Aurora 101

Question 1

What is Aurora

Answer 1

Amazon’s relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial DBs with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source DBs.

Question 2

With which DB engines is Aurora compatible?

Answer 2

MySQL/PostgreSQL

Question 3

How many times faster is Aurora than MySQL?

Answer 3

5x

Question 4

How many times faster is Aurora than PostgreSQL?

Answer 4

3x

Question 5

What price ratio is Aurora compared to commercial DBs?

Answer 5

1/10

Question 6

How does Aurora HA work?

Answer 6

Aurora stores 6 copies of your DB across 3 availability zones. 2 copies per AZ

Question 7

How does Aurora storage autoscaling work?

Answer 7

Starts with 10GBs, increments by 10GB

Question 8

What is the maximum storage capacity of Aurora?

Answer 8

64TB

Question 9

Aurora’s maximum vCPU

Answer 9

64vCPUs

Question 10

Aurora’s maximum memory

Answer 10

488GiB

Question 11

How many copies of data can be lost before affecting write availability?

Answer 11

two copies

Question 12

In Aurora, how many copies of data can be lost before affecting read availability?

Answer 12

three copies

Question 13

Using AWS Aurora, how do you fix errors?

Answer 13

AWS continuously scans data blocks and disks for errors and automatically repairs when needed.

Question 14

What is the maximum number of read-replicas you can have with AWS Aurora?

Answer 14

15

Question 15

In Aurora, when writes are causing high CPU utilization, what is the fix?

Answer 15

Scale up (increase the instance size)

Question 16

In Aurora, when reads are causing high CPU utilization, what is the fix?

Answer 16

Scale out (Increase the number of replicas)

Question 17

What is Aurora Serverless?

Answer 17

on-demand, auto-scaling, pay per second Aurora configuration.

Question 18

What are the two capacity types of Aurora?

Answer 18

Provisioned

Serverless

Question 19

In Aurora, when you use encyption at rest, are read replicas encrypted by default?

Answer 19

Yes

Question 20

What is the difference between backtrack and a backup?

Answer 20

Backtrack allows you to roll back your DB to a point in time. Backup is restoring the entire DB to the last snapshot.

Question 21

What is the maximum time backtrack supports?

Answer 21

72 hours

Question 22

True or False In backtrack, if you select 72 hours as your backtrack window, your restores will be 72 hours in the past?

Answer 22

False. You can restore up to any point in time up to 72 hours. 1hr, 5hrs, 10hrs, etc; up to 72hrs.

Question 23

An Aurora DB comes with two end points. A write endpoint, and a read endpoint, true or false?

Answer 23

True.

Question 24

If your primary DB is encrypted, can a new read replica be unencrypted?

Answer 24

No.

Question 25

Will a failover priority of tier 10 beat a failover priority of tier 0?

Answer 25

No. The lower the number, the higher the failover priority.

Question 26

How is failover priority determined among read replicas?

Answer 26

Tiers. The lower the number, the higher the priority.

Question 27

What is the maximum priority tier?

Answer 27

0 (remember, the lower the number, the higher the priority).

Question 28

What is the minimum priority tier?

Answer 28

15

Question 29

Are cross-region replicas possible?

Answer 29

Yes

Question 30

True or False: if you set up a cross-region replica, Aurora will create a whole new Aurora cluster?

Answer 30

True.

Question 31

True or False: For cross-region replication, it is recommended to enable multi-AZ to ensure high availability on the target cluster?

Answer 31

True