Architecting for AWS Cloud, AWS Best Practices

Question 1

Business benefits of the cloud

Answer 1

little upfront investment

just in time infrastructure

more efficient resource utilization

usage based costing (utility billing)

reduced time to market

Question 2

technical benefits of the cloud

Answer 2

automation, scriptable-infrastructre

auto scaling

proactive scaling

more efficient development lifecycle

improved testability

disaster recovery / business continuity

can overflow traffic to the cloud to expand capacity

Question 3

Design for failure

Answer 3

assume things will fail, design and deploy for automated recovery

Particularly plan for hardware failure, outages, higher requests per second, etc.

Question 4

Decouple your components

Answer 4

Think SQS

Build components without tight dependencies on each other so that if one fails, the others keep working

ie isolate app server from web server and database

for batch processing, create asynchronous components that are independent

Question 5

Implement elasticity

Answer 5

3 Ways

proactive cyclic scaling. Periodic scaling at fixed intervals (ie paycheck processing)

proactive event scaling. ie. black friday, movie release

autoscale based on demand.

Question 6

Secure your application

Answer 6

whitelist ports and protocols