AWS Solutions Architect Professional Flashcards
What is a Persistent Data Store?
Means the data’s durable,
and it sticks around
and it survives reboots, or power cycles.
Examples of this are Glacier and RDS.
What is a Transient Data Store?
The data’s just temporarily stored
and generally speaking, it gets handed off
to another process.
And examples of this are SQS and SNS.
What is Ephemeral data store?
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.
What is IOPS?
Input/Output Operations Per Second
What is Throughput?
How much data you can move at one time
What are the two Consistency Models Named?
ACID And Base
What does ACID mean?
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.
What does BASE Mean?
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).
What is the maximum object size for S3?
5 TB
What size is it recommended to use Multipart upload?
100 megabytes
What is the S3 file path really considered?
A Key in the Object storage. This uniquely IDs the object.
What is the basic concept of S3 versioning?
Saving a new copy of each write operation.
This enables roll backs and un-delete capability
True or False:
You can enable MFA for delete operations?
True
True or False:
S3 Supports Cross Region Replication?
True
What is Intelligent Tiering?
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.
What are Intelligent Tiering archive options?
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.
What are Services that, with S3, can help create a Data Lake Concept?
Athena, Redshift Spectrum, and QuickSight offer the enablement of a data lake concept.
What is Transfer Acceleration?
Uses CloudFront as an upload point for reduced upload latency and upload times.
True or False:
S3 supports the BitTorrent Protocol?
True.
You can create a specific url and this can generate a .torrent file to be used across a distributed network.
What are other names for S3 Glacier storage?
Cold storage
Offline Storage
Farline Storage
True or False:
S3 Glacier retrieval can be sped up if you pay for this?
True.
True or False:
A Glacier Lock is Immutable?
True.
It can be overwritten, or deleted, but not changed.
With AWS Glacier Vault, how long do you have to confirm your vault lock by default?
24 hours to confirm.
If you don’t, the vault lock goes away.
With EBS, what are two limitations?
Only used with EC2
Only 1 AZ
Can you move Instance Stores between Instances?
No
What advantage does Instance Store have over EBS?
Instances stores are direct attach to Instances, and do not need to travel “over the network” in order to be read.
EBS Snapshots store data and data changes how?
Incrementally. They only snapshot the changes and rebuild from the compiled changes.
What is AWS Data Lifecycle Manager?
Allows scheduled Snapshots for volumes or instances, and can set rules to retain and remove snapshots.
What is AWS Elastic File Share (EFS) based on?
Based on NFS file share protocol
True or False:
EFS is Multi AZ distributed?
True
True or False:
EFS can be mounted from On Prem Deployments?
True, however not recommended without strong internet connection
What is AWS DataSync?
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.
What is the drawback to EFS?
Cost is the main drawback.
3x more expensive than EBS
20x more expensive than S3
True or False:
EFS supports all NFS features?
False. Some NFS4 features are not supported yet.
What is AWS Storage Gateway?
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
What are the modes of AWS Storage Gateway?
File Gateway
Volume Gateway Stored
Volume Gateway Cached
Tape Gateway
What is File Gateway?
Exposes volumes as either NFS or
SMB shares so that whatever OS you have in your data center.
What is Volume Gateway Stored Mode?
Exposed as iSCSI and in essence, they just asynchronously replicate data to S3 in the background.
What is Volume Gateway Cached Mode?
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.
What is Tape Gateway?
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.
What is Amazon WorkDocs?
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
What Databases are not supported on RDS?
DB2
SAP HANA
Does Creating an RDS Read Replica create downtime for your application?
No
What is DynamoDB?
Massively Scalable eky value storage system.
Multi AZ noSQL data store
What is one of the drawbacks for DynamoDB having mutli AZ implementation?
Writes need to be propagated and this could take a small amount of time.
Writes are “Eventually Consistent” / Less than a second
Is DynamoDB more ACID or BASE compliant?
BASE
What does BASE compliant stand for in Databases?
Basic Availability
Soft State
Eventually Consistent
Can DynamoDB be made ACID compliant?
Yes
How is DynamoDB priced?
Priced on Throughput rather than compute
Defined as Read and write capacity units
What is a drawback on DyanmoDB scaling?
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
True or False?
DynamoDB has on demand capacity?
True
Premium Cost for this feature
How do you achieve ACID compliance with DynamoDB?
Use DynamoDB Transactions.
What are name and value pairs referred to in noSQL databases?
Attributes
What is the unique identifier called in DynamoDB?
Primary Key
What other values are there for DynamoDB to use for organization?
Global Index
Secondary Indexes
Local Secondary Index
Sort Key
In DynamoDB, if you want a fast query of attributes without doing a full table scan, what can you use?
Global Secondary Index
What can a Secondary Index in a database be thought of as?
A View
True or False:
Redshift is Postgres SQL compatible?
True
This allows it to work with almost any BI tool currently out.
What is Redshift Spectrum
A new feature to query data directly from data files on S3
What is a Data Lake?
A large repository
for a variety of data, on top of which you place
some framework or technology to make use of it.
What is AWS Neptune?
A Graph Database.
Used for storing relationships between objects.
Think social networks or product recommendation engines.
What are the two subversions of ElastiCache?
Redis and Memcached
What makes in memory databases different?
Stored in memory and therefore not tied to disk I/O
Faster than DynamoDB
Trade off is Persistence
How is Elasticache billed?
Node Size and hours of usage
Which Version of Elasticache has more features? Memcached or Redis?
Redis has more features. Also can have storage options.
What can Amazon Athena be described as?
a SQL Engine overlaid on top of S3 using Presto.
Designed to query raw data in S3 in JSON or .CSV format
How can you greatly increase Amazon Athena performance?
Convert data into Parquet format
True or False:
You should use Athena if you’re wanting to do joins for your data?
False
More useful to use Redshift Spectrum
What is Amazon Quantum Ledger Database? (QLDB?)
Based on a blockchain concept, it’s an immutable journal of transactions.
What is the benefit of having a centralized Ledger Database?
Centralization makes transaction writes faster and leverage speed. Pretty good performance overall.
What is Amazon Managed Blockchain?
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.
What is Amazon Timestream Database?
Purpose-built for keeping up with time-series data.
Built in Analytics, interpolation of vlaues that might be missing.
Data Smoothing.
What is Amazon DocumentDB?
DocumentDB is MongoDB-esque, MongoDB compatibility, works with Mongo APIs
What is ElasticSearch?
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.
What is usually used in combination with ElastiSearch? (ES?)
ELK stack with ElastiSearch, LogStash, and Kibana.
When would you want to use a Database on an EC2 instance?
If your preferred database is not available under RDS
and if you really need ultimate control over the database.
When would you want to use RDS?
You need a traditional relational database
for online transactional processing
or your data is well-formed and structured.
When would you want to use DynamoDB?
If your data is unpredictable
and in maybe a name/value pair, and good in memory performance.
When would you want to use AWS Redshift?
When you have massive amounts of data
and you really need online analytical processing workloads.
When would you want to use AWS Neptune?
If the relationship between the objects
is a major portion of the data’s value.
That’s where graph databases really excel.
When would you want to use ElastiCache?
If you just need a small temporary storage space for data and your data is highly volatile.
When creating S3 buckets, what is a good best practice to prevent transmitting traffic over the open internet?
Create an Endpoint for your S3 bucket on your VPC.
This can be done for multiple services.
What two “flavors” does Amazon Aurora come in?
Postgres and MySql
What extra features does Amazon Aurora come with?
Automated Failover to read replicas
Performance enhancing and redundancy
What benefit might NoSQL Databases have over traditional relational databases?
Lower overall cost of ownership.
Better performance.
Easy to develop on.
True or False:
You can suffer a performance hit on your RDS if you’re running backups without Multiple AZ enabled?
True.
The backups are run against the standby RDS instance.
What is a limitation of S3 Requestor Pays bucket access?
Requestor needs an AWS account.
True or False:
S3 has a bitTorrent protocol support?
True.
This can help limit data transfer costs
