AWS High Performance

Question 1

How do you scale EBS volumes?

Answer 1

Modify volume type, size, and IOPS capacity. This is not done automatically, and thus requires more operational management.

Question 2

How do you scale EFS systems?

Answer 2

EFS scales automatically as you add and remove files. Thus, it requires less management.

Question 3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

What are S3 storage classes, basic API calls, and multi-part uploads?

Answer 3

Answer…

Great for big data storage, backup and recovery.

Question 4

What level of resiliency is S3?

Global, regional, or local?

Answer 4

Global

Question 5

Elastic Block Store (EBS)

What are different volume types and their performance? Key words?

Answer 5

Answer…

Look for these key words referencing block storage:
* DAS
* SAN
* Persistent storage for EC2

Question 6

What are the two types of EC2 storage?

Answer 6

1. Instance Store: local, ephemeral storage (short-lived data)
2. EBS Volumes: persistent storage

Question 7

What are EBS Snapshots and where are they stored?

Answer 7

Backups of EBS volumes for recovery.

EBS Snapshots are stored in S3.

Question 8

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

What are the configuration options for performance? Key words?

Answer 8

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

Question 9

AWS Storage Gateway

Answer 9

Answer…

Great for a hybrid storage solution.

Question 10

Amazon FSx

Key words?

Answer 10

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

Question 11

Which storage options are best fits for low-latency requirements?

Answer 11

EBS volumes (plus, performance is configurable)

Question 12

What is S3 Accelerator?

Question 13

AWS CloudFront

How does caching work?

Question 14

What are the different EC2 instance types?

Question 15

What are the two types of ECS (Elastic Container Service)?

Answer 15

1. Amazon EC2
2. Fargate (serverless)

Question 16

How do you integrate application load balancers with containers for port mapping?

Question 17

AWS Lambda

Limits?

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

CloudWatch

What are and how do metrics, alarms, and dashboards work?

Question 19

How do you add automation, alerts, and remediation for scaling events based on alarms in CloudWatch?

Which metrics should you monitor for scaling events?

Answer 19

Alarms go off when a metric crosses a certain threshhold for a defined amount of time.

Question 20

Which CoudWatch metrics are not available by default?

Answer 20

• Amount of memory used on EC2 instances
  *

Question 21

What’s the difference between Spot Instances and On-Demand instances?

Question 22

What’s the difference between relational, key-value, document, in-memory, graph, time series, and ledger databases?

Answer 22

1. Relational
2. Key-value
3. Document
4. In-memory
5. Graph
6. Time series
7. Ledger databases

Question 23

How do you maximize the performance of relational database engines?

Question 24

How do you configure read replicas for RDS?

Question 25

Database read replicas vs. multi-AZ deployments

Question 26

How do Aurora clusters and data replication work? | How does Aurora use compute?

Answer 26

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.

Question 27

I need consistent single-digit milisecond performance and extremely high volumes: DynamoDB or Aurora?

Answer 27

DynamoDB

Question 28

DynamoDB | How is data replicated?

Answer 28

Answer… Data is replicated across multiple storage nodes by default. It's backed by SSD. Provides point-in-time recovery and encryption at rest.

Question 29

I need a relational database solution with a regional failover: RDS MySQL or Aurora MySQL?

Answer 29

Aurora (RDS only has AZ failover)

Question 30

Which services offer caching? | Why would you use caching to optimize your database throughput?

Answer 30

* Elasticache * DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) …

Question 31

ElastiCache

Answer 31

Managed in-memory cache for two caching engines: Redis and MemcacheD

Question 32

DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)

Answer 32

Adds access to data in milliseconds. Has two caches: 1. Item 2. Query

Question 33

RDS Proxy

Answer 33

Maintains a pool of established connections with your RDS instances. Reduces stress on compute and memory. Supports a large number of frequent database connections.

Question 34

RDS Instance auto-scaling

Question 35

Aurora Serverless

Answer 35

… Best for infrequent, intermittent, unpredictable workloads. Automatically scales and shuts down according to usage amounts.

Question 36

What are ACUs (Aurora Capacity Units)?

Question 37

Kinesis Data Streams

Answer 37

Captures item-level changes for data in DynamoDB tables in a stream.

Question 38

AWS Global Accelerator

Question 39

What is S3 Transfer Acceleration?

Question 40

What are VPC endpoints?

Question 41

When should you use a VPN vs Direct Connect for hybrid deployments?

Question 42

AWS Transit Gateway | What are its use cases? How does it simplify network peering solutions?

Question 43

AWS CloudHub

Question 44

What AWS service/feature could you use to route a user to the closest region in which you operate?

Answer 44

Route 53 geoproximity routing policies.

Question 45

Route 53 | What are its use cases?

Question 46

AWS CloudFront

Question 47

AWS DataSync

Question 48

AWS Snow Family

Question 49

AWS Transfer Family

Question 50

AWS Database Migration Service

Question 51

What is minimum, maximum, and desired capacity in EC2 Auto Scaling? | What are the different scaling policies? When should you use them?

Question 52

How do you integrate Auto Scaling with a Load Balancer?

Question 53

What are the different load balancers and their use cases? | What is the layer of the OSI model for each load balancer?

Question 54

Amazon EMR

Question 55

Why choose Kinesis Data Streams vs. Kinesis Data FireHose?

Answer 55

**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.

Question 56

Kinesis Data Analytics

Answer 56

Includes basic data transformation options.

Question 57

AWS Glue

Question 58

AWS Lake Formation

Question 59

When would you use the Snow Family to transfer data from on premises to the cloud?

Question 60

When would you use Kinesis to transfer data in AWS?

Question 61

CloudHSM

Question 62

What types of hard or soft quotas will impact your Lambda functions?

Question 63

Step Functions

Question 64

What is a GraphQL?

Question 65

What are the features of AppSync?