A team needs a Linux server for a new internal API. You have console and CLI access to the AWS account, and the VPC already exists with public and private subnets.
The interviewer asks“Walk me through how you'd launch an EC2 instance for a new application server. Take me through each step and tell me what you'd choose and why.”
I'd decide four things before clicking: what it's for, where it sits in the network, how I'll get in, and how I'll recreate it. Then on the single launch page: name and tags, a current AMI like Amazon Linux 2023, a right-sized t3/t4g type, a private subnet with a security group that only allows what the app needs, an encrypted gp3 volume, an IAM instance profile, and IMDSv2 required. I connect with Session Manager instead of opening SSH, verify status checks and the bootstrap log, and for anything beyond a one-off I put it in a launch template managed by Terraform.
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