AWS Cloud Practitioner Flashcards
What is public cloud?
Computing services offered by third-party providers over the public Internet
What is hybrid cloud?
A cloud setup where you have some data on prem and some in the cloud
What type of expense is cloud computing?
With cloud services we reduce our trade capital expense (CAPEX) in exchange for higher operational expense (OPEX)
What does Iaas stand for?
Infrastructure as a service.
What is an example of Iaas in AWS?
EC2
What does Paas stand for?
Platform as a service. Paas removes the need to manage underlying infrastructure.
What is an example of Paas in AWS?
Elastic beanstalk
What does Saas stand for?
Software as a service. A completed product that will be run and managed by the provider.
What is an example of Saas in AWS?
Rekognition
What are the 3 AWS pricing fundamentals?
You pay for compute time, you pay for data stored in the cloud and you pay for data transfer out of the cloud (data transfer into the cloud is free)
What is a region in AWS?
A physical location containing a cluster of data centres which are divided into Availability Zones (AZs).
What are four things you should take into account when choosing an AWS region?
Compliance with data governance, proximity to customers, available services within a region and pricing.
What is an AZ in AWS?
Availability Zone. Each AZ within a region is one or more discrete data centres.
How are AZs organised in a region?
They are separated from each other so they’re less likely to all be affected by a disaster.
What standard defines what is AWS’s responsibility and what is the user’s responsibility?
The shared responsibility model.
What does IAM stand for?
Identity and Access Management
What should you use your AWS root account for?
You should only use the root account to perform a few account and service management tasks (for example, creating other accounts).
What can IAM groups contain?
IAM groups contain users. They cannot contain other groups- although users can belong to multiple groups.
What type of files are used to assign IAM permissions?
In IAM you assign permissions with JSON documents called policies.
Which principle should you use when deciding on the permissions to grant an IAM user?
The least privilege principle. Don’t give anymore permissions than a user needs.
What are tags, and what are they used for?
Tags are used to organise and track AWS resources. They are key-value pairs.
What is within the IAM Policy Structure?
An optional SID (id), an effect (this dictates whether the policy allows or denies access), a principle (the user/account/group to which this policy applies), an action (a list of actions which this policy applies to- e.g., a ‘get’), a resource (list of resources which this action applies to- e.g., a bucket), and an optional condition (condition for execution)
What is the name of the type of device you use for physical MFA?
Universal Second Factor
What are the three ways in which you can access AWS?
The AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS Software Developer Kit (SDK)
How do you generate AWS Access Keys?
Use the AWS Console.
What is the different between the AWS CLI and SDK?
The CLI allows you do work with AWS over the command line, SDK allows you to access AWS programmatically.
What does AWS SDK stand for?
AWS Software Developer Kit
What is AWS Cloudshell?
A terminal in the AWS management console in which you are automatically logged in as your user in your current region.
If you want AWS Services to perform actions on your behalf you need to assign them permissions using IAM Roles (T/F)
True
What is the name of the document which lists all of your account’s users and the status of their credentials?
IAM Credentials Report
What is the name of the document which shows the service permissions granted to a user and when those services were last accessed?
IAM Access Advisor
What is the correct policy for creating new AWS Users?
One AWS user = one physical user.
What is the correct policy for assigning permissions to a user?
Assign users to groups and permissions to groups.
Where do you find information on your AWS spending?
AWS Billing Dashboard
What does EC2 stand for?
Elastic Compute Cloud
What is bootstrapping in EC2?
Bootstrapping means running commands when a machine starts. This script is only run once, and it is used to automate boot tasks.
What is the name of the script which is run when we launch an EC2 instance?
The EC2 User Data Script
What are examples of EC2 base images?
AWS Linux and Ubuntu
What are EC2 instance types?
EC2 Instance types represent different amounts of memory, different CPUs &c.
An EC2 instance is named m5.2xLarge. What information do we know about it?
‘m’ is the name of its instance class (‘general purpose’), ‘5’ is its instance generation, ‘2xLarge’ is its size within the instance class.
You have a machine learning project. What is the best type of EC2 instance to use for it?
A compute optimised EC2 instance.
You have a project which needs a high performance database. What is the best type of EC2 instance to use for it?
A memory optimised EC2 instance.
You have a noSQL database project. What is the best type of EC2 instance to use for it?
A storage optimised EC2 instance.
What do you use to control traffic in and out of EC2 instances?
Security groups.
You create an EC2 security group. What are the rules for reusing it?
Security groups can be attached to multiple instances but they are locked to a region. If you want to go into another region you have to create a new security group.
What are the default EC2 security group rules?
All inbound traffic is blocked, all outbound traffic is allowed.
What rules do EC2 security groups support?
EC2 security groups only support allow rules.
What is AWS EC2 Instance Connect?
Amazon EC2 Instance Connect is a simple and secure way to connect to your instances using Secure Shell (SSH)
What are On-Demand EC2 Instances?
EC2 Instances that you pay for with no long-term commitments. They are good for short workloads. You pay by the second.
What are Reserved EC2 Instances?
You can purchase a Reserved Instance for a one-year or three-year commitment. They are good for long term workloads (like databases) and are cheaper than On-Demand Instances.
What are Convertible Reserved EC2 Instances?
Convertible Reserved Instances are a type of Reserved Instance that can be exchanged for new instance types, new tenancies, and new operating systems as circumstances change. They are good for long workloads with flexible instances.
What are Spot EC2 Instances?
A Spot Instance is an instance that uses spare EC2 capacity that is available for less than the On-Demand price.These are good for short workloads and are cheap, but you may lose your instances.
What are Dedicated Hosts EC2 Instances?
An Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use. This is good if you have compliance requirements.
What are Dedicated EC2 Instances?
Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances that run in a virtual private cloud (VPC) on hardware that’s dedicated to a single customer.
What are EC2 Capacity Reservations?
On-Demand Capacity Reservations enable you to reserve compute capacity for your Amazon EC2 instances in a specific Availability Zone for any duration. Capacity Reservations mitigate against the risk of being unable to get On-Demand capacity in case there are capacity constraints.
What does EBS stand for?
Elastic Block Store. Elastic Block Store is an high-performance block-storage service designed for EC2.
What is an EBS Volume?
An Amazon EBS volume is a block-level storage device that you can attach to your instances. After you attach a volume to an instance, you can use it as you would use a physical hard drive.
What are the rules for moving and reusing EBS Volumes?
A volume can only be mounted to one instance at a time (unless you are willing to do some complicated things). They can be moved between EC2 Instances easily, provided those instances are within the same AZ. To move volumes between AZs you need to snapshot them.
Which attribute is used to control EBS volume behaviour when an EC2 Instance terminates?
The ‘delete on termination’ attribrute.
What are the default rules for EBS volume behaviour on EC2 Instance termination?
By default the EC2 instance’s root volume will be deleted, but no other EBS volumes will be.
What is an EBS snapshot?
A ‘backup’ of the contents of a volume.
What does it mean to archive a snapshot?
Moving a snapshot to ‘archive tier’ makes its storage 75% cheaper, but it takes 24 to 75 hours to retrieve it.
What does AMI stand for?
Amazon Machine Image
What does an AMI do?
An Amazon Machine Image is a master image for the creation of EC2 instances in AWS. You can create an AMI from a existing EC2 instance. They are built for a specific region.
What are the three types of AMI that you can use to launch instances from?
Public AMI (AWS provided), your own AMI (made and maintained by you) and AWS Marketplace AMIs
What do you use EC2 Image Builder for?
EC2 Image Builder is used to automate the creation of VMs or container images. AMIs are one of the types of images you can create with Image Builder, and Image Builder allows you to automate the creation, maintenance and validation of AMIs.
What AWS EC2 tool would you use if you need a high-performance hardware disk?
EC2 instance store. Instance stores lose their storage if they’re stopped- they’re good for buffer/cache/scratch storage. There is a risk of data loss if the hardware fails, and backups are your responsibility.
What does EFS stand for?
Elastic File System
What does NFS stand for?
Network File System
What service does EFS provide?
It is a Network File System which is accessible across multiple AZs (via EFS mount targets). It is expensive, compared with EBS.
What is EFS-IA?
Elastic File System Infrequent Access. If you enable EFS-IA within a lifecycle policy, EFS will automatically move your files to a cheaper infrequent access store if they go unused for a long time.
What is Amazon Fsx?
Fsx is used to launch 3rd party high performance file systems on AWS. There is an Fsx for windows and lustre (“linux” + “cluster” = “lustre”).
What is vertical scalability?
Vertical scalability means that you can increase the size of an instance.
What is horizontal scalability?
Horizontal scalability means that you can increase the number of instances for your application.
What is high availability?
High availability indicates that you running you application in at least two availability zones. High availability goes hand in hand with horizontal scaling.
What is elasticity?
Once a system is scalable, elasticity means there will be some ‘auto-scaling’, so that a system can scale based on load. This allows you to optimise costs.
What are load balancers?
A load balancer is a service which forwards internet traffic to multiple servers downstream. This allows you to spread load across multiple downstream instances. You can expose a single point of access (DNS) to your application and seamlessly handle failures downstream.
What are the location rules for load balancers?
You can use a load balancer across multiple AZs.
What does ELB stand for?
Elastic Load Balancer.
What does an ELB do?
Elastic Load Balancer is a managed service which handles the maintenance of your load balancers. Elastic Load Balancing scales your load balancer as your incoming traffic changes over time.
Which load balancer type handles HTTP/HTTPS routing?
Application load balancer
Which load balancer type is used for ultra high performance and handles UPP and TCP routing?
Network load balancer
Which load balancer type is best for security and intrusion detection?
Gateway load balancer
What does ASG stand for?
Auto scaling group
What is an ASG used for?
Auto scaling groups are designed to scale in and out (aka add and remove EC2 instances) to match your application’s load. You set a minimum and maximum number of machines and a desired capacity and your ASG will automatically register new instances to your load balancer when needed. It will also replace unhealthy instances.
Which ASG strategy requires you to change the application scale yourself?
Manual scaling
Which ASG strategy allows you to change the application scale according to demand?
Dynamic scaling
Which ASG strategy allows you to change the application scale based on an event?
Simple/ step scaling. An example of an event is a cloudwatch alarm being triggered.
Which ASG strategy allows you to set an average scale for your application?
Target tracking scaling (e.g., ‘I want ASG CPU to stay around 40%’)
Which ASG strategy allows you to scale based on a schedule?
Scheduled scaling
Which ASG strategy allows you to scale based on a learned pattern?
Predictive scaling (use machine learning to predict traffic ahead of time, and automatically provision EC2 instances ahead of time)
What does S3 stand for?
Amazon Simple Storage Service
How are files and directories described in Amazon S3?
Files are objects, directories are buckets.
What are the location rules for S3 buckets?
S3 Buckets are defined at the region level.
What are the size constraints for S3 objects?
If you try to upload objects larger than 5TB, you will need to do this with a multi part upload.
What user based policy can you use to secure your S3 bucket?
IAM policies can be used to dictate which API calls are allowed for a specific AWS User.
Which common S3 policy can be used to create bucket-wide access rules?
Bucket policies.
Which S3 policy can be used to create object specific access rules?
Object Access Control List
If you know that none of your S3 buckets should ever be public, what is the easiest way to set this?
You can set this rule at the account level.
At what level do you set versioning in S3?
S3 file versioning is set at the bucket level
What does CRR stand for?
Cross region replication
What does SRR stand for?
Same region replication
What is CRR useful for?
Compliance, lower latency access, replication across accounts
What is SRR useful for?
Log aggregation, live replication between prod and test accounts
Which two methods can you use to move between S3 storage classes?
You can move manually, or by using S3 lifecycle configurations
Which S3 storage class is best for general purpose use?
S3 Standard
Which S3 storage class is best for data which is infrequently accessed but still needs rapid retrieval?
S3 Infrequent Access. Standard infrequent access is used for disaster recovery. One zone infrequent access is used for backups of on-prem data, or data you can recreate.
Which S3 storage class is best for big data analytics?
S3 Standard
Which S3 storage class is best for gaming apps?
S3 Standard
Which S3 storage class is best for low cost storage (e.g., for archiving and backup)?
S3 Glacier Storage.
What is the fastest S3 storage class for archiving?
S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval.
What is the flexible S3 storage class for archiving?
S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (which includes expedited, standard and bulk tiers).
What is the cheapest S3 storage class for archiving?
S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Which S3 storage tool can you use to move between storage classes automatically?
S3 Intelligent Tiering
What are the three S3 Encryption options?
No encryption, server-side encryption (file is encrypted after it is received) and client-side encryption (use encrypts objects before uploading it)
What are the AWS Snow Family used for?
The AWS Snow Family are portable devices to collect and process data at the edge and to migrate data in and out of AWS.
When should you make use of a snowball device for uploading data to AWS?
When it would take you more than a week to upload your data to the cloud directly.
How much data can be stored on a snowball edge?
80TB
How much data can be stored on a snowcone?
8TB
How can you use your Amazon Snowcone to send data to AWS over the internet?
Connect it to the web and use AWS DataSync to send your data
How much data can be stored on a snowmobile?
It has up to 100PB useable
What do you install to your on prem servers to allow them to transfer data to your Snowball device?
Snowball client
What service can you use to manage your snow family devices?
AWS OpsHub
Which AWS service can you use to bridge between on-prem and cloud data?
AWS Storage Gateway
What does RDS stand for?
Relational Database Service
What is RDS used for?
Relational Database Service is a managed DB service for using SQL.
What is the name of the relational database service which was built by AWS to be optimised for the cloud ?
Amazon Aurora