example, the Java Transaction Library for DynamoDB creates 7N+4 additional writes for every write operation. This is partly because the library holds metadata to manage the transactions to ensure that it’s consistent and can be rolled back before commit.
You can use DynamoDB Streams to address all these use cases. DynamoDB Streams is a powerful service that you can combine with other AWS services to solve many similar problems. When enabled, DynamoDB Streams captures a time-ordered sequence of item-level modifications in a DynamoDB table and durably stores the information for up to 24 hours. Applications can access a series of stream records, which contain an item change, from a DynamoDB stream in near real time.
AWS maintains separate endpoints for DynamoDB and DynamoDB Streams. To work with database tables and indexes, your application must access a DynamoDB endpoint. To read and process DynamoDB Streams records, your application must access a DynamoDB Streams endpoint in the same Region
20 global secondary indexes are allowed per table? (by default)
What is one key difference between a global secondary index and a local secondary index? A local secondary index must have the same partition key as the main table
How many tables can an AWS account have per region? 256
How many secondary indexes (global and local combined) are allowed per table? (by default): 25 You can define up to 5 local secondary indexes and 20 global secondary indexes per table (by default) – for a total of 25.
How can you increase your DynamoDB table limit in a region? By contacting AWS and requesting a limit increase
For any AWS account, there is an initial limit of 256 tables per region.
The minimum length of a partition key value is 1 byte. The maximum length is 2048 bytes.
The minimum length of a sort key value is 1 byte. The maximum length is 1024 bytes.
For tables with local secondary indexes, there is a 10 GB size limit per partition key value. A table with local secondary indexes can store any number of items, as long as the total size for any one partition key value does not exceed 10 GB.
The following diagram shows a local secondary index named LastPostIndex. Note that the partition key is the same as that of the Thread table, but the sort key is LastPostDateTime.
Q0: What should the Developer enable on the DynamoDB table to optimize performance and minimize costs?
A. Amazon DynamoDB auto scaling
B. Amazon DynamoDB cross-region replication
C. Amazon DynamoDB Streams
D. Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator
D. DAX is a DynamoDB-compatible caching service that enables you to benefit from fast in-memory performance for demanding applications. DAX addresses three core scenarios:
As an in-memory cache, DAX reduces the response times of eventually-consistent read workloads by an order of magnitude, from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds.
DAX reduces operational and application complexity by providing a managed service that is API-compatible with Amazon DynamoDB, and thus requires only minimal functional changes to use with an existing application.
For read-heavy or bursty workloads, DAX provides increased throughput and potential operational cost savings by reducing the need to over-provision read capacity units. This is especially beneficial for applications that require repeated reads for individual keys.
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Q2: A security system monitors 600 cameras, saving image metadata every 1 minute to an Amazon DynamoDb table. Each sample involves 1kb of data, and the data writes are evenly distributed over time. How much write throughput is required for the target table?
A. 6000
B. 10
C. 3600
D. 600
B. When you mention the write capacity of a table in Dynamo DB, you mention it as the number of 1KB writes per second. So in the above question, since the write is happening every minute, we need to divide the value of 600 by 60, to get the number of KB writes per second. This gives a value of 10.
You can specify the Write capacity in the Capacity tab of the DynamoDB table.
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Q3: You are developing an application that will interact with a DynamoDB table. The table is going to take in a lot of read and write operations. Which of the following would be the ideal partition key for the DynamoDB table to ensure ideal performance?
A. CustomerID
B. CustomerName
C. Location
D. Age
Answer- A
Use high-cardinality attributes. These are attributes that have distinct values for each item, like e-mailid, employee_no, customerid, sessionid, orderid, and so on..
Use composite attributes. Try to combine more than one attribute to form a unique key.
Reference: Choosing the right DynamoDB Partition Key
Q4: A DynamoDB table is set with a Read Throughput capacity of 5 RCU. Which of the following read configuration will provide us the maximum read throughput?
A. Read capacity set to 5 for 4KB reads of data at strong consistency
B. Read capacity set to 5 for 4KB reads of data at eventual consistency
C. Read capacity set to 15 for 1KB reads of data at strong consistency
D. Read capacity set to 5 for 1KB reads of data at eventual consistency
Answer: B.
The calculation of throughput capacity for option B would be:
Read capacity(5) * Amount of data(4) = 20.
Since its required at eventual consistency , we can double the read throughput to 20*2=40
Q5: Your team is developing a solution that will make use of DynamoDB tables. Due to the nature of the application, the data is needed across a couple of regions across the world. Which of the following would help reduce the latency of requests to DynamoDB from different regions?
A. Enable Multi-AZ for the DynamoDB table
B. Enable global tables for DynamoDB
C. Enable Indexes for the table
D. Increase the read and write throughput for the tablez
Answer: B
Amazon DynamoDB global tables provide a fully managed solution for deploying a multi-region, multimaster database, without having to build and maintain your own replication solution. When you create a global table, you specify the AWS regions where you want the table to be available. DynamoDB performs all of the necessary tasks to create identical tables in these regions, and propagate ongoing data changes to all of them.
Reference: Global Tables
Q6: An application is currently accessing a DynamoDB table. Currently the tables queries are performing well. Changes have been made to the application and now the performance of the application is starting to degrade. After looking at the changes , you see that the queries are making use of an attribute which is not the partition key? Which of the following would be the adequate change to make to resolve the issue?
A. Add an index for the DynamoDB table
B. Change all the queries to ensure they use the partition key
C. Enable global tables for DynamoDB
D. Change the read capacity on the table
Answer: A
Amazon DynamoDB provides fast access to items in a table by specifying primary key values. However, many applications might benefit from having one or more secondary (or alternate) keys available, to allow efficient access to data with attributes other than the primary key. To address this, you can create one or more secondary indexes on a table, and issue Query or Scan requests against these indexes.
A secondary index is a data structure that contains a subset of attributes from a table, along with an alternate key to support Query operations. You can retrieve data from the index using a Query, in much the same way as you use Query with a table. A table can have multiple secondary indexes, which gives your applications access to many different query patterns.
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Q7: Company B has created an e-commerce site using DynamoDB and is designing a products table that includes items purchased and the users who purchased the item.
When creating a primary key on a table which of the following would be the best attribute for the partition key? Select the BEST possible answer.
A. None of these are correct.
B. user_id where there are many users to few products
C. category_id where there are few categories to many products
D. product_id where there are few products to many users
Answer: B.
When designing tables it is important for the data to be distributed evenly across the entire table. It is best practice for performance to set your primary key where there are many primary keys to few rows. An example would be many users to few products. An example of bad design would be a primary key of product_id where there are few products but many users.
When designing tables it is important for the data to be distributed evenly across the entire table. It is best practice for performance to set your primary key where there are many primary keys to few rows. An example would be many users to few products. An example of bad design would be a primary key of product_id where there are few products but many users.
Reference: Partition Keys and Sort Keys
Q8: Which API call can be used to retrieve up to 100 items at a time or 16 MB of data from a DynamoDB table?
A. BatchItem
B. GetItem
C. BatchGetItem
D. ChunkGetItem
Answer: C. BatchGetItem
The BatchGetItem operation returns the attributes of one or more items from one or more tables. You identify requested items by primary key.
A single operation can retrieve up to 16 MB of data, which can contain as many as 100 items. BatchGetItem will return a partial result if the response size limit is exceeded, the table’s provisioned throughput is exceeded, or an internal processing failure occurs. If a partial result is returned, the operation returns a value for UnprocessedKeys. You can use this value to retry the operation starting with the next item to get.Reference: API-Specific Limits
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Q9: Which DynamoDB limits can be raised by contacting AWS support?
A. The number of hash keys per account
B. The maximum storage used per account
C. The number of tables per account
D. The number of local secondary indexes per account
E. The number of provisioned throughput units per account
Answer: C. and E.
For any AWS account, there is an initial limit of 256 tables per region.
AWS places some default limits on the throughput you can provision.
These are the limits unless you request a higher amount.
To request a service limit increase see https://aws.amazon.com/support.
Q10: Which approach below provides the least impact to provisioned throughput on the “Product”
table?
A. Create an “Images” DynamoDB table to store the Image with a foreign key constraint to
the “Product” table
B. Add an image data type to the “Product” table to store the images in binary format
C. Serialize the image and store it in multiple DynamoDB tables
D. Store the images in Amazon S3 and add an S3 URL pointer to the “Product” table item
for each image
Answer: D.
Amazon DynamoDB currently limits the size of each item that you store in a table (see Limits in DynamoDB). If your application needs to store more data in an item than the DynamoDB size limit permits, you can try compressing one or more large attributes, or you can store them as an object in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and store the Amazon S3 object identifier in your DynamoDB item.
Compressing large attribute values can let them fit within item limits in DynamoDB and reduce your storage costs. Compression algorithms such as GZIP or LZO produce binary output that you can then store in a Binary attribute type.
Reference: Best Practices for Storing Large Items and Attributes
Q11: You’re creating a forum DynamoDB database for hosting forums. Your “thread” table contains the forum name and each “forum name” can have one or more “subjects”. What primary key type would you give the thread table in order to allow more than one subject to be tied to the forum primary key name?
A. Hash
B. Range and Hash
C. Primary and Range
D. Hash and Range
Answer: D.
Each forum name can have one or more subjects. In this case, ForumName is the hash attribute and Subject is the range attribute.
Definition 1: Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a “simple storage service” offered by Amazon Web Services that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its global e-commerce network.
Definition 2: Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
AWS S3 Explained graphically:
Amazon S3 Explained
Amazon S3 Explained in pictures
Amazon S3 Explained graphically
AWS S3 Facts and summaries
S3 is a universal namespace, meaning each S3 bucket you create must have a unique name that is not being used by anyone else in the world.
S3 is object based: i.e allows you to upload files.
Files can be from 0 Bytes to 5 TB
What is the maximum length, in bytes, of a DynamoDB range primary key attribute value?
The maximum length of a DynamoDB range primary key attribute value is 2048 bytes (NOT 256 bytes).
S3 has unlimited storage.
Files are stored in Buckets.
Read after write consistency for PUTS of new Objects
Eventual Consistency for overwrite PUTS and DELETES (can take some time to propagate)
S3 Standard (durable, immediately available, frequently accesses)
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering (S3 Intelligent-Tiering): It works by storing objects in two access tiers: one tier that is optimized for frequent access and another lower-cost tier that is optimized for infrequent access.
S3 – One Zone-Infrequent Access – S3 One Zone IA: Same ad IA. However, data is stored in a single Availability Zone only
S3 – Reduced Redundancy Storage (data that is easily reproducible, such as thumbnails, etc.)
Glacier – Archived data, where you can wait 3-5 hours before accessing
You can have a bucket that has different objects stored in S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, and S3 One Zone-IA.
The default URL for S3 hosted websites lists the bucket name first followed by s3-website-region.amazonaws.com . Example: enoumen.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com
Core fundamentals of an S3 object
Key (name)
Value (data)
Version (ID)
Metadata
Sub-resources (used to manage bucket-specific configuration)
Bucket Policies, ACLs,
CORS
Transfer Acceleration
Object-based storage only for files
Not suitable to install OS on.
Successful uploads will generate a HTTP 200 status code.
S3 Security – Summary
By default, all newly created buckets are PRIVATE.
You can set up access control to your buckets using:
Bucket Policies – Applied at the bucket level
Access Control Lists – Applied at an object level.
S3 buckets can be configured to create access logs, which log all requests made to the S3 bucket. These logs can be written to another bucket.
S3 Encryption
Encryption In-Transit (SSL/TLS)
Encryption At Rest:
Server side Encryption (SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, SSE-C)
Client Side Encryption
Remember that we can use a Bucket policy to prevent unencrypted files from being uploaded by creating a policy which only allows requests which include the x-amz-server-side-encryption parameter in the request header.
S3 CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing):
CORS defines a way for client web applications that are loaded in one domain to interact with resources in a different domain.
Used to enable cross origin access for your AWS resources, e.g. S3 hosted website accessing javascript or image files located in another bucket. By default, resources in one bucket cannot access resources located in another. To allow this we need to configure CORS on the bucket being accessed and enable access for the origin (bucket) attempting to access.
Always use the S3 website URL, not the regular bucket URL. E.g.: https://s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/acloudguru
S3 CloudFront:
Edge locations are not just READ only – you can WRITE to them too (i.e put an object on to them.)
Objects are cached for the life of the TTL (Time to Live)
You can clear cached objects, but you will be charged. (Invalidation)
S3 Performance optimization – 2 main approaches to Performance Optimization for S3:
GET-Intensive Workloads – Use Cloudfront
Mixed Workload – Avoid sequencial key names for your S3 objects. Instead, add a random prefix like a hex hash to the key name to prevent multiple objects from being stored on the same partition.
The best way to handle large objects uploads to the S3 service is to use the Multipart upload API. The Multipart upload API enables you to upload large objects in parts.
You can enable versioning on a bucket, even if that bucket already has objects in it. The already existing objects, though, will show their versions as null. All new objects will have version IDs.
Bucket names cannot start with a . or – characters. S3 bucket names can contain both the . and – characters. There can only be one . or one – between labels. E.G mybucket-com mybucket.com are valid names but mybucket–com and mybucket..com are not valid bucket names.
What is the maximum number of S3 buckets allowed per AWS account (by default)? 100
You successfully upload an item to the us-east-1 region. You then immediately make another API call and attempt to read the object. What will happen? All AWS regions now have read-after-write consistency for PUT operations of new objects. Read-after-write consistency allows you to retrieve objects immediately after creation in Amazon S3. Other actions still follow the eventual consistency model (where you will sometimes get stale results if you have recently made changes)
S3 bucket policies require a Principal be defined. Review the access policy elements here
What checksums does Amazon S3 employ to detect data corruption?
Amazon S3 uses a combination of Content-MD5 checksums and cyclic redundancy checks (CRCs) to detect data corruption. Amazon S3 performs these checksums on data at rest and repairs any corruption using redundant data. In addition, the service calculates checksums on all network traffic to detect corruption of data packets when storing or retrieving data.
Q0: You’ve written an application that uploads objects onto an S3 bucket. The size of the object varies between 200 – 500 MB. You’ve seen that the application sometimes takes a longer than expected time to upload the object. You want to improve the performance of the application. Which of the following would you consider?
A. Create multiple threads and upload the objects in the multiple threads
B. Write the items in batches for better performance
C. Use the Multipart upload API
D. Enable versioning on the Bucket
C. All other options are invalid since the best way to handle large object uploads to the S3 service is to use the Multipart upload API. The Multipart upload API enables you to upload large objects in parts. You can use this API to upload new large objects or make a copy of an existing object. Multipart uploading is a three-step process: You initiate the upload, you upload the object parts, and after you have uploaded all the parts, you complete the multipart upload. Upon receiving the complete multipart upload request, Amazon S3 constructs the object from the uploaded parts, and you can then access the object just as you would any other object in your bucket.
Q2: You are using AWS SAM templates to deploy a serverless application. Which of the following resource will embed application from Amazon S3 buckets?
A. AWS::Serverless::Api
B. AWS::Serverless::Application
C. AWS::Serverless::Layerversion
D. AWS::Serverless::Function
Answer – B
AWS::Serverless::Application resource in AWS SAm template is used to embed application frm Amazon S3 buckets.
Reference: Declaring Serverless Resources
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Q3: A static web site has been hosted on a bucket and is now being accessed by users. One of the web pages javascript section has been changed to access data which is hosted in another S3 bucket. Now that same web page is no longer loading in the browser. Which of the following can help alleviate the error?
A. Enable versioning for the underlying S3 bucket.
B. Enable Replication so that the objects get replicated to the other bucket
C. Enable CORS for the bucket
D. Change the Bucket policy for the bucket to allow access from the other bucket
Answer – C
Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) defines a way for client web applications that are loaded in one domain to interact with resources in a different domain. With CORS support, you can build rich client-side web applications with Amazon S3 and selectively allow cross-origin access to your Amazon S3 resources.
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Cross-Origin Resource Sharing: Use-case Scenarios The following are example scenarios for using CORS:
Scenario 1: Suppose that you are hosting a website in an Amazon S3 bucket named website as described in Hosting a Static Website on Amazon S3. Your users load the website endpoint http://website.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com. Now you want to use JavaScript on the webpages that are stored in this bucket to be able to make authenticated GET and PUT requests against the same bucket by using the Amazon S3 API endpoint for the bucket, website.s3.amazonaws.com. A browser would normally block JavaScript from allowing those requests, but with CORS you can congure your bucket to explicitly enable cross-origin requests from website.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com.
Scenario 2: Suppose that you want to host a web font from your S3 bucket. Again, browsers require a CORS check (also called a preight check) for loading web fonts. You would congure the bucket that is hosting the web font to allow any origin to make these requests.
Q4: Your mobile application includes a photo-sharing service that is expecting tens of thousands of users at launch. You will leverage Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage of the user Images, and you must decide how to authenticate and authorize your users for access to these images. You also need to manage the storage of these images. Which two of the following approaches should you use? Choose two answers from the options below
A. Create an Amazon S3 bucket per user, and use your application to generate the S3 URL for the appropriate content.
B. Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user accounts as your application-level user database, and offload the burden of authentication from your application code.
C. Authenticate your users at the application level, and use AWS Security Token Service (STS)to grant token-based authorization to S3 objects.
D. Authenticate your users at the application level, and send an SMS token message to the user. Create an Amazon S3 bucket with the same name as the SMS message token, and move the user’s objects to that bucket.
Answer- C
The AWS Security Token Service (STS) is a web service that enables you to request temporary, limited-privilege credentials for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users or for users that you authenticate (federated users). The token can then be used to grant access to the objects in S3.
You can then provides access to the objects based on the key values generated via the user id.
Q5: Both ACLs and Bucket Policies can be used to grant access to S3 buckets. Which of the following statements is true about ACLs and Bucket policies?
A. Bucket Policies are Written in JSON and ACLs are written in XML
B. ACLs can be attached to S3 objects or S3 Buckets
C. Bucket Policies and ACLs are written in JSON
D. Bucket policies are only attached to s3 buckets, ACLs are only attached to s3 objects
Answer: A. and B.
Only Bucket Policies are written in JSON, ACLs are written in XML.
While Bucket policies are indeed only attached to S3 buckets, ACLs can be attached to S3 Buckets OR S3 Objects.
Reference:
Q6: What are good options to improve S3 performance when you have significantly high numbers of GET requests?
A. Introduce random prefixes to S3 objects
B. Introduce random suffixes to S3 objects
C. Setup CloudFront for S3 objects
D. Migrate commonly used objects to Amazon Glacier
Answer: C
CloudFront caching is an excellent way to avoid putting extra strain on the S3 service and to improve the response times of reqeusts by caching data closer to users at CloudFront locations.
S3 Transfer Acceleration optimizes the TCP protocol and adds additional intelligence between the client and the S3 bucket, making S3 Transfer Acceleration a better choice if a higher throughput is desired. If you have objects that are smaller than 1GB or if the data set is less than 1GB in size, you should consider using Amazon CloudFront’s PUT/POST commands for optimal performance.
Reference: Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration
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Q7: If an application is storing hourly log files from thousands of instances from a high traffic
web site, which naming scheme would give optimal performance on S3?
A. Sequential
B. HH-DD-MM-YYYY-log_instanceID
C. YYYY-MM-DD-HH-log_instanceID
D. instanceID_log-HH-DD-MM-YYYY
E. instanceID_log-YYYY-MM-DD-HH
Answer: A. B. C. D. and E.
Amazon S3 now provides increased performance to support at least 3,500 requests per second to add data and 5,500 requests per second to retrieve data, which can save significant processing time for no additional charge. Each S3 prefix can support these request rates, making it simple to increase performance significantly.
This S3 request rate performance increase removes any previous guidance to randomize object prefixes to achieve faster performance. That means you can now use logical or sequential naming patterns in S3 object naming without any performance implications.
Q8: You are working with the S3 API and receive an error message: 409 Conflict. What is the possible cause of this error
A. You’re attempting to remove a bucket without emptying the contents of the bucket first.
B. You’re attempting to upload an object to the bucket that is greater than 5TB in size.
C. Your request does not contain the proper metadata.
D. Amazon S3 is having internal issues.
Answer:A.
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Q9: You created three S3 buckets – “mywebsite.com”, “downloads.mywebsite.com”, and “www.mywebsite.com”. You uploaded your files and enabled static website hosting. You specified both of the default documents under the “enable static website hosting” header. You also set the “Make Public” permission for the objects in each of the three buckets. You create the Route 53 Aliases for the three buckets. You are going to have your end users test your websites by browsing to http://mydomain.com/error.html, http://downloads.mydomain.com/index.html, and http://www.mydomain.com. What problems will your testers encounter?
A. http://mydomain.com/error.html will not work because you did not set a value for the error.html file
B. There will be no problems, all three sites should work.
C. http://www.mywebsite.com will not work because the URL does not include a file name at the end of it.
D. http://downloads.mywebsite.com/index.html will not work because the “downloads” prefix is not a supported prefix for S3 websites using Route 53 aliases
Answer: B.
It used to be that the only allowed domain prefix when creating Route 53 Aliases for S3 static websites was the “www” prefix. However, this is no longer the case. You can now use other subdomain.
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To succeed with the real exam, do not memorize the answers below. It is very important that you understand why a question is right or wrong and the concepts behind it by carefully reading the reference documents in the answers.
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Q1:For auditing purposes, your company now wants to monitor all API activity for all regions in your AWS environment. What can you use to fulfill this new requirement?
A. For each region, enable CloudTrail and send all logs to a bucket in each region.
B. Enable CloudTrail for all regions.
C. Ensure one CloudTrail is enabled for all regions.
D. Use AWS Config to enable the trail for all regions.
Ensure one CloudTrail is enabled for all regions. Turn on CloudTrail for all regions in your environment and CloudTrail will deliver log files from all regions to one S3 bucket. AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.
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Use a VPC Endpoint to access S3. A VPC endpoint enables you to privately connect your VPC to supported AWS services and VPC endpoint services powered by PrivateLink without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection. Instances in your VPC do not require public IP addresses to communicate with resources in the service. Traffic between your VPC and the other service does not leave the Amazon network.
AWS PrivateLink simplifies the security of data shared with cloud-based applications by eliminating the exposure of data to the public Internet.
[Get AWS CCP Practice Exam PDF Dumps here] It is AWS responsibility to secure Edge locations and decommission the data. AWS responsibility “Security of the Cloud” – AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the AWS Cloud. This infrastructure is composed of the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS Cloud services.
Q4:You have EC2 instances running at 90% utilization and you expect this to continue for at least a year. What type of EC2 instance would you choose to ensure your cost stay at a minimum?
[Get AWS CCP Practice Exam PDF Dumps here] Reserved instances are the best choice for instances with continuous usage and offer a reduced cost because you purchase the instance for the entire year. Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RI) provide a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand pricing and provide a capacity reservation when used in a specific Availability Zone.
The AWS Simple Monthly Calculator helps customers and prospects estimate their monthly AWS bill more efficiently. Using this tool, they can add, modify and remove services from their ‘bill’ and it will recalculate their estimated monthly charges automatically.
A. Sign up for the free alert under filing preferences in the AWS Management Console.
B. Set a schedule to regularly review the Billing an Cost Management dashboard each month.
C. Create an email alert in AWS Budget
D. In CloudWatch, create an alarm that triggers each time the limit is exceeded.
Answer:
Answer: iOS – Android (C) [Get AWS CCP Practice Exam PDF Dumps here] AWS Budgets gives you the ability to set custom budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount. You can also use AWS Budgets to set reservation utilization or coverage targets and receive alerts when your utilization drops below the threshold you define. Reservation alerts are supported for Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Elasticsearch reservations.
Q7:An Edge Location is a specialization AWS data centre that works with which services?
A. Lambda
B. CloudWatch
C. CloudFront
D. Route 53
Answer:
Answer: Get AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exam CCP CLF-C01 eBook Print Book here Lambda@Edge lets you run Lambda functions to customize the content that CloudFront delivers, executing the functions in AWS locations closer to the viewer. Amazon CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js, and image files, to your users. CloudFront delivers your content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations. When a user requests content that you’re serving with CloudFront, the user is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency (time delay), so that content is delivered with the best possible performance.
CloudFront speeds up the distribution of your content by routing each user request through the AWS backbone network to the edge location that can best serve your content. Typically, this is a CloudFront edge server that provides the fastest delivery to the viewer. Using the AWS network dramatically reduces the number of networks that your users’ requests must pass through, which improves performance. Users get lower latency—the time it takes to load the first byte of the file—and higher data transfer rates.
You also get increased reliability and availability because copies of your files (also known as objects) are now held (or cached) in multiple edge locations around the world.
Anser: A.
Route 53 is a domain name system service by AWS. When a Disaster does occur , it can be easy to switch to secondary sites using the Route53 service.
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that
computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.
Answer: D.
The below snapshot from the AWS Documentation shows the spectrum of the Disaster recovery methods. If you go to the further end of the spectrum you have the least time for downtime for the users.
Q11:Your company is planning to host resources in the AWS Cloud. They want to use services which can be used to decouple resources hosted on the cloud. Which of the following services can help fulfil this requirement?
A. AWS EBS Volumes
B. AWS EBS Snapshots
C. AWS Glacier
D. AWS SQS
Answer:
D. AWS SQS: Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly-scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between applications or microservices. It moves data between distributed application components and helps you decouple these components.
A. 99.999999999% Durability and 99.99% Availability
S3 Standard Storage class has a rating of 99.999999999% durability (referred to as 11 nines) and 99.99% availability.
A. Redshift is a database offering that is fully-managed and used for data warehousing and analytics, including compatibility with existing business intelligence tools.
B. and C.
CENTRALLY MANAGE POLICIES ACROSS MULTIPLE AWS ACCOUNTS
AUTOMATE AWS ACCOUNT CREATION AND MANAGEMENT
CONTROL ACCESS TO AWS SERVICES
CONSOLIDATE BILLING ACROSS MULTIPLE AWS ACCOUNTS
Q17:There is a requirement hosting a set of servers in the Cloud for a short period of 3 months. Which of the following types of instances should be chosen to be cost effective.
A. Spot Instances
B. On-Demand
C. No Upfront costs Reserved
D. Partial Upfront costs Reserved
Answer:
B. Since the requirement is just for 3 months, then the best cost effective option is to use On-Demand Instances.
You can use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to monitor, store, and access your log files from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, AWS CloudTrail, and other sources. You can then retrieve the associated log data from CloudWatch Log.
Q22:A company is deploying a new two-tier web application in AWS. The company wants to store their most frequently used data so that the response time for the application is improved. Which AWS service provides the solution for the company’s requirements?
A. MySQL Installed on two Amazon EC2 Instances in a single Availability Zone
Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory data store or cache in the cloud. The service improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory data stores, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases.
Q23:You have a distributed application that periodically processes large volumes of data across multiple Amazon EC2 Instances. The application is designed to recover gracefully from Amazon EC2 instance failures. You are required to accomplish this task in the most cost-effective way. Which of the following will meetyour requirements?
When you think of cost effectiveness, you can either have to choose Spot or Reserved instances. Now when you have a regular processing job, the best is to use spot instances and since your application is designed recover gracefully from Amazon EC2 instance failures, then even if you lose the Spot instance , there is no issue because your application can recover.
A network access control list (ACL) is an optional layer of security for your VPC that acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets. You might set up network ACLs with rules similar to your security groups in order to add an additional layer of security to your VPC.
Q25:A company is deploying a two-tier, highly available web application to AWS. Which service provides durable storage for static content while utilizing Overall CPU resources for the web tier?
A. Amazon EBC volume.
B. Amazon S3
C. Amazon EC2 instance store
D. Amazon RDS instance
Answer:
B. Amazon S3 is the default storage service that should be considered for companies. It provides durable storage for all static content.
Q26:When working on the costing for on-demand EC2 instances , which are the following are attributes which determine the costing of the EC2 Instance. Choose 3 answers from the options given below
Q27:You have a mission-critical application which must be globally available at all times. If this is the case, which of the below deployment mechanisms would you employ
Always build components which are loosely coupled. This is so that even if one component does fail, the entire system does not fail. Also if you build with the assumption that everything will fail, then you will ensure that the right measures are taken to build a highly available and fault tolerant system.
Q29: You have 2 accounts in your AWS account. One for the Dev and the other for QA. All are part ofconsolidated billing. The master account has purchase 3 reserved instances. The Dev department is currently using 2 reserved instances. The QA team is planning on using 3 instances which of the same instance type. What is the pricing tier of the instances that can be used by the QA Team?
Since all are a part of consolidating billing, the pricing of reserved instances can be shared by All. And since 2 are already used by the Dev team , another one can be used by the QA team. The rest of the instances can be on-demand instances.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly-scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between applications or microservices. It moves data between distributed application components and helps you decouple these components.
Q32:You are exploring what services AWS has off-hand. You have a large number of data sets that need to be processed. Which of the following services can help fulfil this requirement.
A. EMR
B. S3
C. Glacier
D. Storage Gateway
Answer:
A. Amazon EMR helps you analyze and process vast amounts of data by distributing the computational work across a cluster of virtual servers running in the AWS Cloud. The cluster is managed using an open-source framework called Hadoop. Amazon EMR lets you focus on crunching or analyzing your data without having to worry about time-consuming setup, management, and tuning of Hadoop clusters or the compute capacity they rely on.
