Data Management

Question 1

RDS backups

Answer 1

• • Transactional storage engine is recommended for durability (InnoDB MySQL)
• • Degrades performance If Multi-AZ is not enabled.
• • Deleting an instance deletes all automated backups(not manual backups)
• • Backups are stored internally on Amazon S3

Question 2

RDS restoring

Answer 2

• • When restoring, only the default DB parameter and security groups are associated with the instance.
• • you can change to a different DB engine as long as it is closely related to the previous engine and there is enough space allocated.

Question 3

Automatic Backups – ElastiCache

Answer 3

• • Backups available for Redis clusters only.
• • Snapshots backup data for the entire cluster at a specific point in time.
• • Backup window should be during the least-utilized time period of the day
• • Snapshots can degrade performance and should be performance on read replicas.

Question 4

Automatic Backups – Redshift

Answer 4

• • provides free storage equal to the storage capacity of the cluster.
• • Snapshots can be automated or manual, and are incremental;
• • Restoring snapshots creates a new cluster and imports the data.

Question 5

EC2 Backups

Answer 5

• • No Built-in automated backup option
• • Snapshots of EBS volumes are incremental and can be automated with the API, CLI, or even AWS Lambda
• • Snapshots cause performance degradation
• • Snapshots are stored on S3;

Question 6

RDS Read Replicas Across Regions – DR

Answer 6

• • multi-AZ deployments are not enough to protect against entire regions going down.
• • We can use read replicas in other regions for higher availability.

Question 7

RDS Read Replicas Across Regions – benefits

Answer 7

• • help with performance if we have a global audience
  • • Packets have shorter distances to travel between our database and the end user;
• • Replica lag can be expected to go up.

Question 8

Services to be used for DR

Answer 8

EC2 and EBS
S3
AWS Import/Export Snowball
Amazon RDS
Elastic Load Balancer and Auto Scaling
Amazon Storage Gateway
CloudFormation

Question 9

Quick recovering from disasters

Answer 9

• • use read replicas across regions for our database
• • have a backup to our infrastructure in a geographically separate location.
• • have the latest data and configuration available on our backup.

Question 10

AWS Tools for DR

Answer 10

• • EC2 AMI
• • VM Import/Export
• • For VMWare – we can use the AWS Management Portal for vCenter
• • Direct Connect
• • S3 Transfer Acceleration

Question 11

DR scenarios – Backup and restore scenario

Answer 11

• • use AWS as a backup solution only by storing VMs, Snapshots, and other data
• • strategically map out which data needs to be backed up, and how
• • choose tools and services that comply with requirements(regulatory, financial, etc…)
• • Determine data lifetime and longterm backup strategies
• • test you backups often and thoroughly.

Question 12

DR scenarios – pilot light

Answer 12

• • keeps the environment small but can ignite and scale to failover our on-premises infrastructure
• • provisions the bare minimum resources but is always ready for a failover
• • Growing the infrastructure to scale can take some time
• • resource deployment and provisioning should be automated
• • tested often and thoroughly.

Question 13

DR scenarios – hot Standby(multi-site)

Answer 13

• • provides the least downtime possible
• • keeps all of the resources ready for use at any moment’s notice
• • can be complex to maintain
• • usually the most expensive to implement.

Question 14

DR scenarios – Duplicate the environments from one region to another

Answer 14

• • Many concepts from our on-premises scenarios still apply for this scenario
• • we can use read replicas for our Amazon RDS database
• • route 53 has a Failover routing policy which routes traffic depending on availability of resources
• • AMIs are region specific and must be copied over to other regions
• • EC2 key pairs are also region specific and must be imported to other regions.
• -Make sure that data and changes are up to date with both regions.

Question 15

Potential issues with replicating data

Answer 15

• • The distance between our replication sites can increase replica lag
• • Bandwidth limitations can also delay data replication
• • it’s important to understand which services have asynchronous replication, and which have synchronous replication.

Question 16

Centralized logging

Answer 16

• • Consolidate logs in one central location

- - analyze, store, and modify the data in any way that you need

Question 17

Storing log files and backups tools

Answer 17

• • Rsyslog(native to Linux)
• • Splunk
• • Kiwi
• • Graylog
• • The ELK stack(Elasticssearch, Logstash, Kibana)

Question 18

Redshift

Answer 18

• -a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse
• • use it to query large amounts of data
• • send it data from services like s3, DynamoDB, or Kinesis

Question 19

other types of logging – S3 access logs

Answer 19

• • enable logging on a bucket
• • requests made to that bucket will be logged and stored on S3
• • No extra charge, except for the extra storage cost

Question 20

CloudTrail

Answer 20

• • logs API calls made on our account

- - useful for debugging, security auditing, and to learn how users interact with our resources