AWS Design Principles

Question 1

What is Scaling Horizontally?

Answer 1

an increase in the number of resources

Question 2

What is Scaling Vertically?

Answer 2

an increase in the specifications of an individual resource

Question 3

What is Instantiating Compute Resources?

Answer 3

automate setting up of new resources along with their configuration and code

Question 4

What is Infrastructure as Code?

Answer 4

AWS assets are programmable. You can apply techniques, practices, and tools from software development to make your whole infrastructure reusable, maintainable, extensible, and testable.

Question 5

What is Serverless Management and Deployment?

Answer 5

being serverless shifts your focus to automation of your code deployment. AWS handles the management tasks for you.

Question 6

What is Infrastructure Management and Deployment?

Answer 6

AWS automatically handles details, such as resource provisioning, load balancing, auto scaling, and monitoring, so you can focus on resource deployment.

Question 7

What are Alarms and Events?

Answer 7

AWS services will continuously monitor your resources and initiate events when certain metrics or conditions are met.

Question 8

What are Well-Defined Interfaces?

Answer 8

reduce interdependencies in a system by allowing various components to interact with each other only through specific, technology agnostic interfaces, such as RESTful APIs.

Question 9

What is Service Discovery?

Answer 9

applications that are deployed as a set of smaller services should be able to be consumed without prior knowledge of their network topology details. Apart from hiding complexity, this also allows infrastructure details to change at any time.

Question 10

What is Asynchronous Integration?

Answer 10

interacting components that do not need an immediate response and where an acknowledgement that a request has been registered will suffice, should integrate through an intermediate durable storage layer.

Question 11

What is Distributed Systems Best Practices?

Answer 11

build applications that handle component failure in a graceful manner.

Question 12

What are Relational Databases?

Answer 12

provide a powerful query language, flexible indexing capabilities, strong integrity controls, and the ability to combine data from multiple tables in a fast and efficient manner.

Question 13

What are NoSQL Databases?

Answer 13

trades some of the query and transaction capabilities of relational databases for a more flexible data model that seamlessly scales horizontally. It uses a variety of data models, including graphs, key-value pairs, and JSON documents, and are widely recognized for ease of development, scalable performance, high availability, and resilience.

Question 14

What are Data Warehouses?

Answer 14

are a specialized type of relational database, which is optimized for analysis and reporting of large amounts of data.

Question 15

What are Graph Databases?

Answer 15

uses graph structures for queries.

Question 16

What Search Functionalities do Graph Databases provide?

Answer 16

-Search is often confused with query. A query is a formal database query, which is addressed in formal terms to a specific data set. Search enables datasets to be queried that are not precisely structured.
-A search service can be used to index and search both structured and free text format and can support functionality that is not available in other databases, such as customizable result ranking, faceting for filtering, synonyms, and stemming.

Question 17

What is a Data Lake?

Answer 17

Data Lake – an architectural approach that allows you to store massive amounts of data in a central location so that it’s readily available to be categorized, processed, analyzed, and consumed by diverse groups within your organization.

Question 18

What is Standby Redundancy?

Answer 18

Standby redundancy – when a resource fails, functionality is recovered on a secondary resource with the failover process. The failover typically requires some time before it completes, and during this period the resource remains unavailable. This is often used for stateful components such as relational databases.

Question 19

What is Active Redundancy?

Answer 19

Active redundancy – requests are distributed to multiple redundant compute resources. When one of them fails, the rest can simply absorb a larger share of the workload.

Question 20

What is Detect Failure?

Answer 20

Detect Failure – use health checks and collect logs

Question 21

What is Synchronous Replication?

Answer 21

Synchronous replication – only acknowledges a transaction after it has been durably stored in both the primary storage and its replicas. It is ideal for protecting the integrity of data from the event of a failure of the primary node.

Question 22

What is Asynchronous Replication?

Answer 22

Asynchronous replication – decouples the primary node from its replicas at the expense of introducing replication lag. This means that changes on the primary node are not immediately reflected on its replicas.

Question 23

What is Quorum-based Replication?

Answer 23

Quorum-based replication – combines synchronous and asynchronous replication by defining a minimum number of nodes that must participate in a successful write operation.

Question 24

What is Automated Multi-Data Center Resilience?

Answer 24

Automated Multi-Data Center Resilience – utilize AWS Regions and Availability Zones (Multi-AZ Principle). (See Disaster Recovery section)

Question 25

What is Fault Isolation and Traditional Horizontal Scaling?

Answer 25

Fault Isolation and Traditional Horizontal Scaling – Shuffle Sharding

Question 26

How does one optimize for cost?

Answer 26

-Right Sizing – AWS offers a broad range of resource types and configurations for many use cases.
-Elasticity – save money with AWS by taking advantage of the platform’s elasticity.
-Take Advantage of the Variety of Purchasing Options – Reserved Instances vs Spot Instances (See AWS Pricing)

Question 27

What is Application Data Caching?

Answer 27

Application Data Caching – store and retrieve information from fast, managed in-memory caches.

Question 28

What is Edge Caching?

Answer 28

Edge Caching – serves content by infrastructure that is closer to viewers, which lowers latency and gives high, sustained data transfer rates necessary to deliver large popular objects to end users at scale.

Question 29

What is Defense in Depth?

Answer 29

Use AWS Features for Defense in Depth – secure multiple levels of your infrastructure from network down to application and database.

Question 30

What is Share Security Responsibility with AWS?

Answer 30

Share Security Responsibility with AWS – AWS handles the security OF the Cloud while customers handle security IN the Cloud.

Question 31

What are Reduce Privileged Access?

Answer 31

Reduce Privileged Access – implement the Principle of Least Privilege controls.

Question 32

What is Security as Code?

Answer 32

Security as Code – firewall rules, network access controls, internal/external subnets, and operating system hardening can all be captured in a template that defines a Golden Environment.

Question 33

What is Real-Time Auditing?

Answer 33

Real-Time Auditing – implement continuous monitoring and automation of controls on AWS to minimize exposure to security risks.

Question 34

What does it mean to Decouple your components?

Answer 34

Decouple your components– the key concept is to build components that do not have tight dependencies on each other so that if one component were to fail for some reason, the other components in the system will continue to work. This is also known as loose coupling. This reinforces the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) design principle that the more loosely coupled the components of the system are, the better and more stable it scales.

Question 35

What does it mean to Think Parallel?

Answer 35

Think parallel - This internalizes the concept of parallelization when designing architectures in the cloud. It encourages you to implement parallelization whenever possible and to also automate the processes of your cloud architecture.

Question 36

What does it mean to Implement Elasticity?

Answer 36

Implement elasticity - This principle is implemented by automating your deployment process and streamlining the configuration and build process of your architecture. This ensures that the system can scale in and scale out to meet the demand without any human intervention.