AWS fundamentals

Question 1

Which elements do AWS’s global insfratructure consists of, and what is the definitions of those elements?

Answer 1

The AWS global infrastructure consists of two elements:

Regions and Availability zones.

Regions:
A region is simply a location (or geografical area). This could be London, Sydney or North carolina for intance

Availability zones:
You can think of avaiability zones as a data center (a data center is a building filled with servers). Keep in mind one availability zones can contain multiple data centers if they are close enough to eachother.

Question 2

How many availability zones have to be in a geografical location for it to be considered a region?

Answer 2

3 or more.

Question 3

What are the 11 core AWS services that is needed to pass the exam?

Answer 3

• Databases
• Storage
• Compute
• Migration & Transfer
• Network & Content delivery
• Management & Governance
• Analytics
• Security, identity & compliance
• Application integration
• AWS cost management
• Containers

Question 3

What is an edge location?

Answer 3

Edge locations are endpoints for AWS that are used for caching content.

Typically this consists of Amazon’s content delivery network cloudfront.

There are many more edge locations compared to regions. There 215 edge locations compared to 91 regions.

Question 3

What is the maximum distance there can be between availability zones in a region?

Answer 3

60 miles or 100 km.

Question 4

What is the shared responsibility model?

Answer 4

It’s simply a model that describes which responsibilities are on Amazon, and which responsibilities are on the customer of AWS when it comes to security primarily.

Amazon is responsible to provide security that primarily involves their assets, and providing those assets. This is for instance databases and compute power in their datacenters and the security of their datacenters.

Customers are primarily responsible for the internal security of the services they use. So if you use a database service it’s the customers responsibility making sure the data is safe, and the correct people have accesss.

Question 5

How do you check if you’re responsible for someting in AWS?

Answer 5

When in doubt if you’re responsible ask yourself “can you do this in the AWS management console?” if the answer is yes, you’re most likely responsible.

Examples of customer responsibilities:
Security groups, IAM users, patching EC2 operating systems, patching databased running on EC2.

Examples of AWS responsibilities:
Manageing data cetners, security cameras, cabling, patching RDS operating systems.

A shared responsibility is encryption.

Question 6

What are the four key services the exam is split into?

Answer 6

1. Compute
2. Storage
3. Databases
4. Networking

Question 7

What does the term compute cover, and what AWS service can provide this?

Answer 7

Compute is the center piece of all applications. It’s what crunches the data you put into the application. This is for instance servers and virtual machines.

Examples of AWS compute services are:
* EC2
* Lambda
* Elastic Beanstalk

Question 8

What does the term storage cover, and what AWS service can provide this?

Answer 8

Storage covers ways to save information/data.

Examples of AWS storage services are:
* S3
* EBS
* EFS
* FSx
* Storage gateway

Question 9

What does the term databases cover, and what AWS service can provide this?

Answer 9

Databases are simply spreadsheets. It’s a way to store and retrieve information/data.

Examples of AWS database services are:
* RDS
* DynamoDB
* Redshift

Question 10

What does the term networking cover, and what AWS service can provide this?

Answer 10

Networking is a term that describes where the compute, storage and databases services live and how they communicate with each other.

Examples of networking services are:
* VPCs
* Direct Connect
* Route 53
* API gateway
* AWS Global Accelerator

Question 11

What are the six pillar of the well-architected framework?

Answer 11

1. operational Excellence

Running an monitoring systems to deliver business value, and continually improving processes and procedures.

2. Performance Efficiency

Using IT and computing resources efficiently

3. Security

Protecting information and systems

4. Cost optimization

Avoiding unnecessary costs

5. Reliability

Enduring a workload perform its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to

6. Sustainability

Minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads