3.8 Explain how resiliency and automation strategies reduce risk

Question 1

Continuous monitoring

Answer 1

An automation solution will have a system of continuous monitoring to detect service failures and security incidents. Continuous monitoring might use a locally installed agent or heartbeat protocol or may involve checking availability remotely.

Question 2

Configuration validation

Answer 2

This process ensures that a recovery solution is working at each layer (hardware, network connectivity, data replication, and application).

Question 3

Templates

Answer 3

Similar to a master image, this is the build instructions for an instance. Rather than storing a master image, the software may build and provision an instance according to the template instructions.

Question 4

Master image

Answer 4

This is the “gold” copy of a server instance, with the OS, applications, and patches all installed and configured. This is faster than using a template, but keeping the image up to date can involve more work than updating a template.

Question 5

Non-persistence

Answer 5

The property by which a computing environment is discarded once it has finished its assigned task.

Question 6

Snapshots

Answer 6

This is a saved system state that can be reapplied to the instance.

Question 7

Rollback to known configuration

Answer 7

A physical instance might not support snapshots but has an “internal” mechanism for restoring the baseline system configuration, such as Windows System Restore.

Question 8

Live boot media

Answer 8

Use an instance that boots from read-only storage to memory rather than being installed on a local read/write hard disk.

Question 9

Elasticity

Answer 9

The property by which a computing environment can instantly react to both increasing and decreasing demands in workload.

Question 10

Scalability

Answer 10

The property by which a computing environment is able to gracefully fulfill its ever-increasing resource needs.

Question 11

Distributive allocation

Answer 11

Refers to the ability to switch between available processing and data resources to meet service requests. This is typically achieved using load balancing services during normal operations or automated failover during a disaster.

Question 12

Fault tolerance

Answer 12

Protection against system failure by providing extra (redundant) capacity. Generally, fault tolerant systems identify and eliminate single points of failure.

Question 13

High availability

Answer 13

The property that defines how closely systems approach the goal of providing data availability 100 percent of the time while maintaining a high level of system performance.

Question 14

RAID

Answer 14

(redundant array of independent/ inexpensive disks) A set of vendor-independent specifications that support redundancy and fault tolerance for configurations on multiple-device storage systems.