What is an AMI?

0-2 years experience

1. 1You need to spin up a new EC2 instance for a web service. How would you use an AMI in that process?
2. 2If you launch an instance from a custom AMI you created yesterday, what happens to the instance if you later update the source code on the original machine?

2-5 years experience

1. 1Our deployment pipeline builds a new AMI for each release. Yesterday the new AMI failed to start due to missing drivers. How would you troubleshoot the issue?
2. 2We have a mix of on‑demand and spot instances using the same AMI. What trade‑offs should we consider when updating the AMI across these fleets?
3. 3Explain how you would roll back to a previous version of an AMI without affecting running instances.

5-8 years experience

1. 1We need to serve traffic in multiple regions and want to keep AMI versions in sync. What design would you propose to manage AMI replication and versioning at scale?
2. 2Our security team requires that all AMIs be scanned for vulnerabilities before use. How would you integrate scanning into the AMI lifecycle while minimizing deployment latency?
3. 3Discuss the performance and cost implications of using large, pre‑baked AMIs versus lightweight base images with user‑data scripts.

8+ years experience

1. 1Our organization is migrating from a monolithic application to microservices, each with its own AMI. How would you design a cross‑team AMI governance model to ensure consistency, compliance, and efficient updates?
2. 2We have legacy workloads that rely on outdated OS versions baked into AMIs. What strategy would you recommend for gradually deprecating these AMIs while maintaining service continuity?
3. 3Consider a scenario where multiple product teams share a common base AMI that they customize. How would you architect a versioning and CI/CD pipeline to avoid dependency hell and support independent releases?