Cloud Concepts and Technology

Question 1

Advantages of cloud computing

Answer 1

1. Trade capital expense for variable expense
2. Benefit from massive economies of scale
3. Stop guessing about capacity
4. Increase speed and agility
5. Stop spending money running and maintaining data centres
6. Go global in minutes

Question 2

Types of cloud computing

Answer 2

1. Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS) - AWS EC2
2. Platform As A Service (PAAS) - GoDaddy, Elastic Beans
3. Software As A Service (SAAS) - Gmail

Question 3

Types of Cloud Computing Deployments

Answer 3

1. Public Cloud - AWS, Azure, GCP
2. Hybrid - Mixture of public and private
3. Private Cloud (Or on Premise)

Question 4

High level services (For this exam)

Answer 4

1. Compute
2. Storage
3. Databases
4. Security, Identity & Compliance
5. AWS Cost management

Question 5

What is region and AZ?

Answer 5

Availability Zone is like a data centre. It can have 1 or more data centres.
The region is a geographical area consisting of 2 or more AZ’s.

Question 6

What is Edge localtion?

Answer 6

They are endpoints for AWS which are used for caching content. Typically this consists of CloudFront (AWS CDN).

Question 7

How to choose AWS region?

Answer 7

• Data Sovereignty Laws
• Latency to end-users
• AWS Services

Question 8

AWS Support plans

Answer 8

1. Basic - Free
2. Developer - $29/month
3. Business - $100/month
4. Enterprise - $15,000/month, TAM

Question 9

What is IAM?

Answer 9

Identity Access Management. It is Global and you do not specify a region when dealing with IAM. When a user or group gets created, it is globally created.

Question 10

What is S3?

Answer 10

Simple Storage Service

• Safe place to store your files.
• Object based storage
• data is spread across multiple devices and facilities
• 0 Bytes to 5 TB
• Unlimited storage
• Stored under buckets
• S3 is a universal namespace. Names must be unique globally.
• When upload a file to S3, you will receive HTTP 200.
• Cross region replication

Question 11

Data consistency Model for S3

Answer 11

• Read after Write consistency for PUTS of new objects

- Eventual Consistency for overwrite PUTS and DELETES (can take some time to propagate)

Question 12

S3 features

Answer 12

• Tiered storage available
• Lifecycle Management
• Versioning
• Encryption
• Secure data using Access Control Lists and Bucket Policies

Question 13

S3 Storage classes

Answer 13

• S3 Standard
• S3 - IA (Infrequently Accessed)
• S3 One Zone - IA
• S3 - Intelligent Tiering
• S3 Glacier
• S3 Glacier Deep Archive

Question 14

S3 charges

Answer 14

• Storage
• Requests
• Storage Management Pricing
• Data Transfer Pricing
• Transfer Acceleration
• Cross Region Replication Pricing

Question 15

S3 Transfer Acceleration

Answer 15

Upload on the edge location closed to your location.

Question 16

Ways to restrict S3 bucket access?

Answer 16

• Using bucket policies - Applied to whole bucket
• Using Object policies - Applied to individual files
• IAM policies to Users & Groups - Applied to user & groups

Question 17

What is CloudFront?

Answer 17

A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers (network)
that deliver webpages and other web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage, and a content delivery server.

Question 18

What is TTL?

Answer 18

Time to live

Question 19

CloudFront - Key Terminology

Answer 19

• Web Distribution - Typically used for websites

- RTMP - Used for Media Streaming

Question 20

What is EC2?

Answer 20

Elastic Compute Cloud

Is just a virtual server (or servers) in the cloud.
EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.

Question 21

EC2 Pricing Models

Answer 21

1. On Demand - allows you to pay a fixed rate by the hour (or by the second) with no commitment.
2. Reserved - Provides you with a capacity reservation, and offer a significant discount on the hourly change for an instance. Contract terms are 1 yr or 3 yrs.
3. Spot - Enables you to bid whatever price you want for instance capacity, providing for even greater savings if your applications have flexible start and end times.
4. Dedicated Hosts - Physical EC2 server dedicated for your use. Dedicated hosts can help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses.

Question 22

What is EBS?

Answer 22

(Elastic Block Storage)
- Storage for EC2 instances (Virtual Disk)

EBS allows you to create storage volumes and attach them to EC2 instances. Once attached, you can create a file system on top of these volumes, run a database, or use them in any other way you would use a block device. EBS volumes are placed in a specific AZ, where they are automatically replicated to protect you from the failure of a single component.

Question 23

Types of EBS

Answer 23

1. SSD
2. 1 General Purpose SSD (GP2)
3. 2 Provisioned IOPS SSD (I01)
4. Magnetic
5. 1 Throughput Optimized HDD (ST1)
6. 2 Cold HDD (SC1)
7. 3 Magnetic

Question 24

Ways to interact with AWS?

Answer 24

1. Using console
2. Using CLI
3. Using SDK’s

Question 25

Load balancers type

Answer 25

1. Application Load Balancers - Layer 7 (make intelligent decisions) 2. Network Load Balancers - Extreme performance/static IP addresses 3. Classic Load Balancers - Test & Dev, keeps cost low

Question 26

RDS(SQL/OLTP) features

Answer 26

- Multi AZ - for disaster recovery | - Read Replicas - for performance

Question 27

Amazon Non-Relational DB

Answer 27

Dynamo DB

Question 28

Amazon Data warehousing

Answer 28

Redshift (OLAP)

Question 29

What is ElasticCache?

Answer 29

It is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud. The service improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. Its supports two open-source in-memory caching e engines: 1. Memcached 2. Redis

Question 30

What is Route53?

Answer 30

It is Amazons DNS(Domain Name System) Service. You can use it to direct traffic all around the world and you can use it to register a domain name. Its global, similar to IAM and S3.

Question 31

What is Elastic Beanstalk?

Answer 31

A way of deploying applications to the cloud. You don't have to worry about the infrastructure that runs those applications. You can simply upload your application, and it will automatically handles the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling and application health monitoring. It is limited in what it can provision and is not programmable.

Question 32

What is Cloudformation?

Answer 32

A service that helps you model and setup your AWS resources so that you can spend less time managing those resources and more time focusing on your applications that runs in AWS. You create a template that describes all the AWS resources that you want, and AWS CloudFormation takes care of provisioning and configuring those resources for you. You don't need to individually create and configure AWS resources and figure out whats's dependent on what; AWS CloudFormation handles all of that.

Question 33

Amazon Graph Database

Answer 33

Amazon Neptune

Question 34

Removing single point of failure

Answer 34

- Introducing redundancy - Detect failure - Durable data storage - Automated multi-data center resilience - Fault isolation and traditional horizontal scaling (scaling out) - Sharding (split)

Question 35

Factors for optimizing AWS cost?

Answer 35

- Right sizing - Elasticity - Take advantage of variety of purchasing options

Question 36

Caching types

Answer 36

- Application caching | - Edge caching

Question 37

Security

Answer 37

- Use AWS features for defense in dept - Share security responsibility with AWS - Reduce privileged access - Security as code - Real time auditing (by using AWS Cloud trail)

Question 38

What are global AWS services?

Answer 38

1. IAM 2. Route53 3. Cloudfront 4. SNS 5. SES

Question 39

What are the services that give global views but are regional?

Answer 39

1. S3

Question 40

AWS services which can be used on premise?

Answer 40

1. Snowball (gigantic disk to load data) 2. Snowball edge (where you can't get AWS connectivity). Boeing uses that. Comes with lamda 3. Storage gateway (physical or virtual). Way of caching file in datacenter 4. CodeDeploy - Deploy application onPremise 5. Opsworks - Automated deployments onPremise 6. IoT Greengrass

Question 41

What is Cloudwatch?

Answer 41

A monitoring service to monitor your AWS resources, as well as the applications that you run on AWS. (Like a trainer in Gym). - It can monitor most of AWS as well as your applications that run on AWS - Cloudwatch with EC2 will monitor events every 5 minutes by default - You can create alarms which trigger notifications. - All about performance.

Question 42

What is AWS Systems manager?

Answer 42

- Can be used to manage fleets of EC2 instances & virtual machines - A piece of software is installed on each VM. - Can be both inside AWS and on premise. - Run Command is used to install, patch, uninstall software. - Integrates with Cloudwatch to give you a dashboard of your entire estate.

Question 43

What is Service health dashboard?

Answer 43

- Overview of all regions - Daily historical information - RSS feeds - Check outages

Question 44

What is Personal health dashboard?

Answer 44

- Personalised for you | - Relevant, up-to-date information

Question 45

S3 vs EBS (Elastic block storage) vs EFS (Elastic file system)

Answer 45

- S3 is for flat files (objects), can't store OS - EBS is a virtual disk and can be attached to EC2. The size of the disk can be changed but it is not done automatically. - EFS is a virtual disk that can be attached to EC2 and the size of the disk is elastic (scaling up and down depending on usage)

Question 46

What is Global accelerator?

Answer 46

- Create accelerators to improve availability and performance of your applications for local and global users. - Direct traffic to optimal endpoints over the AWS global network. This improves the availability and performance of your internet applications that are used by a global audience.