AWS Application Integration Services

Question 1

What is Amazon Simple Notification Service?

Answer 1

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud.

Question 2

What is SNS used for?

Answer 2

Amazon SNS is used for building and integrating loosely-coupled, distributed applications.

SNS provides instantaneous, push-based delivery (no polling).

Question 3

What are the concepts in SNS?

Answer 3

Topics – how you label and group different endpoints that you send messages to.

Subscriptions – the endpoints that a topic sends messages to.

Publishers – the person/alarm/event that gives SNS the message that needs to be sent.

Question 4

What can SNS do?

Answer 4

Send automated or manual notifications.

Send notification to email, mobile (SMS), SQS, and HTTP endpoints.

Closely integrated with other AWS services such as CloudWatch so that alarms, events, and actions in your AWS account can trigger notifications.

Question 5

What is the price model of SNS?

Answer 5

Offered under an inexpensive, pay-as-you-go model with no up-front costs.

Question 6

What data type does SNS use?

Answer 6

Data type is JSON.

Question 7

What needs does SNS satisfy?

Answer 7

SNS supports a wide variety of needs including

• event notification
• monitoring applications
• workflow systems
• time-sensitive information updates
• mobile applications
• any other application that generates or consumes notifications.

Question 8

Who are the subscribers of SNS?

Answer 8

HTTP.
HTTPS.
Email.
Email-JSON.
SQS.
Application.
Lambda.

Question 9

What transport protocols do SNS support notifications over?

Answer 9

HTTP/HTTPS – subscribers specify a URL as part of the subscription registration.
Email/Email-JSON – messages are sent to registered addresses as email (text-based or JSON-object).
SQS – users can specify an SQS standard queue as the endpoint.
SMS – messages are sent to registered phone numbers as SMS text messages.

Question 10

What is the character limit for topic names?

Answer 10

Topic names are limited to 256 characters.

Question 11

What auditing does SNS support?

Answer 11

SNS supports CloudTrail auditing for authenticated calls.

Question 12

What is storage capability of SNS?

Answer 12

SNS provides durable storage of all messages that it receives (across multiple AZs).

Question 13

What is Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)?

Answer 13

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a distributed queue system.

Amazon SQS enables you to send, store, and receive messages between software components.

Question 14

What is an Amazon SQS Queue?

Answer 14

An Amazon SQS queue is a temporary repository for messages that are awaiting processing.

Question 15

What is an Amazon SQS Queue?

Answer 15

An Amazon SQS queue is a temporary repository for messages that are awaiting processing.

Question 16

What is the purpose of the SQS queue?

Answer 16

The SQS queue acts as a buffer between the component producing and saving data, and the component receiving the data for processing.

Question 17

What architecture is SQS based on?

Answer 17

Amazon SQS is pull-based, not push-based (like Amazon SNS).

Question 18

What is Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF)?

Answer 18

Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF) is a web service that makes it easy to coordinate work across distributed application components.

Question 19

What is SWF used for?

Answer 19

Amazon SWF is used for processing background jobs that have parallel or sequential steps.

Question 20

What situation is SWF most suitable for?

Answer 20

Use Amazon SWF if your app’s steps take more than 500 milliseconds to complete, you need to track the state of processing, or you need to recover or retry if a task fails.

Best suited for human-enabled workflows like an order fulfilment system or for procedural requests.

Question 21

What does SWF allow you to do?

Answer 21

With SWF you can create distributed asynchronous systems as workflows.

Tracks the state of your workflow which you interact and update via API.

Question 22

What is Amazon MQ?

Answer 22

Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for ActiveMQ.

Amazon MQ provides cost-efficient and flexible messaging capacity.

Question 23

What does Amazon MQ support?

Answer 23

Amazon MQ supports industry-standard APIs and protocols so you can migrate messaging and applications without rewriting code.

Question 24

What does Amazon MQ manage?

Answer 24

Amazon MQ manages the administration and maintenance of ActiveMQ brokers and automatically provisions infrastructure for high availability.

Question 25

What is AWS Step Functions?

Answer 25

AWS Step Functions can be used to coordinate the components of distributed applications as a series of steps in a visual workflow.

You can quickly build and run state machines to execute the steps of your application in a reliable and scalable fashion.

It is a managed workflow and orchestration platform.

Question 26

How does AWS Step Functions work?

Answer 26

1. Define the steps of your workflow in the JSON-based Amazon States Language. The visual console automatically graphs each step in the order of execution.
2. Start an execution to visualize and verify the steps of your application are operating as intended. The console highlights the real-time status of each step and provides a detailed history of every execution.
3. AWS Step Functions operates and scales the steps of your application and underlying compute for you to help ensure your application executes reliably under increasing demand.