AWS Resiliency Flashcards

For the AWS Certified Solutions Architect—Associate exam prep. Increase understanding about AWS resiliency, including fault tolerance, scalability, availability, and loosely-coupled architectures.

1
Q

What is resiliency?

A

The ability to recover when stressed by loads, attacks, or failure of any workload components.

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2
Q

What is the difference between vertical and horizontal scaling?

What is the cost optimization for each?

A

Vertical scaling: Increasing the size of the instances.

Horizontal scaling: Increasing the amount of instances.

Cost optimization:

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3
Q

What is elasticity?

A

Using automatic scaling alongside horizontal scaling to match capacity with demand.

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4
Q

What can AWS Auto scaling do? What about EC2 Auto scaling?

What are the difference EC2 Auto scaling policies?

A
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5
Q

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

A
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6
Q

Elastic Container Service (ECS)

A
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7
Q

Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

A
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8
Q

AWS Lambda

A
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9
Q

Relational Database Service (RDS)

A
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10
Q

DynamoDB

A

NoSQL, low latency at extreme scale.

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11
Q

Amazon Aurora

A

Cloud-native relational database service.

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12
Q

Amazon Redshift

A

Data warehouse.

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13
Q

For resiliency in RDS, when would you use read-replicas or a multi-AZ design?

A

Use read replicas for performance and availability benefis. (This is not a cache replacement.)

Multi-AZ design doesn’t scale your needs, allow you to access it directly, or provide added performance on the standby copy. Multi-AZ is only good for high availability.

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14
Q

Which services provide caching abilities?

A
  1. Amazon CloudFront
  2. ElastiCache
  3. DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)
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15
Q

What is RDS Proxy?

How does it make applications more scalable, resilient, and secure?

A

Gives applications the ability to pull and share database connections. This improves efficiency and app scalability.

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16
Q

What are the AWS edge networking services?

When should you use each one?

A
  1. Amazon CloudFront
  2. Route 53
  3. AWS Global Accelerator
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17
Q

AWS Transfer Family

A

Grants the ability to create, automate, and monitor your file transfer and data processing.

Does not require your own code or infrastructure. Supports up to three AZs.

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18
Q

What is service-oriented architecture? What is microservices architecture?

A

Service-oriented architecture:Making software components reusable through service interfaces

Microservices architecture: Makes software components smaller and simpler.

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19
Q

What is the difference between API-driven, event-driven, and streaming data?

A
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20
Q

Amazon API Gateway

A
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21
Q

AWS Fargate

A

Serverless compute for containers.

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22
Q

What is concurrency and transactions in AWS Lambda?

A
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23
Q

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

A

definition…

Can deliver high throughput by scaling message producers and consumers horizontally.

24
Q

What is synchronous vs asynchronous decoupling?

A

Synchronous decoupling requires components to always be available.

Asynchronous decoupling involves communication between components through durable components.

25
Q

What is the difference between high availability and fault tolerance?

A

High availability is designing for minimal downtime.

Fault tolerance is designing for zero downtime and is typically more expensive.

26
Q

What are ways to design an architecture for disaster recovery?

A
  1. Backups stored offsite
  2. Backups stored in the cloud
  3. Run disaster simulation tests
  4. Build resources needed for operational redundancy (like servers and databases)
27
Q

What are legacy applications?

A

Answer…

Component migrations are not possible.

28
Q

What are the two disaster recovery objectives and their definitions?

A
  1. Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Maximum acceptable delay between a service interruption and service restoration. What’s the maximum time the application can be unavailable?
  2. Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Maximum acceptable amount of time since the last data recovery point. How often does the data need to be backed up?
29
Q

What are the four disaster recovery strategies?

Which are active/active and active/passive? What’s the RPO and RTO?

A

Active/Active
* Multi-site active-active: Zero downtime and near zero data loss. $$$$. Real-time RTO/RPO.

Active/Passive
* Warm Standby: Smaller, always-running instance, with scalability available after event. $$$. Minutes of RTO/RPO.
* Pilot Light: Data live, services idle. $$. 10s of minutes of RTO/RPO.
* Backup & Restore: Provision all AWS resources and restore backups after event. $. Hours of RTO/RPO.

30
Q

How does Amazon Aurora work for cross-regional failover?

How long does it take to failover?

A
31
Q

How does RDS multi-AZ deployment failover work?

How long is the database down?

A
32
Q

How do DynamoDB global tables work?

What backup and recovery options does it have?

A
33
Q

How can you improve availability and disaster recovery for legacy applications that are not cloud native?

A
34
Q

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

How can it be used with on-premises and cloud-based applications?

A
35
Q

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)

A
36
Q

EC2 Image Builder

A
37
Q

How do routing tables work?

A
38
Q

VPC Peering Connections

A
39
Q

AWS Transit Gateway

A
40
Q

AWS Site-to-Site VPN

A
41
Q

AWS Direct Connect Locations

A
42
Q

AWS Direct Connect Gateways

A
43
Q

AWS Route 53 Resolver

A
44
Q

Which services can automate deployment?

Which can be used for containers?

A
  1. Elastic Beanstalk
  2. CloudFormation
  3. OpsWorks

For containers:
1. ECS
2. EKS

45
Q

Which services can help you find vulnerabilities in your infrastructure and code?

A
  1. Amazon Inspector
  2. Amazon CodeGuru
46
Q

What are the various DNS routing capabilities of Route 53?

Which support global architectures?

A
47
Q

Amazon CloudWatch

How do you initate automated actions using CloudWatch alarms?

A
48
Q

AWS X-Ray

A
49
Q

EventBridge

A
50
Q

Amazon Polly

What is a use case for Polly in high availability and fault tolerance?

A

Large volumes of IT service requests

51
Q

Which two services can be used to create a self-healing environment that can tolerate a single point of failure of a single EC2 instance, or a loss of an entire AZ?

A

Is it EC2 Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancer?

52
Q

AWS Global Accelerator

A
53
Q

What’s the difference between EC2 Auto Scaling and AWS Auto Scaling?

A
54
Q

What’s the difference between stateful and stateless applications?

A
55
Q

What is a sticky session, and why does it keep customers on the same instance?

A