AWS High Performance Flashcards
How do you scale EBS volumes?
Modify volume type, size, and IOPS capacity. This is not done automatically, and thus requires more operational management.
How do you scale EFS systems?
EFS scales automatically as you add and remove files. Thus, it requires less management.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
What are S3 storage classes, basic API calls, and multi-part uploads?
Answer…
Great for big data storage, backup and recovery.
What level of resiliency is S3?
Global, regional, or local?
Global
Elastic Block Store (EBS)
What are different volume types and their performance? Key words?
Answer…
Look for these key words referencing block storage:
* DAS
* SAN
* Persistent storage for EC2
What are the two types of EC2 storage?
- Instance Store: local, ephemeral storage (short-lived data)
- EBS Volumes: persistent storage
What are EBS Snapshots and where are they stored?
Backups of EBS volumes for recovery.
EBS Snapshots are stored in S3.
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
What are the configuration options for performance? Key words?
A shared file system, great for large repositories, dev environments, directories, and more.
Configuration options for performance:
1. General purpose
2. Max IO
3. Cost optimization lifecycle policies
Look for these key words referencing file system storage:
* Network-based file systems
* NFS
* Hybrid access (VPN or direct connect)
* Linux instances
AWS Storage Gateway
Answer…
Great for a hybrid storage solution.
Amazon FSx
Key words?
Similar to EFS, but created for Windows instances and FSx Lustre (Linux instances). Fully-managed.
Supports active directory integration. Highly available and scalable.
Look for these key words referencing FSx file system:
* Windows file system share drive
* SMB protocol
* Windows NTFS
Which storage options are best fits for low-latency requirements?
EBS volumes (plus, performance is configurable)
What is S3 Accelerator?
AWS CloudFront
How does caching work?
What are the different EC2 instance types?
What are the two types of ECS (Elastic Container Service)?
- Amazon EC2
- Fargate (serverless)
How do you integrate application load balancers with containers for port mapping?
AWS Lambda
Limits?
Functional compute option.
15 minute execution limit. No scaling required to run more functions per second.
Use Lambda with CloudFront to run Lambda globally on CloudFront edge locations. This increases responsiveness and performance.
CloudWatch
What are and how do metrics, alarms, and dashboards work?
How do you add automation, alerts, and remediation for scaling events based on alarms in CloudWatch?
Which metrics should you monitor for scaling events?
Alarms go off when a metric crosses a certain threshhold for a defined amount of time.
Which CoudWatch metrics are not available by default?
- Amount of memory used on EC2 instances
*
What’s the difference between Spot Instances and On-Demand instances?
What’s the difference between relational, key-value, document, in-memory, graph, time series, and ledger databases?
- Relational
- Key-value
- Document
- In-memory
- Graph
- Time series
- Ledger databases
How do you maximize the performance of relational database engines?
How do you configure read replicas for RDS?
Database read replicas vs. multi-AZ deployments
How do Aurora clusters and data replication work?
How does Aurora use compute?
Aurora clusters are made up of one primary instance and zero or more read replicas. These have the benefit of multi-AZ deployment, which makes Aurora more available than RDS.
Aurora does not use local storage for compute, but a shared cluster volume.
I need consistent single-digit milisecond performance and extremely high volumes: DynamoDB or Aurora?
DynamoDB
DynamoDB
How is data replicated?
Answer…
Data is replicated across multiple storage nodes by default. It’s backed by SSD. Provides point-in-time recovery and encryption at rest.
I need a relational database solution with a regional failover: RDS MySQL or Aurora MySQL?
Aurora (RDS only has AZ failover)
Which services offer caching?
Why would you use caching to optimize your database throughput?
- Elasticache
- DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)
…
ElastiCache
Managed in-memory cache for two caching engines: Redis and MemcacheD
DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)
Adds access to data in milliseconds. Has two caches:
1. Item
2. Query
RDS Proxy
Maintains a pool of established connections with your RDS instances.
Reduces stress on compute and memory. Supports a large number of frequent database connections.
RDS Instance auto-scaling
Aurora Serverless
…
Best for infrequent, intermittent, unpredictable workloads. Automatically scales and shuts down according to usage amounts.
What are ACUs (Aurora Capacity Units)?
Kinesis Data Streams
Captures item-level changes for data in DynamoDB tables in a stream.
AWS Global Accelerator
What is S3 Transfer Acceleration?
What are VPC endpoints?
When should you use a VPN vs Direct Connect for hybrid deployments?
AWS Transit Gateway
What are its use cases? How does it simplify network peering solutions?
AWS CloudHub
What AWS service/feature could you use to route a user to the closest region in which you operate?
Route 53 geoproximity routing policies.
Route 53
What are its use cases?
AWS CloudFront
AWS DataSync
AWS Snow Family
AWS Transfer Family
AWS Database Migration Service
What is minimum, maximum, and desired capacity in EC2 Auto Scaling?
What are the different scaling policies? When should you use them?
How do you integrate Auto Scaling with a Load Balancer?
What are the different load balancers and their use cases?
What is the layer of the OSI model for each load balancer?
Amazon EMR
Why choose Kinesis Data Streams vs. Kinesis Data FireHose?
Data Streams is real-time data streaming. It’s highly scalable and durable.
Data Fire Hose loads data streams into data stores. It’s the simplest approach to capture, transform, and load data streams into stores.
Kinesis Data Analytics
Includes basic data transformation options.
AWS Glue
AWS Lake Formation
When would you use the Snow Family to transfer data from on premises to the cloud?
When would you use Kinesis to transfer data in AWS?
CloudHSM
What types of hard or soft quotas will impact your Lambda functions?
Step Functions
What is a GraphQL?
What are the features of AppSync?
