AWS 101

Question 1

What is Cloud Computing?

Answer 1

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Question 2

What is EC2?

Answer 2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front, so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to forecast traffic.

Question 3

What is VPC?

Answer 3

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) gives you full control over your virtual networking environment, including resource placement, connectivity, and security. Get started by setting up your VPC in the AWS service console. Next, add resources to it such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) instances. Finally, define how your VPCs communicate with each other across accounts, Availability Zones, or AWS Regions. In the example below, network traffic is being shared between two VPCs within each Region

Question 4

What is Nat Gateway?

Answer 4

A NAT gateway is a Network Address Translation (NAT) service. You can use a NAT gateway so that instances in a private subnet can connect to services outside your VPC but external services cannot initiate a connection with those instances.

Question 5

What is Client VPN?

Answer 5

AWS Client VPN is a fully-managed remote access VPN solution used by your remote workforce to securely access resources within both AWS and your on-premises network. Fully elastic, it automatically scales up, or down, based on demand. When migrating applications to AWS, your users access them the same way before, during, and after the move. AWS Client VPN, including the software client, supports the OpenVPN protocol.

Question 6

What is Amazon EMR?

Answer 6

Amazon EMR is a cloud big data platform for running large-scale distributed data processing jobs, interactive SQL queries, and machine learning (ML) applications using open-source analytics frameworks such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Presto.

Question 7

What is Amazon Athena?

Answer 7

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

Athena is easy to use. Simply point to your data in Amazon S3, define the schema, and start querying using standard SQL. Most results are delivered within seconds. With Athena, there’s no need for complex ETL jobs to prepare your data for analysis. This makes it easy for anyone with SQL skills to quickly analyze large-scale datasets.

Athena is out-of-the-box integrated with AWS Glue Data Catalog, allowing you to create a unified metadata repository across various services, crawl data sources to discover schemas and populate your Catalog with new and modified table and partition definitions, and maintain schema versioning.

Question 8

What is Amazon Quicksight?

Answer 8

Amazon QuickSight allows everyone in your organization to understand your data by asking questions in natural language, exploring through interactive dashboards, or automatically looking for patterns and outliers powered by machine learning.

Question 9

What is Amazon Dynamodb?

Answer 9

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at any scale. DynamoDB offers built-in security, continuous backups, automated multi-Region replication, in-memory caching, and data export tools.

Question 10

What is Amazon Kinesis Datastream?

Answer 10

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a serverless streaming data service that makes it easy to capture, process, and store data streams at any scale.

Question 11

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose?

Answer 11

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is an extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that reliably captures, transforms, and delivers streaming data to data lakes, data stores, and analytics services.

Question 12

What is Amazon SNS?

Answer 12

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fully managed messaging service for both application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communication.

The A2A pub/sub functionality provides topics for high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging between distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven serverless applications. Using Amazon SNS topics, your publisher systems can fanout messages to a large number of subscriber systems, including Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions, HTTPS endpoints, and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, for parallel processing. The A2P functionality enables you to send messages to users at scale via SMS, mobile push, and email.

Question 13

What is Amazon SQS?

Answer 13

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message-oriented middleware, and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. Get started with SQS in minutes using the AWS Management Console, Command Line Interface or SDK of your choice, and three simple commands.

SQS offers two types of message queues. Standard queues offer maximum throughput, best-effort ordering, and at-least-once delivery. SQS FIFO queues are designed to guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the exact order that they are sent.

Question 14

AWS Step Functions?

Answer 14

AWS Step Functions is a low-code, visual workflow service that developers use to build distributed applications, automate IT and business processes, and build data and machine learning pipelines using AWS services. Workflows manage failures, retries, parallelization, service integrations, and observability so developers can focus on higher-value business logic.

Question 15

What is AWS Lambda?

Answer 15

AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. You can trigger Lambda from over 200 AWS services and software as a service (SaaS) applications, and only pay for what you use.

Question 16

What is the Amazon API Gateway?

Answer 16

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. APIs act as the “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your backend services. Using API Gateway, you can create RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that enable real-time two-way communication applications. API Gateway supports containerized and serverless workloads, as well as web applications.

API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, CORS support, authorization and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management. API Gateway has no minimum fees or startup costs. You pay for the API calls you receive and the amount of data transferred out and, with the API Gateway tiered pricing model, you can reduce your cost as your API usage scales.

Question 17

What is Amazon Route53?

Answer 17

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.

Amazon Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS – such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, or Amazon S3 buckets – and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS. You can use Amazon Route 53 to configure DNS health checks, then continuously monitor your applications’ ability to recover from failures and control application recovery with Route 53 Application Recovery Controller.

Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow makes it easy for you to manage traffic globally through a variety of routing types, including Latency Based Routing, Geo DNS, Geoproximity, and Weighted Round Robin—all of which can be combined with DNS Failover in order to enable a variety of low-latency, fault-tolerant architectures. Using Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow’s simple visual editor, you can easily manage how your end-users are routed to your application’s endpoints—whether in a single AWS region or distributed around the globe. Amazon Route 53 also offers Domain Name Registration – you can purchase and manage domain names such as example.com and Amazon Route 53 will automatically configure DNS settings for your domains.

Question 18

What is Amazon CloudFront?

Answer 18

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience.

Question 19

What is Amazon S3?

Answer 19

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Customers of all sizes and industries can store and protect any amount of data for virtually any use case, such as data lakes, cloud-native applications, and mobile apps. With cost-effective storage classes and easy-to-use management features, you can optimize costs, organize data, and configure fine-tuned access controls to meet specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements.

Question 20

What is Amazon EKS?

Answer 20

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on-premises.

Question 21

What is AWS Fargate?

Answer 21

AWS Fargate is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers. AWS Fargate is compatible with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

Question 22

What is Amazon ECS?

Answer 22

Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy for you to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications.

Question 23

What is Amazon RDS?

Answer 23

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. Choose from seven popular engines — Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility, Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server — and deploy on-premises with Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts.

Question 24

What is Amazon Aurora?

Answer 24

Amazon Aurora provides built-in security, nearly continual backups, serverless compute, up to 15 read replicas, automated multi-Region replication, and integrations with other AWS services.

Question 25

What is Amazon Location Service?

Answer 25

Amazon Location Service makes it easy for developers to add location functionality to applications without compromising data security and user privacy.

Location data is a vital ingredient in today’s applications, enabling capabilities ranging from asset tracking to location-based marketing. However, developers face significant barriers when integrating location functionality into their applications. This includes cost, privacy and security compromises, and tedious and slow integration work.

Amazon Location Service provides affordable data, tracking and geofencing capabilities, and native integrations with AWS services, so you can create sophisticated location-enabled applications quickly, without the high cost of custom development. You retain control of your location data with Amazon Location, and you can combine proprietary data with data from the service. Amazon Location provides cost-effective location-based services (LBS) using high-quality data from global, trusted providers Esri and HERE.

Question 26

What is Amazon WorkSpaces?

Answer 26

Amazon WorkSpaces is a fully managed desktop virtualization service for Windows and Linux that enables you to access resources from any supported device.

Question 27

What is AWS Outposts?

Answer 27

AWS Outposts is a family of fully managed solutions delivering AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a truly consistent hybrid experience. Outposts solutions allow you to extend and run native AWS services on premises, and is available in a variety of form factors, from 1U and 2U Outposts servers to 42U Outposts racks, and multiple rack deployments.

With AWS Outposts, you can run some AWS services locally and connect to a broad range of services available in the local AWS Region. Run applications and workloads on premises using familiar AWS services, tools, and APIs. Outposts supports workloads and devices requiring low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data residency, and application migration with local system interdependencies.

Question 28

What is Amazon AppStream 2.0?

Answer 28

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed non-persistent desktop and application service for remotely accessing your work.

Question 29

What is Amazon Connect?

Answer 29

With Amazon Connect, you can set up a contact center in minutes that can scale to support millions of customers.

Question 30

What is AWS Global Accelerator?

Answer 30

AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that improves the performance of your users’ traffic by up to 60% using Amazon Web Services’ global network infrastructure. When the internet is congested, AWS Global Accelerator optimizes the path to your application to keep packet loss, jitter, and latency consistently low.

With Global Accelerator, you are provided two global static public IPs that act as a fixed entry point to your application, improving availability. On the back end, add or remove your AWS application endpoints, such as Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers, EC2 Instances, and Elastic IPs without making user-facing changes. Global Accelerator automatically re-routes your traffic to your nearest healthy available endpoint to mitigate endpoint failure.

Set up your accelerator on the AWS Management Console in minutes with step-by-step documentation or with one click in the Elastic Load Balancing Console. Learn more by following the self-service workshop and test performance benefits from your location with the AWS Global Accelerator speed comparison tool.