AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Flashcards
What is Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - a type of virtual server
Flexible, reliable, scalable (but you have to use a specific server type)
Serverless – you cannot see or access the underlying infrastructure
Amazon EC2: you pay for only the compute time that you use while your instances are running. For some workloads, you can significantly reduce Amazon EC2 costs by using Spot Instances. For example, suppose that you are running a batch processing job that is able to withstand interruptions. Using a Spot Instance would provide you with up to 90% cost savings while still meeting the availability requirements of your workload.
You can find additional cost savings for Amazon EC2 by considering Savings Plans and Reserved Instances.
Benefits of EC2?
no upfront costs, flexibility in scale, and you don’t have to wait to get started
Hypervisor = responsible for managing resources between virtual machines
Multitenancy: sharing underlying hardware between virtual machines
Vertical scaling: making instance bigger with more memory/storage, etc.
CaaS: Compute as a service
Identify the different Amazon EC2 instance types.
Instance Types -> under an instance Family
Family:
General Purpose – balanced resourced
Compute Optimized – compute intensive, gaming servers, high performance compute, scientific modeling
Memory Optimized – memory intensive tasks - workload that requires large amounts of data to be preloaded before running an application
Accelerated Computing – floating point number calculations, graphics processing, data pattern matching, utilize hardware accelerators
Storage Optimized – high performance for locally stored data. Designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to large datasets on local storage.
Differentiate between the various billing options for Amazon EC2.
On-demand – only pay for duration instance pays for
Savings plan – low prices for a commitment for 1 or 3 year term (72% potential savings over on-demand) – pick how much per hour you want to pay for, any above that is charged at on-demand pricing
Reserved instances – predictable usage and specify what instance type you need – 1 or 3 year team, full pay, partial or pay later (75% savings over on-demand)
Spot instances – spare AWS usage (90% off on-demand price) – AWS can claim instance at any time
Dedicated hosts – certain compliance requirements – you lease the entire host all by yourself – most expensive option
Summarize the benefits of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
You don’t have to worry about scaling your assets to demand every hour/day/year, overpay for underutilization or underpay and not be able to service clients at peak times
AWS Service that provides scaling for Amazon EC2 instances is Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Dynamic scaling – responds to changing demand
Predictive scaling – automatically schedules the right number of Amazon EC2 instances based on predicted demand
What is scaling up vs scaling out?
Scaling up – add more power to machines that are already running
Scaling out – adding more instances
Summarize the benefits of Elastic Load Balancing.
Properly distribute traffic – high performance, cost-efficient, highly available, automatically scalable
Regional construct – instead of on the individual instances – this makes it highly available
ELB = single URL so you don’t have to manage many to many connections between ordering tier (front-end) and production tier (back end)
Summarize the differences between Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).
Messaging and queuing – an order buffer if the worker is still working on the previous request, this way the order is not lost
If components directly communicate with each other without a buffer, it’s called – tightly coupled architecture – this is also called a monolithic application
-if a single component fails, the entire system will fail or have issues
Loosely couple architecture – single failure won’t cause cascading failures – microservices approach
What is Amazon SQS
Simple Queue Service - send, store, receive messages between software components at any volume
Payload = data inside a message
What is a Amazon SQS queue
where messages are placed until they are processed
What is Amazon SNS
delivery service:
-publish/subscribe model (pub/sub)
-create a Amazon SNS topic = a channel for messages to be delivered
-add subscribers to the topic
-publish 1 message to a topic, and it will be sent out to all the subscribers
What is AWS Lambda?
– serverless – upload code into a lambda function, configure a trigger, service waits for trigger, function is then automatically run
–configured to run processes of < 15 minutes
–good for quick processing, or handling web requests, etc that are quick, less than 15 min to complete
AWS Lambda: you are charged based on the number of requests for your functions and the time that it takes for them to run. AWS Lambda allows 1 million free requests and up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time per month.
You can save on AWS Lambda costs by signing up for a Compute Savings Plan.
-Compute Savings Plan offers lower compute costs in exchange for committing to a consistent amount of usage over a 1-year or 3-year term. This is an example of paying less when you reserve.
What is AWS ECS?
AWS Elastic Container Service - not serverless – run containerized applications at scale
What is AWS EKS?
AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service - not serverless – similar to ECS, differing tooling/features
–both can run on EC2
–both are container orchestration tools
–container = a Docker container, a package for your code – similar to how VMs work
Cluster = a group of containers across many instances
–container orchestration – monitoring and managing containers
What is AWS Fargate
serverless compute service for ECS or EKS
Describe the basic concept of Availability Zones.
Regions are geographically isolated areas
Each AWS Region has multiple Availability Zones
Availability Zone (AZ) = AWS Data Center or groups of DCs
Best practice = run across at least 2 Availability Zones in a Region
Elastic Load Balancing = a region service = it runs across all Availability Zones in the region
Regionally scoped service = highly available since it spans all Availability Zones in the region
Summarize the benefits of the AWS Global Infrastructure.
Compliance – You can block off data where it lives, for compliance purposes – like leaving Germany business data only in GE
Proximity – be close to your customers – lower latency
Feature Availability – sometimes closest region does not have all features you want
Pricing – some regions are more expensive than others, like gov’t taxes, fees, labor, etc.
Describe the benefits of Amazon CloudFront and edge locations.
CDN = content delivery network:
Amazon Cloudfront = Amazon’s CDN
-a network that delivers content to users based on their geographic region (like Edge locations).
Edge locations = run Amazon Cloudfront to get content closer to your customers and also Amazon Route 53 (Domain Name Service)
An edge location is a site that Amazon CloudFront uses to store cached copies of your content closer to your customers for faster delivery.
What are AWS Outposts?
install a mini-region inside of your own data center
Aws owned and managed physical resources in your physically owned building
Compare different methods for provisioning AWS services.
In AWS, everything is an API
1. AWS management console: the admin dashboard where you control everything
2. AWS Command Line Interface (CLI): make API calls using the terminal on your machine
You can do everything via the CLI as you can do on the GUI of the AWS management console
3. AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs) – create AWS programs using various programming languages
What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk
-service that helps you provision EC2 instances – builds out your environment for you
-helps you focus on business application, not the infrastructure
-you provide code and configuration settings, and Elastic Beanstalk deploys the resources necessary to perform the following tasks:
Adjust capacity
Load balancing
Automatic scaling
Application health monitoring
What is AWS CloudFormation
Infrastructure as code tool used to define a wide variety of AWS resources
-use JSON or YAML text-based documents, called “cloud formation templates”
-helps define what you want, without having specify how you want it built
What is Amazon VPC?
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud - provision a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where they can be public facing or private
Cashiers interact with Customers, so we put cashiers into a public subnet
Baristas need to focus on working, so put baristas in a private subnet
VPC = basically your own private network within AWS – you can define your IP range for your AWS resources
-you place EC2 instances and ELBs inside your VPC
Subnets are chunks of IP addresses in your VPC that allow you to group resources together
In order to make your VPC public facing, you must attach an Internet Gateway (kinda like a door) to your VPC
What is AWS Direct Connect
VPN and private route, direct fiber connection from your data center to AWS