AWS Assessment LinkedIn Answers: What Actually Gets Asked

LinkedIn’s AWS assessment has gotten complicated with all the services Amazon has rolled out over the years. As someone who has taken the test and helped others prepare for it, I learned everything there is to know about what questions show up and how to approach them. Today, I will share it all with you.

The assessment tests practical knowledge, not just memorized facts. You’ll see scenario-based questions that require understanding how services connect and when to use each one. Passing adds an “AWS” badge to your profile that recruiters actually notice.

Core Services You Must Know

Probably should have led with this section, honestly. The assessment leans heavily on three foundational services: EC2, S3, and RDS. Get these wrong and you won’t pass regardless of how well you know the newer stuff.

EC2 Questions

EC2 questions focus on instance types and pricing models. You need to know the difference between On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, and Savings Plans. A typical question gives you a workload description and asks which pricing model fits best.

The pattern I’ve seen:

• Unpredictable, short-term workloads → On-Demand
• Steady-state production workloads → Reserved or Savings Plans
• Flexible, fault-tolerant batch jobs → Spot
• Workloads that can handle interruption → Spot

Instance families come up too. Know that t-series instances work for variable workloads with burstable CPU, while c-series handles compute-intensive work. Memory-optimized r-series instances suit databases and caching layers. Questions often describe a workload and ask which instance family fits.

S3 Questions

Storage classes dominate S3 questions. The assessment tests whether you can match data access patterns to the right tier:

• S3 Standard – Frequently accessed data
• S3 Intelligent-Tiering – Unknown or changing access patterns
• S3 Standard-IA – Infrequent access, but needs quick retrieval
• S3 One Zone-IA – Same as Standard-IA but lower durability (single AZ)
• S3 Glacier – Archive storage, retrieval in minutes to hours
• S3 Glacier Deep Archive – Cheapest storage, retrieval in 12+ hours

Lifecycle policies show up frequently. Questions ask how to automate moving objects between storage classes or expiring old versions. The answer usually involves configuring lifecycle rules that transition objects based on age.

Security questions cover bucket policies versus IAM policies, public access blocks, and pre-signed URLs. Know that bucket policies attach to the bucket while IAM policies attach to users and roles. Both can grant or deny access—the most restrictive policy wins.

RDS Questions

RDS questions test backup strategies and high availability. Multi-AZ deployments provide automatic failover—the standby instance takes over if the primary fails. Read replicas offload read traffic but don’t provide automatic failover.

Know the database engines RDS supports: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, and Amazon Aurora. Aurora comes up often because it’s AWS’s proprietary option with higher performance and availability than standard engines.

Automated backups versus manual snapshots is another common topic. Automated backups enable point-in-time recovery but only retain for up to 35 days. Manual snapshots persist until you delete them.

Security Questions

That’s what makes security endearing to AWS certification folks—it shows up everywhere. The shared responsibility model is fundamental: AWS secures the infrastructure, you secure what you build on it.

IAM dominates security questions. Know these concepts cold:

• Users represent individual people or services
• Groups collect users with common permissions
• Roles grant temporary credentials to services or users
• Policies define what actions are allowed or denied

Questions often ask about the principle of least privilege. The correct answer is always the one that grants only the permissions needed for the task—nothing more.

MFA (multi-factor authentication) comes up for root account security. The best practice is enabling MFA on the root account immediately after creating it, then using IAM users for daily operations. Never use root credentials for routine work.

Encryption questions cover data at rest and in transit:

• KMS (Key Management Service) manages encryption keys
• SSE-S3 encrypts with Amazon-managed keys
• SSE-KMS encrypts with customer-managed keys in KMS
• SSE-C encrypts with customer-provided keys

For data in transit, the answer is usually TLS/SSL. HTTPS for web traffic, encrypted connections for databases.

Networking Concepts

VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) questions test whether you understand AWS networking. The key components:

• VPC – Your isolated network in AWS
• Subnets – Segments within a VPC, either public or private
• Route tables – Control where traffic goes
• Internet gateway – Connects VPC to the internet
• NAT gateway – Lets private instances access the internet without being directly reachable
• Security groups – Instance-level firewalls (stateful)
• Network ACLs – Subnet-level firewalls (stateless)

The distinction between security groups and NACLs trips people up. Security groups are stateful—if you allow inbound traffic, the response automatically goes out. NACLs are stateless—you must explicitly allow both inbound and outbound traffic.

Public versus private subnets comes up often. A public subnet has a route to an internet gateway. A private subnet doesn’t—traffic goes through a NAT gateway instead.

CloudFront questions focus on CDN concepts: edge locations, caching, and origin servers. Know that CloudFront caches content at edge locations worldwide to reduce latency for users.

Application Deployment

Elastic Beanstalk simplifies deployments. Questions ask when to use it versus manual EC2 configuration. Beanstalk handles infrastructure automatically—you upload code and it provisions servers, load balancers, and auto-scaling. Choose Beanstalk when you want to deploy quickly without managing infrastructure details.

Lambda questions test serverless concepts:

• Functions run in response to events (API calls, S3 uploads, scheduled triggers)
• No servers to manage—AWS handles scaling automatically
• Pay only for execution time, billed per millisecond
• Maximum execution duration limits (15 minutes currently)

A common question pattern: “You need to process images uploaded to S3 without managing servers. Which service?” The answer is Lambda triggered by S3 events.

Know how Lambda integrates with other services. API Gateway fronts Lambda for REST APIs. S3 triggers Lambda for file processing. DynamoDB Streams triggers Lambda for database changes.

Monitoring and Operations

CloudWatch is AWS’s monitoring service. Questions cover:

• Metrics – Numerical data about your resources (CPU usage, network traffic)
• Logs – Application and system log aggregation
• Alarms – Notifications when metrics cross thresholds
• Dashboards – Visualizations of metrics and logs

Know the default metrics versus custom metrics. EC2 provides CPU, network, and disk I/O metrics by default. Memory usage requires the CloudWatch agent to publish custom metrics.

The AWS CLI comes up in questions about automation. Commands follow a pattern: aws <service> <action> <parameters>. You don’t need to memorize specific commands, but understand that CLI and SDK calls map to the same API operations as the console.

Pricing and Support

Pricing questions test cost optimization knowledge:

• On-Demand – Pay by the hour/second, no commitment
• Reserved – Commit to 1-3 years for 30-75% discount
• Spot – Bid for unused capacity, up to 90% discount but can be interrupted
• Savings Plans – Commit to hourly spend for discounts across services

The AWS Pricing Calculator helps estimate costs. Questions might ask how to predict monthly expenses for a proposed architecture.

Support plans differ in response times and access:

• Basic – Free, self-service support only
• Developer – Business hours email support
• Business – 24/7 phone and chat, 1-hour response for production issues
• Enterprise – Technical Account Manager, 15-minute response for critical issues

Sample Questions You’ll Encounter

These aren’t exact questions from the test (those change regularly), but the patterns are consistent:

Question type: Service selection

“A company needs to store infrequently accessed documents that must be retrieved within milliseconds when needed. Which S3 storage class is most cost-effective?”

Answer: S3 Standard-IA (Infrequent Access)

Question type: Architecture

“A web application needs to handle sudden traffic spikes during marketing campaigns. Which approach provides automatic scaling?”

Answer: Auto Scaling groups with EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer

Question type: Security

“A developer needs temporary access to an S3 bucket from an EC2 instance. What’s the recommended approach?”

Answer: Attach an IAM role to the EC2 instance with the necessary S3 permissions

Question type: Troubleshooting

“An EC2 instance in a public subnet cannot reach the internet. The security group allows all outbound traffic. What should you check?”

Answer: Verify the route table has a route to the internet gateway

How to Prepare

The free tier is your best study tool. Create an AWS account and actually build things. Launch EC2 instances, create S3 buckets, configure VPCs. Hands-on experience beats reading documentation every time.

AWS documentation is dense but accurate. The FAQ pages for each service summarize key concepts well. The whitepapers on architecture and security provide deeper context for scenario questions.

Practice tests help calibrate your knowledge. Several third-party providers offer question banks similar to the LinkedIn assessment. Time yourself—the actual test is timed, and rushing leads to mistakes.

Focus on scenarios, not memorization. The assessment asks “what would you do” questions, not “what is the definition” questions. Understand why you’d choose one service over another for a given workload.

If you’re aiming for a specific role, prioritize the services that role uses. A data engineer should know analytics services deeply. A developer should focus on deployment and compute services. A solutions architect needs breadth across all categories.

The badge stays on your profile for one year. After that, you can retake the assessment to renew it. Treat it as ongoing learning rather than a one-time hurdle.

Additional Topics to Study

Beyond the core services, several other areas appear in the assessment:

Auto Scaling configures automatic scaling for EC2 instances. Know the components: launch configurations (or launch templates), scaling policies, and scaling groups. Understand target tracking policies versus step scaling policies—target tracking adjusts capacity to maintain a metric (like CPU at 50%), while step scaling adds or removes specific numbers of instances based on thresholds.

Elastic Load Balancing distributes traffic across instances. Three types exist:

• Application Load Balancer (ALB) – Layer 7, HTTP/HTTPS routing based on content
• Network Load Balancer (NLB) – Layer 4, ultra-low latency for TCP/UDP
• Classic Load Balancer – Legacy option, avoid for new deployments

Questions typically ask which load balancer to use. ALB for web applications with path-based routing. NLB for extreme performance requirements or protocols that aren’t HTTP.

Route 53 is AWS’s DNS service. Know routing policies: simple, weighted, latency-based, failover, and geolocation. Failover routing comes up in disaster recovery scenarios—Route 53 health checks detect outages and redirect traffic automatically.

DynamoDB questions test NoSQL understanding. Know the difference between partition keys and sort keys. Understand provisioned versus on-demand capacity modes. Read and write capacity units determine throughput for provisioned tables.

Global tables replicate DynamoDB data across regions for multi-region applications. DAX (DynamoDB Accelerator) provides microsecond read latency through caching.

SQS and SNS appear in decoupling questions. SQS is a message queue—producers send messages, consumers poll and process them. SNS is pub/sub—messages fan out to multiple subscribers simultaneously. A common pattern uses SNS to fan out to multiple SQS queues for different processing needs.

ECS and EKS run containers. ECS is AWS’s native container orchestration. EKS runs Kubernetes. Both support Fargate for serverless container execution. Questions ask when to use containers versus Lambda—containers work better for long-running processes or applications that need specific runtime environments.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Test-takers often stumble on these points:

Confusing availability and durability. S3 offers 99.999999999% durability (eleven 9s)—your data won’t be lost. Availability is lower and varies by storage class—Standard is 99.99%, Glacier might take hours to retrieve. High durability doesn’t mean instant availability.

Forgetting security group defaults. Security groups allow all outbound traffic by default but deny all inbound. NACLs allow all traffic both directions by default. Getting these backward causes wrong answers.

Mixing up IAM concepts. Users get long-term credentials. Roles get temporary credentials. Policies define permissions but do nothing until attached. Groups organize users but can’t be attached to resources directly.

Overcomplicating answers. If a question asks for the simplest solution, choose managed services over custom implementations. Elastic Beanstalk beats manual EC2 configuration for most web apps. RDS beats self-managed databases on EC2. The “right” answer is often the one requiring least operational overhead.

Ignoring the Well-Architected Framework. Many questions align with its pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. When uncertain, choose answers that follow these principles.

Final Tips

Read questions carefully. “Most cost-effective” means cheapest among valid options. “Highest availability” prioritizes uptime over cost. “Simplest” means least operational complexity. The qualifier in the question determines the correct answer among technically valid choices.

Eliminate obviously wrong answers first. Most questions have one or two choices that clearly don’t fit. Narrow to two options, then reason through which better matches the scenario.

Don’t overthink. The assessment tests foundational knowledge, not edge cases. If an answer seems too simple, it might be correct. Complex architectures exist in real life, but assessment questions usually have straightforward solutions.

Trust hands-on experience. If you’ve actually built things on AWS, you’ll recognize patterns in the questions. Console clicking teaches muscle memory that helps even on multiple choice tests.

The badge is worth the effort. It signals to recruiters that you have verified AWS knowledge. For anyone targeting cloud roles, passing this assessment removes one more hurdle in the hiring process.

Resources for Continued Learning

After passing the assessment, keep learning. AWS certifications provide structured paths: Cloud Practitioner for broad overview, Solutions Architect for architecture skills, Developer for application building, SysOps Administrator for operations.

AWS re:Invent sessions are available free on YouTube. They cover new services, architecture patterns, and customer case studies. The AWS Twitch channel runs live content regularly.

AWS Skill Builder offers free and paid learning paths. The digital training covers fundamentals through advanced topics. Labs provide hands-on practice in sandbox environments without risking your own account.

Community resources help too. AWS subreddits, Stack Overflow tags, and LinkedIn groups connect you with practitioners facing similar challenges. Learning from others’ questions often reveals gaps in your own knowledge.

The cloud keeps evolving. Services launch, features change, best practices update. Treating learning as ongoing rather than finished keeps your skills relevant in a fast-moving field.