Interview guide, assessment, and glossary
There is no separate official “Amazon EKS certification.” This fieldbook uses the official AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate question shape as a practice benchmark, then makes the content EKS-heavy.
Assessment facts
The official SAA-C03 exam currently has 65 questions in 130 minutes, including multiple-choice and multiple-response items. AWS reports 50 scored and 15 unscored questions and a scaled passing score of 720. Our mock has 65 original questions, uses a transparent 72% practice target, and is not copied exam content.
Interview answer frame: WORKLOAD
- Why: users, outcome, SLO, RTO/RPO, regulation, budget.
- Ownership: accounts, teams, access, shared responsibility.
- Runtime: Auto Mode, managed nodes, Fargate, or Karpenter.
- Kubernetes: workload objects, resources, probes, placement, disruption.
- Links: VPC, traffic, identity, integrations, data.
- Operations: delivery, logs, metrics, alerts, upgrades, incident response.
- Availability: zones, regions, backup, restore, failure tests.
- Dollars: allocation, unit cost, scaling, commitment, Spot, transfer.
Essential abbreviations
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| EKS | Elastic Kubernetes Service |
| EC2 | Elastic Compute Cloud |
| ECR | Elastic Container Registry |
| VPC | Virtual Private Cloud |
| CNI / CSI | Container Network / Storage Interface |
| ENI | Elastic Network Interface |
| IAM / RBAC | AWS identity authorization / Kubernetes authorization |
| IRSA | IAM Roles for Service Accounts |
| ALB / NLB | Application / Network Load Balancer |
| HPA / VPA | Horizontal / Vertical Pod Autoscaler |
| PDB | PodDisruptionBudget |
| AZ | Availability Zone |
| HA / DR | High Availability / Disaster Recovery |
| RPO / RTO | Tolerated data loss / restoration time |
| SLI / SLO / SLA | Indicator / objective / agreement |
| IaC | Infrastructure as Code |
| CI/CD | Continuous Integration / Delivery |
| DLQ | Dead-Letter Queue |
| KMS | Key Management Service |
Final Feynman challenge
Explain EKS to a colleague in two minutes. Draw the managed control plane, worker choices, VPC paths, human and Pod identity, delivery path, data, and failure domains. Then explain one trade-off in each. Anything you cannot explain simply is your next study target.