AWS Product Review Flashcards
How many services are available in AWS?
Over 200 that span data warehousing, deployment, directories, content delivery and more
When did AWS start?
In 2006, AWS started offering IT infrastructure services
What is cloud computing?
With pay-as-you-go pricing, it’s the on-demand delivery of:
- Compute power
- Database
- Storage
- Applications
- Misc.
What are the 6 advantages of cloud computing as referenced by AWS?
- Trade capital expense for variable operating expense
- Benefit from massive economies of scale
- Stop guessing capacity
- Increase speed and agility
- Don’t need data centers
- Deploy globally in minutes
Types of Cloud Computing
Infrastructure as a Service
Platform as a Service
Software as a Service
What is Infrastructure as a Service?
Highest level of flexibility and is similar to existing IT resources familiar to large organizations today. Basic building blocks for cloud IT:
- Access to networking features
- Computers (virtual or dedicated hardware)
- Data storage
What is Platform as a Service?
Removes the need to manage the underlying infrastructure and allows the focus to be on the deployment and management of the applications themselves. No need to worry about: 1. Capacity planning 2. Software maintenance 3. Patching 4. Misc
What is Software as a Service?
SaaS provides the user with a completed product that is run and managed by the service provider.
What are the 3 cloud deployment models?
- Cloud
- Hybrid
- On-premise
Of the 3 cloud deployment models (cloud, hybrid, on-premise), what specifically does the cloud model provide?
Everything is built and deployed in the cloud and can either be built on low-level infrastructure or use higher level services which remove the management, architecting, and scaling requirements.
Of the 3 cloud deployment models (cloud, hybrid, on-premise), what does the hybrid model provide?
Infrastructure and applications between cloud-based resources and existing resources that are not located in the cloud.
Of the 3 cloud deployment models (cloud, hybrid, on-premise), what does the on-premise model provide?
The deployment of resources on-prem can be called the “private cloud” where it doesn’t benefit from many of the main benefits of cloud computing but can provide dedicated resources. Generally same as legacy IT infrastructure but with some application management and virtualization technologies incorporated.
How many customers and countries does AWS service?
Over 1M customers in over 240 countries
What is an AWS region?
It is a physical location in the world where there are multiple availability zones.
What is an availability zone?
Availability zones consist of 1+ discrete data centers each with:
- Redundant power
- Networking
- Connectivity
What is the main benefit from an availability zone?
They offer the ability for you to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center.
How many availability zones and regions are currently available?
80 AZs in 25 regions
Are Amazon regions connected or isolated?
Each region is isolated from the other to provide greatest possible fault tolerance and stability
Are availability zones connected or isolated?
Each AZ is isolated but each AZ in a region is connected through low-latency links
What does it mean for an AZ to be designed as an independent failure zone?
This means that AZs are physically separated and are located in lower risk flood plains. They have discrete uninterrupted power supply, onsite backup generation facilities, and are designed to be supplied by independent substations to reduce risk of a power grid incident affecting more than 1 AZ. They are also redundantly connected to multiple tier-1 transit providers.
What does the AWS shared responsibility model mean?
AWS manages security OF the cloud, you manage security IN the cloud.
What are the main benefits of AWS security?
- Keep your data safe.
- Meet compliance requirements
- Save money
- Scale quickly
Analytics: Describe Amazon Athena
Serverless and interactive query service to analyze data stored in S3. Athena is integrated with the AWS Glue Data Catalog out of the box.
Analytics: Describe CloudSearch
It is a managed service that makes it simple and cost effective to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application. It supports 34 languages and popular search features like highlighting, autocomplete, and geospatial search.
Analytics: Describe Elasticsearch service
Used to search, analyze, and visualize data in real-time. Can use intuitive APIs and real-time analytics capabilities for things like log analytics, full-text search, application monitoring, and clickstream analytics. It integrates with tools like Kibana and Logstash in addition to other AWS services.
Analytics: Describe Amazon EMR
Industry leading cloud big data platform for processing vast amounts of data using tools like Apache Spark, Hive, HBase, Flink, Hudi, and Presto. It automates capacity provisioning and tuning of clusters and can run petabyte-scale analysis at less than half the cost of on-prem and 3X faster than standard Apache Spark. Can run workloads on EC2, EKS clusters, or on-prem using AWS outposts.
Analytics: Describe Amazon FinSpace
Built for the financial services industry, it removes the heavy lifting of building and maintaining a data management system for financial analytics. Includes a library of 100+ functions like time bars and Bollinger bands.
Analytics: Describe Amazon Kinesis
Can process streaming data of any scale and type (video, audio, application logs, website clickstreams, IoT telemetry). Enables you to process and analyze data as it arrives so can respond instantly instead of having to wait until all data is collected before processing.
Analytics: Describe Kinesis Data Firehose
Easiest way to load streaming data into data stores. Can load into S3, redshift, elasticsearch, and even splunk. It is a fully managed service that scales automatically to match the throughput of the data and requires no additional administration. It can batch, compress, transform, and encrypt the data before loading it, minimizing the total amount of storage and maximizing security
Analytics: Describe Kinesis Data Analytics
It is the easiest way to analyze streaming data, get actionable insights and respond to client needs. Reduces complexity of building, managing, integrating streaming applications with other AWS services.
Analytics: Describe Kinesis Data Streams
It is a scalable and durable real-time data streaming servbice. Can capture GB of data per second from 100k + sources such as website click streams, database event streams, financial transactions, social media feeds, IT logs, and location-tracking events.
Analytics: Describe Kinesis Video Streams
Stream video from connected devices to AWS. Automatically provisions and scales all infra needed to ingest streaming video data. Also, stores, encrypts, and indexes video data, with APIs that can be used to access these videos. Can playback video for live and on-demand viewing.
Analytics: Describe redshift
Most widely used cloud data warehouse. Fast, simple, cost-effective to analyze data using standard SQL. Columnar storage with parallel query execution.
Analytics: Describe Amazon QuickSight
BI tool that lets you create and publish interactive dashboards. These can be embedded into applications as well.
Analytics: Describe Data Exchange
Makes it easy to find and subscribe to 3rd party data in the cloud. Can subscribe to a data product and use the API to load data directly into S3.
Analytics: Data Pipeline
Web service that lets you process data and move it between different compute and storage services at specified intervals.
Analytics: Describe AWS Glue
ETL service with metadata stored in the glue data catalog.
Analytics: Describe AWS Lake Formation
Makes it easy to set up secure data lake in days. Data lake is centralized, curated, and secure repository that has data in the original form and prepared for analysis. Lake formation lets you define where data resides and then collects and catalogs data, moves it into s3, cleans/classifies it, and secures access.
Analytics: Describe Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
Fully managed service to make it easy to build and run applications using Kafka to process streaming data. With MSK, Kafka APIs can be used to populate data lakes, stream changes to/from databases. MSK lets you build/run without needing infrastructure management expertise specific to Apache Kafka.
Application Integration: Describe AWS Step Functions
It is a fully managed service used to coordinate components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Reliable way to step through each function of the application with a graphical console. It automatically triggers and tracks each step and retries when there are errors so that apps can run in order and as expected.
Application Integration: Describe Amazon AppFlow
It is a fully managed integration service to transfer data between SaaS applications and AWS services in a few clicks. Can run data flows on demand, triggered, or adhoc. Also it encrypts data in motion and allows users to restrict data from flowing over public internet for SaaS applications integrated with AWS PrivateLink.
Application Integration: Describe Amazon EventBridge
Serverless event bus making it easier to build event-driven applications. Delivers stream of real-time data and can set up routing tulres to determine where to send data to build application architectures that react in real-time to data sources with publisher and consumer fully decoupled.
Application Integration: Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow
MWAA is a managed orchestration service for Apache Airflow to make it easier to operate data pipelines in the cloud at scale. Airflow is an open source tool that can author, schedule, and monitor sequences of processes and tasks. Airflow + Python can be used to create workflows without needing to manage underlying infrastructure for scalability, availability, and security.
Application Integration: Describe Amazon MQ
It is a managed message broker service for APache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ. Message brokers let different software systems (on different platforms and with different languages) talk to each other. Amazon MQ manages provisioning, setup, maintenance of these using industry-standard APIs and protocols for messaging.
Application Integration: Describe Simple Notification Service
It is a highly available, durable, secure, fully managed pub/sub messaging service that lets us decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Topics are provided where publisher systems can fan out messages to large number of subscriber endpoints for parallel processing.
Application Integration: Describe Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Fully managed message queueing service enabling you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. SQS eliminates complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message oriented middleware. Can send/store/receive messages at any volume without losing messages. Standard queues (max throughput, best ordering, at-least-once delivery) and FIFO queues (messages processed exactly once in the order sent) are the two types.
Application Integration: Amazon Simple Workflow Service
Helps devs build/run/scale background jobs that have parallel or sequential steps. it is a fully managed state tracker and task coordinator in the cloud.
AR/VR: Describe Amazon Sumerian
Lets you create/run VR/AR/3D apps quickly without any expertise. Can run immersive and interactive scenes running on hardware like Oculus, HTC, Google, and Lenovo. Makes it easy to create all building blocks like 3d assets, designing, animating, and scripting. Can design scenes directly from your browser.
Blockchain: Describe Amazon Managed Blockchain
Fully managed service making it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. Eliminates overhead of creating network and automatically scales to meet demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions. Can manage certificates, add new users, and track operational metrics like usage of compute, memory, and storage. Can replicate a copy of network activity into the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database.
Business Applications: Describe Alexa for Business
Service enabling organizations and employees to use alexa to get work done
Business Applications: Describe Amazon Chime
Communications service that transforms online meetings into a secure application that can be trusted.
Business Applications: Describe Amazon SES
Simple Email Service lets devs send mail from within any application. Can quickly send out transactional, marketing, or mass email communications. IP deployment helps drive higher deliverability and protect sender reputation.
Business Applications: Describe Amazon WorkDocs
Fully managed and secure enterprise storage and sharing service. users can comment on files and upload new versions.
Business Applications: Amazon WorkMail
Gives users abiltiy to access email, contacts, calendars using client application of their choice. Can integrate into existing corporate directory.
Cloud Financial Management:
