AWS Practitioner Flashcards
What would you use to get automatic notifications if your account spending goes over a certain amount?
A Billing Alarm will notify you if your account spending goes over a certain amount.
What is IAM used for?
Identity Access Management (IAM) is used for assigning roles and permissions to users
What is an API Gateway?
An API Gateway acts as a reverse proxy that accepts all API calls and aggregates them to the various services.
What is Athena?
Athena is a query service allowing you to analyse and query data located in S3 buckets.
What is Macie?
Macie is a security service that uses Machine Learning and NLP (Natural Language Processing) to discover, classify and protect sensitive data stored in S3.
It provides dashboards, reports and alerts and can also analyse and query Cloudtrail logs.
What is AWS Cognito?
Cognito provides authentication, authorisation and user management for web and mobile apps.
It allows users to sign-in either directly or through a 3rd party such as Facebook, Amazon, Google or Apple.
What are the two main components of AWS Cognito?
User pools and Identity pools are the main components of AWS Cognito
What are Cognito user pools?
User pools is a user directory for SaaS applications.
It provides sign-up and sign-in to web and mobile applications for your users
What are Cognito identity pools?
Identity pools enable you to grant your users access to other AWS services.
What is AWS Config?
AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources.
Config allows you to identify changes to various resources over time
What are AWS Organisations?
AWS Organisations is an account management service that enables you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organisation that you create and manage centrally
What is AWS Security Hub?
AWS Security Hub gives you a view of your high-priority security alerts and security posture across all your AWS accounts
What is AWS Transit Gateway?
Transit Gateway connects VPCs and on-premises networks through a central hub.
What is CloudFront?
CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) that delivers data and applications globally with low latency.
What is Cloudwatch?
Cloudwatch monitors your AWS resources and the applications that run on it.
Cloudwatch allows billing alarms to be created if your total cost exceeds a certain value
What does Cloudwatch use to notify in the event of an alarm being triggered?
Cloudwatch uses SNS topics to notify in the event of an alarm being triggered
What is the key difference between Cloudwatch and Cloudtrail?
Cloudwatch is about performance and Cloudtrail is about auditing
What is EBS?
EBS (Elastic Block Store) is a high-performance, block-storage service to store data on the cloud.
It can be seen as a virtual hard disk in the Cloud.
How can you use an EBS volume to create an image?
You can take a snapshot of your volumes to create images to provision new EC2 instances.
What is EC2?
EC2 is a web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the Cloud.
What is a security group?
A security group acts as a virtual firewall that controls traffic into an instance allowing different types of traffic into named port numbers
What is a Network Access Control List (NACL) ?
A Network Access Control Lists work on subnets and allow you to block/blacklist certain ports or ip addresses
What are AMIs?
AMIs (Amazon Machine Image) are images that provide all the information required to launch an instance.
What are the two types of volumes that back AMIs?
The two storage types are Instance Store and EBS backed volumes.
What are EBS volumes?
EBS volumes are stores that are created from an Amazon EBS snapshot.
What is an ENI?
ENI is an Elastic Network Interface - essentially a virtual network card.
What is EN?
EN is Enhanced Networking.
EN uses single root I/O virtualisation to provide high-performance networking on supported instance types.
What is Elastic Fabric Adapter?
Elastic Fabric Adapter is a network device that can be attach to your EC2 instance to accelerate High Performance Computing (HPC) and machine learning applications.
What are Spot Instances?
Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the Cloud.
Spot instances are available at uptown a 90% discount.
What are Spot instances useful for? (examples)
Spot instances are useful for:
- Big data and analytics
- Containerised workloads
- CI / CD testing
- Web services
What are Spot Fleets?
Spot Fleets are a collection of Spot Instances.
Spot Fleets attempt to launch the number of Spot Instances and On-Demand instances to meet the target capacity specified.
What is Grafana?
Grafana is an open source visualisation tool that can be used on top of a variety of data stores providing dashboards.
What does IAM use to manage access?
IMA uses Groups (to which users can be assigned), and Roles to manage access.
What is Kinesis Firehose?
Kinesis Firehose is a tool to load streaming data into data lakes, data stores and analytics tools.
Firehose can capture, transform and load data enabling real-time analytics.
What is Lambda?
Lambda is a serverless compute function that runs code in response to events and requests without managing servers
What are Load Balancers used for?
Load Balancers are used to balance load across internet-facing web servers.
What are the three types of Load Balancers?
The three types of Load Balancers are:
- Application Load Balancers
- Network Load Balancers
- Classic Load Balancers
What are Application Load Balancers?
Application Load Balancers are best suited for http and https traffic.
They are application aware and send specific requests to specific web servers.
What are Network Load Balancers?
Network Load Balancers are best suited for load balancing of TCP traffic where extreme performance is required.
What are Classic Load balancers?
Classic Load balancers are used to balance http and https traffic but are not application aware.
Classic Load balancers are typically used as a cheap option when you don’t care how the load is distributed.
What is a NAT Gateway?
NAT Gateways allow your private subnets to communicate out to the internet without becoming public.
What are AWS Regions?
An AWS Region is a geographical area
What are AWS Availability Zones?
Availability Zones are close proximity, but separate, data centres within AWS Regions.
What are Edge Locations?
Edge Locations are endpoints that are used for caching content.
What do Edge Locations consist of to enable content caching?
Edge Locations uses CloudFront (which is Amazons CDN) to cache content.
What is a VPC?
A VPC is a Virtual Private Cloud - a virtual data centre where you can deploy your Cloud assets.
What is Amazon RDS?
Amazon Relational Database Service is a managed service to setup and operate a relational DB in the Cloud.
What is Quicksight?
Quicksight is a business analytics service to build visualisations and perform ad-hoc analysis from your data.
What is S3?
S3 is secure, durable and highly scaleable object storage.
What are the S3 tiers?
The S3 tiers are:
- S3 standard
- S3 IA (infrequently accessed)
- S3 one zone IA
- S3 intelligent tiering (moves objects around based on how you use/access your data)
- S3 glacier
- S3 glacier deep archive
-S3 Outposts
What can you use to restrict bucket access?
You can restrict S3 bucket access in the following ways:
- Bucket policies (that apply across the whole bucket)
- Object policies (that apply to individual files)
- IAM policies to users and groups
What is AWS DataSync?
DataSync is used to move large amounts of data from on-premise to AWS. Replication can be done hourly, daily or weekly
What is Snowball?
Snowball is a petabyte-scale transport solution to get data in / out of AWS
What are Snowball Edge and Snowmobile?
Snowball Edge is a 100TB data transfer device with compute capabilities. It can act as either a transport vehicle or support work in offline locations because it can run lambda functions etc.
Snowmobile is for data transfer 100PB and is a shipping container on a truck.
What is Storage Gateway?
Storage Gateway is a device used to transfer data from your on premise site to AWS Cloud-based storage to provide seamless integration.
What are the different types of Storage Gateways?
The different types of Storage Gateway are:
- File Gateway
- Volume Gateway
- Tape Gateway
What are File Gateways?
File Gateways are used to store your on-premise data as files within S3. Once uploaded the files are treated as native S3 objects.
What are Volume Gateways?
A Volume Gateway provides cloud-backed storage volumes that you can mount as Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) devices from your on-premises application servers.
What are Taped Gateways?
Tape Gateway enables you to replace using physical tapes on premises with virtual tapes in AWS
What are VPC Endpoints?
A VPC Endpoint is essentially a configuration that allows your services in your VPC to access a service made available to you via PrivateLink.
A VPC endpoint creates a private connection between your VPC and another AWS service without requiring access over the Internet, through a NAT device, a VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect.
What are the two types of VPC endpoints?
The two types of VPC endpoints are:
- Interface endpoints
- Gateway endpoints
What are Interface endpoints?
Interface endpoints are a type of VPC endpoint that creates an ENI with a private IP address in the subnet to serve as an entry point for traffic destined to another AWS service.
What is a Gateway endpoint?
Gateway endpoints are a type of VPC endpoint that you specify as a target for a route in the route table for traffic destined to a supporting AWS service
What is WAF?
WAF (Web Application Firewall) allows the monitoring of the http and https requests.
What are the four primary services that deal specifically with storing data in AWS?
The four primary services for storing data in AWS are:
- Elastic Block Store (EBS)
- Elastic File System (EFS)
- Amazon FSx
- S3
What is a key use case of EBS?
A use case maybe for large enterprise apps to use EBS to store self-managed relational and NoSQL databases.
They may then run big data analytics engines against this information that work at lightning speed.
Does Block Storage contain metadata?
No, block storage contains no metadata. Object-based storage has metadata
When would you use EBS?
EBS’s biggest strengths are its reliable performance and flexibility.
It’s ideal for apps that need low latency with many IO operations like database servers. It’s scalable, so you can add extra block storage volumes without dropping performance.
What is EFS?
(EFS) is a fully managed and scalable NFS file system (for Linux) that can be mounted to EC2 instances and on-premises compute resources.
What is Guard Duty?
Amazon GuardDuty is an intelligent threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorised behaviour to protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data stored in Amazon S3.
GuardDuty analyzes tens of billions of events across multiple AWS data sources, such as AWS CloudTrail event logs, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs.
What is AWS Direct Connect?
AWS Direct Connect is a cloud service solution that makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS.
Using AWS Direct Connect, you create a private connection between AWS and your data center, office, or colocation environment.
What is AWS PrivateLink?
AWS PrivateLink is a highly available, scalable technology that enables you to privately connect your VPC to services as if they were in your VPC.
What are the 6 advantages to Cloud Computing?
The advantages to Cloud Computing are:
- Go global in minutes
- Stop spending money on running and maintaining data datacentres
- Benefit from massive economies of scale
- Increase speed and agility
- Stop guessing capacity
- Trade capital expenses for variable expenses
What are the 4 benefits of Cloud Computing?
The 4 benefits are:
- High Availability
- Elasticity
- Agility
- Durability
What are the 3 common cloud computing models?
The 3 common Cloud computing models are:
- IaaS
- PaaS
- SaaS
What are the 3 common Cloud deployment models?
The 3 common Cloud deployment models are:
- Private Cloud
- Public Cloud
- Hybrid Cloud
What is another term for Private Cloud?
Another term for Private Cloud is ‘on-premises’
What are the characteristics of Availability Zones?
Availability Zones are:
- Physically separated
- Connected through low-latency links
- Fault tolerant
- Allow high availability
What is AWS CLI?
AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a service that allows you to programmatically access your AWS account through a terminal or command window
What are SDKs?
Software Development Kits (SDKs) allow you to access AWS Services from popular programming languages
What is the Lambda pricing model?
Using Lambda you are charged based on the duration and number of requests.
You have access to 1 million free Lambda calls each month.
What is Fargate?
Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers.
Fargate allows you to manage containers. It is serverless and scales automatically
What is Lightsail?
Lightsail is a service that allows you to quickly launch all the resources needed for small projects.
Lightsail enables the deployment of preconfigured applications such as WordPress websites and comes with a VM, a static IP, SSD based storage and more.
What is AWS Outposts?
AWS Outposts allows you to run cloud services in your internal data center.
Outposts support workloads that need to remain on-premise for latency or data sovereignty needs. AWS delivers and installs the servers in your data center.
What is AWS Batch?
AWS Batch allows you to process large workloads in smaller chunks (or batches).
AWS Batch can run hundreds / thousands of smaller batch processing jobs and can dynamically provision instances based on volume.
When using Lambda, what are you responsible for ?
You are only responsible for your application code. AWS manages servers, coding environment, and language support
What are S3 access logs used for?
S3 Access logs are used to track the access to your buckets and objects
Is S3 a global or regional service?
S3 is a regional service but bucket names must be globally unique
What is durability in regards to Data Accessibility and S3?
Durability means your objects are never lost or compromised.
Amazon S3 Standard
is designed for 99.999999999%
(11 9’s) of durability.
What is availability in regards to Data Accessibility and S3?
Availability means you can access your data quickly when you need it.
Amazon S3 Standard is designed for 99.99% availability.
What is S3 Standard recommended for?
S3 Standard is recommended for frequently accessed data
What is S3 Intelligent Tiering is recommended for?
S3 Intelligent Tiering is recommended for data with unknown or changing access patterns
What is S3 Infrequent Access (IA) recommended for?
S3 Infrequent Access is recommended for long-lived data that is not frequently accessed yet gives millisecond access when needed
What is S3 One Zone Infrequent Access (IA) recommended for?
S3 One Zone IA is recommended for re-creatable data, infrequently accessed with millisecond access but where availability and durability is not essential
What is S3 Glacier recommended for?
S3 Glacier is recommended for long term backups and cheaper storage options
What is S3 Glacier Deep Archive recommended for?
S3 Glacier Deep Archive is used for long-term data archival accessed once or twice a year, or retaining data for regulatory compliance needs.
What is S3 Outposts recommended for?
S3 Outposts is recommended for data that needs to be kept local or has demanding application performance needs.
What are 4 common real world usage scenarios for S3?
4 common real world usage scenarios include:
- Static websites (deploy to S3 and distribute with Cloudfront)
- Data archival ( store in S3 Glacier)
- Analytics systems (store in S3 and use analytic services like Redshift and Athena)
- Mobile applications (App users can upload to S3 buckets)
What are the storage options for EC2 instances?
The supported storage options are :
- Elastic Block Store (EBS)
- Elastic File System (EFS)
- Instance Store
What are the key attributes of EBS?
The key attributes of note for EBS are:
- The data persists when the instance is not running
- It is tied to one AZ
- It can only be attached to 1 instance in the same AZ