Question 1

What does an AWS Well-Architected Review involve and how long does it take?

Accepted Answer

An AWS Well-Architected Review is a structured assessment of your cloud workloads against the six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. Our architects conduct automated scans, stakeholder interviews, and architecture diagram reviews across each pillar. The process typically spans two to three weeks for a mid-sized environment, resulting in a prioritised remediation roadmap with risk ratings and implementation effort estimates. Organisations that complete Well-Architected Reviews typically resolve 60 to 80 percent of high-risk findings within 90 days.

Question 2

How do you approach AWS Landing Zone design for a large enterprise?

Accepted Answer

We design AWS Landing Zones using AWS Control Tower as the orchestration layer combined with Account Factory for Terraform (AFT) to codify account vending and guardrail enforcement. The architecture covers a multi-account structure aligned to business units, centralised logging to S3 and CloudWatch Logs Insights, AWS Organizations Service Control Policies (SCPs), and a hub-and-spoke network topology using AWS Transit Gateway. Identity federation through AWS IAM Identity Center ensures single sign-on and least-privilege role assignment across all member accounts. The build phase typically runs four to six weeks and includes runbooks for ongoing account provisioning.

Question 3

Which migration strategy do you recommend for legacy monolithic applications moving to AWS?

Accepted Answer

For legacy monoliths, we evaluate all six Rs (Rehost, Replatform, Repurchase, Refactor, Retire, Retain) before recommending a path. Most large monoliths benefit from a phased approach: Rehost first using AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) to achieve fast time-to-cloud, then Replatform selected components to managed services such as Amazon RDS or ElastiCache, with a longer-term Refactor track that decomposes business domains into ECS or EKS microservices. We use AWS Migration Evaluator to baseline on-premises costs and model total-cost-of-ownership comparisons before committing to any strategy. This staged approach reduces migration risk while steadily improving architectural maturity.

Question 4

What is your methodology for AWS cost optimisation across a multi-account environment?

Accepted Answer

Our cost optimisation engagement begins with a 30-day baseline using AWS Cost Explorer, Compute Optimizer, and Trusted Advisor findings aggregated through AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) in Athena. We identify the top five cost drivers and apply tactical quick wins such as Reserved Instance and Savings Plans purchases, right-sizing EC2 and RDS instances, and deleting unattached EBS volumes and idle load balancers. Architectural improvements follow, including migrating batch workloads to Spot Instances via AWS Batch, tiering S3 objects with Intelligent-Tiering and lifecycle policies, and converting long-running EC2 jobs to Lambda or Fargate where feasible. Organisations typically achieve 25 to 40 percent cost reduction within the first quarter of an optimisation engagement.

Question 5

How do you secure AWS environments against emerging cloud threats?

Accepted Answer

We implement a defence-in-depth model anchored on AWS Security Hub as the centralised findings aggregator, with GuardDuty for threat detection, Macie for sensitive data discovery, and AWS Config Rules for continuous compliance evaluation. Network controls include VPC Security Groups, Network Firewall, and AWS WAF in front of internet-facing workloads, while AWS Shield Advanced protects against volumetric DDoS attacks. All secrets are managed through AWS Secrets Manager with automatic rotation, and KMS Customer Managed Keys enforce envelope encryption for data at rest. We also integrate with SIEM platforms through EventBridge and Kinesis Data Firehose so that security events flow into your existing SOC toolchain.

Question 6

Can you manage Amazon EKS clusters in production and how do you handle node auto-scaling?

Accepted Answer

We provision EKS clusters using Terraform modules that enforce managed node groups, IRSA (IAM Roles for Service Accounts), and EKS add-ons for VPC CNI, CoreDNS, and kube-proxy. Cluster autoscaling is implemented with Karpenter, which provisions right-sized nodes within seconds based on pending pod resource requests and supports Spot diversification strategies to minimise interruption risk. We configure Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) backed by KEDA for event-driven scaling, and Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) in recommendation mode to inform resource request tuning over time. Ongoing managed operations include monthly EKS version upgrades, CVE patching, and weekly cost reports per namespace.

Question 7

What AWS serverless patterns do you implement for event-driven architectures?

Accepted Answer

We design serverless architectures using Lambda as the compute backbone, connected to event sources including SQS, SNS, EventBridge, DynamoDB Streams, Kinesis, and API Gateway. Complex orchestration logic is externalised to AWS Step Functions Standard or Express Workflows, which provides auditability, retry logic, and parallel branching without embedding orchestration in function code. Lambda extensions and Lambda Layers are used to inject observability agents and shared libraries, while Powertools for AWS Lambda standardises structured logging, tracing with X-Ray, and metrics emission to CloudWatch. All infrastructure is managed as code with AWS SAM or CDK, enabling reproducible deployments across development, staging, and production environments.

Question 8

How do you architect highly available relational databases on AWS?

Accepted Answer

For relational workloads we recommend Amazon Aurora where possible because its storage layer replicates six ways across three Availability Zones, delivers 5x the throughput of standard MySQL, and supports Aurora Serverless v2 for unpredictable workload patterns. For multi-region requirements, Aurora Global Database provides sub-second replication with a Recovery Time Objective under one minute and Recovery Point Objective under one second. Where Aurora is not suitable we provision RDS Multi-AZ with read replicas and enable Performance Insights and Enhanced Monitoring. Database proxy via RDS Proxy eliminates connection exhaustion in Lambda and containerised architectures, and we configure automated backups with point-in-time recovery windows of up to 35 days.

Question 9

What is your approach to building AWS data platforms with Redshift and the analytics stack?

Accepted Answer

We architect cloud data platforms on Amazon Redshift Serverless or provisioned RA3 clusters depending on query concurrency and predictability, integrating Redshift Spectrum for federated querying over S3-based data lakes without data movement. Ingestion pipelines are built on AWS Glue for ELT transformations, Kinesis Data Firehose for streaming ingestion, and DMS for ongoing replication from operational databases. Metadata management is centralised in AWS Glue Data Catalog, accessible from Redshift, Athena, and EMR. Visualisation layers connect through Amazon QuickSight with SPICE acceleration for self-service analytics, and we implement row-level security and column-level masking to enforce data governance policies at query time.

Question 10

How do you integrate Amazon SageMaker into enterprise ML pipelines?

Accepted Answer

Our SageMaker engagements begin with a feature engineering layer using SageMaker Feature Store to ensure consistent features between training and inference, eliminating training-serving skew. Model training runs through SageMaker Pipelines with managed Spot training to reduce GPU costs by up to 70 percent, and experiments are tracked in SageMaker Experiments for reproducibility. Model deployment targets SageMaker Real-Time Endpoints with autoscaling, or Batch Transform for high-throughput offline scoring, with model quality monitored continuously through SageMaker Model Monitor and CloudWatch alarms triggering retraining pipelines on drift detection. Integration with MLflow or existing CI/CD systems is handled through SageMaker Projects, which provisions CodePipeline workflows for model promotion across environments.

Question 11

What does your managed AWS operations service include on an ongoing basis?

Accepted Answer

Our managed operations service covers 24/7 infrastructure monitoring through CloudWatch dashboards and PagerDuty escalation policies, incident response with defined SLA tiers (P1 response under 15 minutes), and proactive patching of EC2 instances and EKS node groups through Systems Manager Patch Manager. Cost governance is delivered through monthly FinOps review calls with Savings Plans recommendations and anomaly detection alerts. Security operations include weekly Trusted Advisor and Security Hub findings triage, quarterly penetration testing coordination, and quarterly access reviews against IAM Identity Center assignments. Clients receive a monthly operational health report covering availability metrics, change activity, cost trends, and risk findings.

Question 12

How do you handle compliance requirements such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 on AWS?

Accepted Answer

AWS provides a shared responsibility model that covers physical and hypervisor-level controls, but customer-side configuration must be hardened to meet regulatory standards. We map compliance controls to AWS services using the AWS Audit Manager framework, which automates evidence collection from Config Rules, CloudTrail, and Security Hub findings aligned to PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 control sets. Network segmentation, encryption at rest and in transit, access control, and logging configurations are enforced as infrastructure-as-code so that compliance state is repeatable and auditable. We also configure AWS Backup with immutable vault policies for regulated data retention and coordinate with your compliance team to produce audit-ready evidence packages.

Question 13

What is the difference between AWS Direct Connect and Site-to-Site VPN and when should each be used?

Accepted Answer

AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated private network circuit from your data centre or colocation facility to an AWS Direct Connect location, delivering consistent sub-10ms latency, predictable bandwidth up to 100 Gbps, and lower data transfer costs for high-volume workloads. Site-to-Site VPN traverses the public internet using IPSec tunnels and is subject to internet latency variability, making it suitable for branch offices, disaster recovery connectivity, or as a backup path for Direct Connect. For enterprise production workloads with regulatory data residency requirements or latency-sensitive databases, Direct Connect with a 10 Gbps dedicated connection and a hosted backup VPN tunnel is the recommended architecture. We assist with cross-connect provisioning at AWS Direct Connect locations and BGP routing configuration through AWS Transit Gateway.

Question 14

How do you approach Infrastructure as Code governance and drift detection on AWS?

Accepted Answer

All infrastructure we deploy is authored in Terraform with a module registry that enforces organisation-wide naming conventions, tagging strategies, and approved resource configurations. State files are stored in S3 with DynamoDB locking and versioning enabled, and all changes flow through a GitOps pipeline with mandatory peer review and Terraform plan output approval before apply. AWS Config continuously evaluates resource configurations against custom and managed rules, and any drift from the approved Terraform state triggers a Config remediation or alerts the operations team. Checkov and tfsec run in CI as static analysis tools to catch security misconfigurations before resources are provisioned, preventing issues such as public S3 buckets or unrestricted security group ingress rules.

Question 15

Can you help design a disaster recovery strategy on AWS and what RTOs and RPOs are achievable?

Accepted Answer

AWS supports four DR strategies: Backup and Restore, Pilot Light, Warm Standby, and Multi-Site Active/Active, each offering different cost and recovery time trade-offs. For critical workloads, a Warm Standby architecture using Aurora Global Database, EKS cluster replication with Velero, and Route 53 health-check failover typically achieves RTO under 15 minutes and RPO under 5 minutes. Active/Active multi-region deployments with DynamoDB Global Tables and API Gateway regional endpoints can approach zero-downtime failover but require application-level conflict resolution. We conduct quarterly DR exercises with automated runbooks in Systems Manager OpsCenter to validate that RTO and RPO targets are met under realistic failure scenarios, and we document findings in post-exercise reports that feed back into architecture improvements.

Question 16

What engagement models do you offer for AWS consulting and how quickly can a team be mobilised?

Accepted Answer

We offer three engagement models tailored to enterprise procurement timelines and project complexity. A Fixed-Scope Assessment delivers a Well-Architected Review, architecture blueprint, and roadmap within four weeks under a statement of work with fixed pricing. A Time-and-Materials Advisory retainer provides on-demand access to senior AWS architects for architecture reviews, design sprints, and escalation support on an hourly or monthly basis. A Managed Services Agreement covers ongoing operations, security monitoring, FinOps, and platform engineering for production environments under a monthly subscription with defined SLA commitments. Teams are typically mobilised within five to ten business days of contract execution, with a dedicated engagement manager assigned on day one to coordinate onboarding, access provisioning, and kickoff planning.

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