AWS Solutions Architect Professional Flashcards

1
Q

What is a Persistent Data Store?

A

Means the data’s durable,
and it sticks around
and it survives reboots, or power cycles.

Examples of this are Glacier and RDS.

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2
Q

What is a Transient Data Store?

A

The data’s just temporarily stored
and generally speaking, it gets handed off
to another process.

And examples of this are SQS and SNS.

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3
Q

What is Ephemeral data store?

A

Means that the data does not stick around,
so if you stop the instance,
or, in some cases, reboot the service,
the data’s gone.

Examples of this are EC2 Instance Store and Memcached data,
which is under the ElastiCache portfolio.

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4
Q

What is IOPS?

A

Input/Output Operations Per Second

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5
Q

What is Throughput?

A

How much data you can move at one time

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6
Q

What are the two Consistency Models Named?

A

ACID And Base

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7
Q

What does ACID mean?

A

Atomic - Meaning all or nothing is written to the DB or it’s rolled back.

Consistent - On the completion of a transaction, the database is structurally sound.

Isolated - Transactions do not contend with one another.

Durable - The results of applying a transaction are permanent, even in the presence of failures.

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8
Q

What does BASE Mean?

A

Basic Availability - The database appears to work most of the time.

Soft-State - Stores don’t have to be write-consistent, nor do different replicas have to be mutually consistent all the time.

Eventual consistency - Stores exhibit consistency at some later point (e.g., lazily at read time).

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9
Q

What is the maximum object size for S3?

A

5 TB

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10
Q

What size is it recommended to use Multipart upload?

A

100 megabytes

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11
Q

What is the S3 file path really considered?

A

A Key in the Object storage. This uniquely IDs the object.

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12
Q

What is the basic concept of S3 versioning?

A

Saving a new copy of each write operation.

This enables roll backs and un-delete capability

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13
Q

True or False:

You can enable MFA for delete operations?

A

True

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14
Q

True or False:

S3 Supports Cross Region Replication?

A

True

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15
Q

What is Intelligent Tiering?

A

The one slightly odd storage case is Intelligent Tiering.
It will move your data around among other storage classes
based on how frequently or infrequently
the objects are accessed.

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16
Q

What are Intelligent Tiering archive options?

A

This will allow those objects
that are being managed by Intelligent Tiering
to shuffle off into Glacier or Deep Glacier
after a certain period of time.

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17
Q

What are Services that, with S3, can help create a Data Lake Concept?

A

Athena, Redshift Spectrum, and QuickSight offer the enablement of a data lake concept.

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18
Q

What is Transfer Acceleration?

A

Uses CloudFront as an upload point for reduced upload latency and upload times.

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19
Q

True or False:

S3 supports the BitTorrent Protocol?

A

True.

You can create a specific url and this can generate a .torrent file to be used across a distributed network.

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20
Q

What are other names for S3 Glacier storage?

A

Cold storage

Offline Storage

Farline Storage

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21
Q

True or False:

S3 Glacier retrieval can be sped up if you pay for this?

A

True.

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22
Q

True or False:

A Glacier Lock is Immutable?

A

True.

It can be overwritten, or deleted, but not changed.

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23
Q

With AWS Glacier Vault, how long do you have to confirm your vault lock by default?

A

24 hours to confirm.

If you don’t, the vault lock goes away.

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24
Q

With EBS, what are two limitations?

A

Only used with EC2

Only 1 AZ

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25
Q

Can you move Instance Stores between Instances?

A

No

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26
Q

What advantage does Instance Store have over EBS?

A

Instances stores are direct attach to Instances, and do not need to travel “over the network” in order to be read.

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27
Q

EBS Snapshots store data and data changes how?

A

Incrementally. They only snapshot the changes and rebuild from the compiled changes.

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28
Q

What is AWS Data Lifecycle Manager?

A

Allows scheduled Snapshots for volumes or instances, and can set rules to retain and remove snapshots.

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29
Q

What is AWS Elastic File Share (EFS) based on?

A

Based on NFS file share protocol

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30
Q

True or False:

EFS is Multi AZ distributed?

A

True

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31
Q

True or False:

EFS can be mounted from On Prem Deployments?

A

True, however not recommended without strong internet connection

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32
Q

What is AWS DataSync?

A

A Purpose Built protocol to keep storage on-prem in sync with EFS or S3 over a Direct Connect or internet and does so securely.

Supports EFS to EFS sync.

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33
Q

What is the drawback to EFS?

A

Cost is the main drawback.

3x more expensive than EBS
20x more expensive than S3

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34
Q

True or False:

EFS supports all NFS features?

A

False. Some NFS4 features are not supported yet.

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35
Q

What is AWS Storage Gateway?

A

Virtual machine that you could download and you can
either run on site or you can also run it on EC2.
It provides local storage resources that are back-ended by S3 and Glacier.

Easy way to sync on preme data to the cloud

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36
Q

What are the modes of AWS Storage Gateway?

A

File Gateway
Volume Gateway Stored
Volume Gateway Cached
Tape Gateway

37
Q

What is File Gateway?

A

Exposes volumes as either NFS or

SMB shares so that whatever OS you have in your data center.

38
Q

What is Volume Gateway Stored Mode?

A

Exposed as iSCSI and in essence, they just asynchronously replicate data to S3 in the background.

39
Q

What is Volume Gateway Cached Mode?

A

Also has an iSCSI interface

Difference between this mode is that the primary data is stored on S3.

So what lives on your local volume in your data center is only those files or those objects that have been recently accessed.

So it serves as a source of cache for your data. That’s living out on S3.

40
Q

What is Tape Gateway?

A

Designed to be a virtual media changer and a virtual
tape library for use with existing backup software and it supports many of the popular backup software that are out there today.

41
Q

What is Amazon WorkDocs?

A

Amazon’s version of Dropbox or Google Drive.

Securely fully managed collaboration service.

It can integrate with AD and provide SSO,

Mobile, Web, Mac, Windows native clients

HIPPA, PCI, and ISO compliant

42
Q

What Databases are not supported on RDS?

A

DB2

SAP HANA

43
Q

Does Creating an RDS Read Replica create downtime for your application?

A

No

44
Q

What is DynamoDB?

A

Massively Scalable eky value storage system.

Multi AZ noSQL data store

45
Q

What is one of the drawbacks for DynamoDB having mutli AZ implementation?

A

Writes need to be propagated and this could take a small amount of time.

Writes are “Eventually Consistent” / Less than a second

46
Q

Is DynamoDB more ACID or BASE compliant?

A

BASE

47
Q

What does BASE compliant stand for in Databases?

A

Basic Availability
Soft State
Eventually Consistent

48
Q

Can DynamoDB be made ACID compliant?

A

Yes

49
Q

How is DynamoDB priced?

A

Priced on Throughput rather than compute

Defined as Read and write capacity units

50
Q

What is a drawback on DyanmoDB scaling?

A

DynamoDB can scale up appropriately, but scaling DOWN is difficult as there is not an accurate prediction of surges, or spikes in the reads to certain tables.

DynamoDB then does not know when, or slowly scales back. There are documented work arounds

51
Q

True or False?

DynamoDB has on demand capacity?

A

True

Premium Cost for this feature

52
Q

How do you achieve ACID compliance with DynamoDB?

A

Use DynamoDB Transactions.

53
Q

What are name and value pairs referred to in noSQL databases?

A

Attributes

54
Q

What is the unique identifier called in DynamoDB?

A

Primary Key

55
Q

What other values are there for DynamoDB to use for organization?

A

Global Index
Secondary Indexes
Local Secondary Index
Sort Key

56
Q

In DynamoDB, if you want a fast query of attributes without doing a full table scan, what can you use?

A

Global Secondary Index

57
Q

What can a Secondary Index in a database be thought of as?

A

A View

58
Q

True or False:

Redshift is Postgres SQL compatible?

A

True

This allows it to work with almost any BI tool currently out.

59
Q

What is Redshift Spectrum

A

A new feature to query data directly from data files on S3

60
Q

What is a Data Lake?

A

A large repository
for a variety of data, on top of which you place
some framework or technology to make use of it.

61
Q

What is AWS Neptune?

A

A Graph Database.

Used for storing relationships between objects.

Think social networks or product recommendation engines.

62
Q

What are the two subversions of ElastiCache?

A

Redis and Memcached

63
Q

What makes in memory databases different?

A

Stored in memory and therefore not tied to disk I/O

Faster than DynamoDB

Trade off is Persistence

64
Q

How is Elasticache billed?

A

Node Size and hours of usage

65
Q

Which Version of Elasticache has more features? Memcached or Redis?

A

Redis has more features. Also can have storage options.

66
Q

What can Amazon Athena be described as?

A

a SQL Engine overlaid on top of S3 using Presto.

Designed to query raw data in S3 in JSON or .CSV format

67
Q

How can you greatly increase Amazon Athena performance?

A

Convert data into Parquet format

68
Q

True or False:

You should use Athena if you’re wanting to do joins for your data?

A

False

More useful to use Redshift Spectrum

69
Q

What is Amazon Quantum Ledger Database? (QLDB?)

A

Based on a blockchain concept, it’s an immutable journal of transactions.

70
Q

What is the benefit of having a centralized Ledger Database?

A

Centralization makes transaction writes faster and leverage speed. Pretty good performance overall.

71
Q

What is Amazon Managed Blockchain?

A

Hosted version of popular open-source blockchain. Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum.

More of a true blockchain framework designed to be distributed. Can be in AWS, multiple AWS accounts, or not in AWS at all.

72
Q

What is Amazon Timestream Database?

A

Purpose-built for keeping up with time-series data.

Built in Analytics, interpolation of vlaues that might be missing.

Data Smoothing.

73
Q

What is Amazon DocumentDB?

A

DocumentDB is MongoDB-esque, MongoDB compatibility, works with Mongo APIs

74
Q

What is ElasticSearch?

A

Primarily considered a search engine, but it indexes the documents it serves up, and it stores them as documents in the form of JSON.

Usefull for Search or Analytics.

75
Q

What is usually used in combination with ElastiSearch? (ES?)

A

ELK stack with ElastiSearch, LogStash, and Kibana.

76
Q

When would you want to use a Database on an EC2 instance?

A

If your preferred database is not available under RDS

and if you really need ultimate control over the database.

77
Q

When would you want to use RDS?

A

You need a traditional relational database
for online transactional processing
or your data is well-formed and structured.

78
Q

When would you want to use DynamoDB?

A

If your data is unpredictable

and in maybe a name/value pair, and good in memory performance.

79
Q

When would you want to use AWS Redshift?

A

When you have massive amounts of data

and you really need online analytical processing workloads.

80
Q

When would you want to use AWS Neptune?

A

If the relationship between the objects
is a major portion of the data’s value.
That’s where graph databases really excel.

81
Q

When would you want to use ElastiCache?

A

If you just need a small temporary storage space for data and your data is highly volatile.

82
Q

When creating S3 buckets, what is a good best practice to prevent transmitting traffic over the open internet?

A

Create an Endpoint for your S3 bucket on your VPC.

This can be done for multiple services.

83
Q

What two “flavors” does Amazon Aurora come in?

A

Postgres and MySql

84
Q

What extra features does Amazon Aurora come with?

A

Automated Failover to read replicas

Performance enhancing and redundancy

85
Q

What benefit might NoSQL Databases have over traditional relational databases?

A

Lower overall cost of ownership.

Better performance.

Easy to develop on.

86
Q

True or False:

You can suffer a performance hit on your RDS if you’re running backups without Multiple AZ enabled?

A

True.

The backups are run against the standby RDS instance.

87
Q

What is a limitation of S3 Requestor Pays bucket access?

A

Requestor needs an AWS account.

88
Q

True or False:

S3 has a bitTorrent protocol support?

A

True.

This can help limit data transfer costs