AWS Global Infrastructure

Question 1

Business factors for choosing Regions

Answer 1

1) Compliance with data governance and legal requirements
2) Proximity to customers
3) Available services within a Region
4) Pricing - cost can vary from Region to Region

Question 2

Describe the basic concept of Availability Zones (AZ)

Answer 2

1) Single data center or a group of data centers within a Region
2) Availability Zones are located tens of miles apart from each other
3) Close enough to have low latency between AZs, but if a disaster occurs in one part of the Region, distant enough to reduce the chance that multiple AZs are impacted
4) Run EC2 instance in multiple AZs in case one fails

Question 3

Describe Amazon Cloudfront

Answer 3

1) Content delivery network (CDN) - cache copies of data closer to the customers
2) Helps deliver data, video, applications and APIs to customers around the world with low latency and high transfer speeds
3) Delivers edge content to users based on their geographic location

Question 4

Describe edge locations

Answer 4

1) Edge location is a site that Amazon Cloudfront uses to store cached copies of content closer to the customers for faster deliver

Question 5

Describe 3 methods for provisioning AWS services

Answer 5

1) AWS Management Console
* Web-based interface for accessing and managing AWS services
* Quickly access recently used services and search for other services by name, keyword or acronym
* Console includes wizards and automated workflows that can simplify the process of completing tasks
* Also AWS Console mobile application - monitoring resources, viewing alarms, accessing billing info

2) AWS Command Line Interface (ASW CLI)
* Enables to control multiple AWS services directly from the command line w/in one tool
* Available for users on Windows, macOS, Linux
* Automate actions that services and applications perform through scripts - launch an Amazon EC2 instance, connect an Amazon EC2 instance to a specific Auto Scaling group

3) Software Development Kits (SDKs)
* Use AWS services through an API designed for the programming language or platform
* Enable to use AWS services with existing applications or create new applications that will run on AWS

Question 6

Describe AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Answer 6

1) Managed tool to provision
2) Service that helps provision Amazon EC2-based environments
3) Provide application code and desired configurations to the AWS Elastic Beanstalk service, which then takes that information and builds out the environment
4) Easy to save and deploy again
5) Provide code and configuration settings and Elastic Beanstalk deploys the resources to perform: Adjust capacity, Load balancing, Automatic scaling, Application health monitoring

Question 7

Describe AWS CloudFormation

Answer 7

1) Infrastructure as code tool(build an environment by writing lines of code instead of using the console to individually provision resources) that allows to define a wide variety of AWS resources in a declarative way using JSON or YAML text-based documents called CloudFormation templates
2) Declarative format allows to define what to build without specifying the details of exactly how to build it
3) Not just EC2 instances. Supports many different AWS resources from storage, databases, analytics, machine learning
4) Repeatable