Serverless Overviews from a Solution Architect Perspective

Question 1

What does Serverless mean?

Answer 1

You don’t manage, provision or see servers.

Question 2

What applications are serverless in AWS?

Answer 2

AWS Lambda
DynamoDB
AWS Cognito
AWS API Gateway
Amazon S3
AWS SNS & SQS
AWS Kinesis Data Firehose
Aurora Serverless 
Step Functions
Fargate

Question 3

Increasing RAM of AWS Lambda will also improve what?

Answer 3

CPU & Network

Question 4

What languages does AWS lambda support?

Answer 4

Node.js (JavaScript)
Python
Java (Java 8 compatible)
C# (.NET Core)
Golang
C# / Powershell
Ruby
Custom Runtime API (community supported)

Question 5

What is preferred for running arbitrary Docker images?

Answer 5

ECS / Fargate

Question 6

A Linux command used for scheduling tasks to be executed sometime in the future.

This is usually used to schedule a job that is executed periodically, for example every morning

What is this called?

Answer 6

Cron Job

Question 7

In AWS Lambda how many of the first call request are free?

Answer 7

1 million

Question 8

In AWS Lambda how many of the first compute time per month are free?

Answer 8

400,000 GB-seconds

Question 9

For AWS Lambda what is the memory allocation?

Answer 9

128 MB - 10 GB

Question 10

For AWS Lambda what is the maximum execution time?

Answer 10

900 seconds (15 minutes)

Question 11

For AWS Lambda what are the environment variables?

Answer 11

4 KB

Question 12

For AWS Lambda what are the concurrency executions?

Answer 12

1000 (can be increased)

Question 13

What is the Lambda function deployment size?

Answer 13

50 MB

Question 14

For Lambda what is the size of uncompressed deployment?

Answer 14

250 MB

Question 15

In AWS Lambda deployment, how would you upload other files?

Answer 15

/tmp directory

Question 16

You can use Lambda to change what?

Answer 16

CloudFront requests and responses

Question 17

• Website Security and Privacy
• Dynamic Web Application at the Edge
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Intelligently Route Across Origins and Data Centers
• Bot Mitigation at the Edge
• Real-time Image Transformation
• A/B Testing
• User Authentication and Authorization
• User Prioritization
• User Tracking and Analytics

Answer 17

Lambda@Edge

Question 18

the execution of two or more computer programs by a single computer

Answer 18

Concurrency executions

Question 19

Creating 2 versions of a digital asset to see which one users respond to better. Examples of assets include a landing page, display ad, marketing email , and social post.

Answer 19

A/B Testing

Question 20

• Fully managed, highly available with replication across multiple AZs
• NoSQL database - not a relational database
• Scales to massive workloads, distributed database
• Millions of requests per seconds, trillions of row, 100s of TB of storage
• Fast and consistent in performance (low latency on retrieval)
• Integrated with lAM for security, authorization and administration
• Enables event driven programming with DynamoDB Streams
• Low cost and auto-scaling capabilities

Answer 20

Amazon Dynamo DB

Question 21

Dynamo DB is made from what?

Answer 21

Tables

Question 22

What is the maximum size of an item in a DynamoDB Table?

Answer 22

400KB

Question 23

• You specify the number of reads/writes per second
• You need to plan capacity beforehand

• Pay for (blank) Read Capacity
Units (RCU) & Write Capacity Units (WCU)

• Possibility to add auto-scaling mode for RCU & WCU

What DynamoDB mode is this?

Answer 23

Provisioned Mode

Question 24

• Read/writes automatically scale up/down with your workloads
• No capacity planning needed
• Pay for what you use, more expensive ($$$)
• Great for unpredictable workloads

What DynamoDB mode is this?

Answer 24

On-Demand Mode

Question 25

A fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache for DynamoDB, that delivers up to a 10 times performance improvement—from milliseconds to microseconds—even at millions of requests per second.

Answer 25

DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)

Question 26

This feature when enabled, captures a time-ordered sequence of item-level modifications in a DynamoDB table and durably stores the information for up to 24 hours.

Answer 26

DynamoDB Streams

Question 27

A collection of one or more replica tables, all owned by a single AWS account.

Answer 27

DynamoDB Global Tables

Question 28

What type of Dynamo DB indexes are there?

Answer 28

Global Secondary Indexes (GSI) Local Secondary Indexes (LSI)

Question 29

What does an API Gateway do?

Answer 29

To put it simply, the API Gateway takes all API requests from a client, determines which services are needed, and combines them into a unified, seamless experience for the user.

Question 30

What does API Gateway integrate with?

Answer 30

Lambda Function HTTP AWS Service

Question 31

What are the three ways to deploy API Gateway?

Answer 31

* Edge Optimized (default) * Regional * Private

Question 32

* the single-entry point for defined back-end APIs and microservices * the gateway acts as protector, enforcing security and ensuring scalability and high availability

Answer 32

API Gateway

Question 33

Which API Gateway Security feature is this? * Great for users / roles already within your AWS account. * Handles authentication & authorization * Leverages Sig v4

Answer 33

IAM Permissions

Question 34

The process to add authentication information to AWS API requests sent by HTTP

Answer 34

Signature Version 4 (SigV4)

Question 35

What API Gateway Security feature is this? * Great for 3rd party tokens * Very flexible in terms of what IAM policy is returned * Handle Authentication + Authorization * Pay per Lambda invocation

Answer 35

Lambda Authorizer (Custom Authorizer)

Question 36

What API Gateway Security feature is this? * You manage your own user pool (backed by FB, Google login etc) * No need to write any custom code * Must implement authorization in the backend

Answer 36

Cognito User Pool

Question 37

Gives users an identity so that they can interact with our application

Answer 37

AWS Cognito

Question 38

* Sign in functionality for app users * Integrate w API Gateway for authentication Which Cognito product is this?

Answer 38

Cognito User Pools

Question 39

* Provide AWS credentials to user so they can access AWS resources directly * Integrate with Cognito User Pools as an identity provider Which Cognito product is this?

Answer 39

Cognito Identity Pools (Federated Identity)

Question 40

* Synchronise data from device to Cognito * Requires Federated Identity Pool in Cognito (not User Pool) * Deprecated and replaced by AppSync Which Cognito product is this?

Answer 40

Cognito Sync

Question 41

What does SAM stand for?

Answer 41

Serverless Application Model

Question 42

* Framework for developing and deploying serverless applications * Can help you run Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB locally * Can use CodeDeploy to deploy Lambda functions * Allows you to deploy Lambda Functions, DynamoDB, API Gateway & Cognito User Pools

Answer 42

AWS SAM

Question 43

RCU & WCU are __________. | What does that mean?

Answer 43

Decoupled, meaning you can increase/decrease each value separately

Question 44

This feature is integrated with Lambda so that you create triggers that automatically respond to events in real time.

Answer 44

DynamoDB Streams

Question 45

To create a serverless API - what should you integrate Amazon API Gateway with?

Answer 45

AWS Lambda

Question 46

Where are API requests routed to?

Answer 46

The nearest CloudFront Edge Location (which improves latency)

Question 47

Who is an Edge-Optimized API Gateway best for?

Answer 47

Geographically distributed clients

Question 48

What feature integrates w Facebook to provide authenticated logins for your application users?

Answer 48

Amazon Cognito User Pools (CUP)

Question 49

What feature allows you to run code closer to your users, which improves performance and reduces latency.

Answer 49

Lambda@Edge