AWS Technology Flashcards
Compute Resources
What is EC2?
EC2 allows you to rent and manage virtual servers in the cloud
Elastic compute power
Virtual servers in the cloud
Compute Resources
What are the methods to access an EC2 instance?
AWS Management Console - configure and manage your instances via a web browser
Secure Shell - establish a secure connection to your instance from your local laptop
EC2 Instance Connect (EIC) - allows you to use IAM policies to control SSH access to your instances, removing the need to manage SSH keys
AWS Systems Manager - allows you to manage your EC2 instances via a web browser or the AWS CLI
Compute Resources
What is AWS Lambda?
A serverless compute service that lets you run code without managing servers
Code is called functions
Scales automatically
Serverless
Compute Resources
What are some AWS Lambda use cases?
Real-time file processing
Sending email notifications
Backend business logic
Compute Resources
How is AWS Lambda charged?
Based on the duration and the number of requests.
Compute Resources
What is AWS Fargate?
A serverless compute engine for containers
Allows you to manage containers like Docker
Scales automatically
Serverless
Compute Resources
What is Lightsail?
Allows you to quickly launch all the resources you need for small projects
Deploy preconfigured applications, like WordPress websites, at the click of a button
Simple screens for people with no cloud experience
Includes a virtual machine, SSD-based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP
Provides a low, predictable monthly fee, as low as $3.50
Compute Resources
What is AWS Outposts?
Allows you to run cloud services in your internal datacenter
Supports workloads that need to remain on-premises due to latency or data sovereignty needs
AWS delivers and installs servers in your internal data center
Use for a hybrid experience
Have access to the cloud services and APIs to develop apps on-premises
Compute Resources
What is AWS Batch?
Allows you to process large workloads in smaller chunks (or batches)
Runs hundreds and thousands of smaller batch processing jobs
Dynamically provisions instances based on volume
Storage Resources
What is S3?
An object storage service for the cloud that is highly available
Objects (or files) are stored in buckets (or directories)
Essentially unlimited storage that can hold millions of objects per bucket
Objects can be public or private
You can upload objects via the console, the CLI, or programmatically from within code using SDKs.
S3 is a regional service, but bucket names must be globally unique
Storage Resources - EC2 Storage
What is an Instance Store?
Local storage that is physically attached to the host computer and cannot be removed
Storage on disks physically attached to an instance
Faster with higher I/O speeds
Storage is temporary since data loss occurs when the EC2 instance is stopped
Recommended for:
Temporary storage needs
Data replicated across multiple instances
Storage Resources - EC2 Storage
What is Elastic Block Store (EBS)?
A storage device (called a volume) that can be attached to (or removed from) your instance.
Data persists when the instance is not running
Tied to one availability zone
Can only be attached to one instance in the same availability zone
Recommended for:
Quickly accessible data
Running a database on an instance
Long-term data storage
Storage Resources - EC2 Storage
What is Elastic File System (EFS)?
A serverless network file system for sharing files
Only supports the Linux file system
More expensive than EBS
Accessible across different availability zones in the same region
Recommended for:
Main directories for business-critical apps
Lift-and-shift existing enterprise apps
Storage Resources
What is the Storage Gateway service?
A hybrid storage service
Connect on-premises and cloud data
Supports a hybrid model
Recommended for:
Moving backups to the cloud
Reducing costs for hybrid cloud storage
Low latency access to data
Storage Resources
What is AWS Backup?
Helps you manage data backups across multiple AWS services
Integrates with resources like EC2, EBS, EFS, and more
Create a backup plan that includes frequency and retention
Content and Delivery Services
What is CloudFront?
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) that delivers data and applications globally with low latency
Makes content available globally or restricts it based on location
Speeds up delivery of static and dynamic web content
Uses edge locations to cache content
Content and Delivery Services
What is Global Accelerator?
A service that sends your users through the AWS global network when accessing your content, speeding up delivery
Improves latency and availability of single-region applications
Sends traffic through the AWS global network infrastructure
60% performance boots
Automatically re-routes traffic to healthy available regional endpoints
Content and Delivery Services
What is S3 Transfer Acceleration?
A service that improves content uploads and downloads to and from S3 buckets
Fast transfer of files over long distances
Uses CloudFront’s globally distributed edge locations
Customer around the world can upload to a central bucket
Network Services
What is a VPC?
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a foundational service that allows you to create a secure private network in the AWS cloud where you launch your resources
Private virtual network
Launch resources like EC2 instances inside the VPC
Isolate and protect resources
A VPC spans availability zones in a region
Network Services
What is VPC Peering?
VPC Peering facilitates the transfer of data in a secure manner between VPCs through a peering connection
Network Services
What is Route 53?
A DNS service that routes users to applications
Cloud DNS service
Domain name registration
Performs health checks on AWS resources
Supports hybrid cloud architectures
Network Services
What is Direct Connect?
A dedicated physical network connection from your on-premises data center to AWS
Dedicated physical network connection
Connects your on-premises data center to AWS
Data travels over a private network
Supports a hybrid environment
Use cases:
Large datasets - transfer large datasets to AWS
Business-critical data - transfer data directly to AWS bypassing your internet service provider
Hybrid model - build hybrid environments
Network Services
What is AWS VPN?
Site-to-Site VPN creates a secure connection between your internal networks and your AWS VPCs
Similar to Direct Connect, but data travels over the public Internet
Data is automatically encrypted
Connects your on-premises data center to AWS
Supports a hybrid environment
Components
Virtual Private Gateway - AWS side VPN connector
Customer Gateway - Customer side VPN connector
Network Services
What is API Gateway?
Allows you to build and manage APIs
Share data between systems
Integrate with services like Lambda
Database Services
What is RDS?
Relational Database - Amazon Relational Database Service - a service that makes it easy to launch and manage relational databases
Supports popular database engines like Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server
Offers high availability and fault tolerance using Multi-AZ deployment option
AWS manages the database with automatic software patching, automated backups, operating system maintenance, and more
Launch read replicas across regions in order to provide enhanced performance and durability
Database Services
What is Aurora?
Relational Database - a relational database compatible with MySQL and PostgreSql that was created by AWS
Supports MySQL and PostgreSQL database engines
5x faster than normal MySQL and 3x faster than normal PostgreSQL
Scales automatically while providing durability and high availability
Managed by RDS
Database Services
What is DynamoDB?
NoSQL Database - is a fully managed NoSQL key-value and document database
NoSQL key-value database
Fully managed and serverless
Non-relational
Scales automatically to massive workloads with fast performance
Database Services
What is DocumentDB?
Document Database - a fully managed document database that supports MongoDB
Document database
MongoDB compatibile
Fully managed and serverless
Non-relational
Database Services
What is ElastiCache?
In-memory Database - a fully managed in-memory datastore compatible with Redis or Memcached
In-memory datastore
Compatible with Redis or Memcached engines
Data can be lost
Offers high performance and low latency
Database Services
What is Neptune?
Graph Database - a fully managed graph database that supports highly connected datasets
Graph database service
Supports highly connected datasets like social media networks
Fully managed and serverless
Fast and reliable
Database Services
Database Use Cases
- Migrate an on-premises Oracle database to the cloud
a. RDS- Migrate an on-premises PostgreSQL database to the cloud
a. RDS
b. Aurora - Alleviate database load for data that is accessed often
a. ElastiCache - Process large sets of users profiles and social interactions
a. Neptune - NoSQL database fast enough to handle millions of requests per second
a. DynamoDB - Operate MongoDB workloads at scale
a. DocumentDB
- Migrate an on-premises PostgreSQL database to the cloud
Migration and Transfer Services
What is Database Migration Service (DMS)?
Helps you migrate databases to or within AWS
Migrate on-premises databases to AWS
Continuous data replication
Supports homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations
Virtually no downtime
Migration and Transfer Services
What is Server Migration Service (SMS)?
Allows you to migrate on-premises servers to AWS
Migrates on-premises servers to AWS
Server saved as a new Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
Use AMI to launch servers as EC2 instances
Migration and Transfer Services
What is the Snow Family of services?
Physical data transfer services - Allows you to transfer large amounts of on-premises data to AWS using a physical device
* Snowcone
Smallest member of data transport devices
8 terabytes of usable storage
Offline shipping
Online with Datasync
* Snowball and Snowball Edge
Petabyte-scale data transport solution
Transfer data in and out
Cheaper than Internet transfer
Snowball Edge supports EC2 and Lambda
* Snowmobile
Multi-petabyte or exabyte scale
Data loaded to S3
Securely transported
Migration and Transfer Services
What is DataSync?
Allows for online data transfer from on-premises to AWS storage services like S3 or EFS
Migrates data from on-premises to AWS
Copy data over Direct Connect or the Internet
Copy data between AWS storage services
Replicate data cross-Region or cross-account
Analytics Services
What is a Data warehouse?
A data warehouse is a data storage solution that aggregates massive amounts of historical data from disparate sources.
Data warehouses support querying, reporting, analytics, and business intelligence. They are not used for transaction processing.
Analytics Services
What is Redshift?
A scalable data warehouse solution
Data warehousing solution
Improves speed and efficiency
Handles exabyte-scale data
Use Cases
When you need to consolidate multiple data sources for reporting
When you want to run a database that doesn’t require real-time transaction processing (insert, update, and delete)
Analytics Services
What is Analytics?
The act of querying or processing your data.
Services that allow you to gain deeper insights enhance decision-making, and act in real time to what your data is telling you.
Analytics Services
What is Athena?
A query service for Amazon S3
Query service
Analyze S3 data using SQL
Pay per query
Considered serverless
Analytics Services
What is Glue?
Prepares your data for analytics
Extract, transform, load - (ETL) service
Prepare and load data
Helps to better understand your data
Analytics Services
What is kinesis?
Allows you to analyze data and video streams in real time
Analyze real-time streaming data
Supports video, audio, application logs, website clickstreams, and IoT
Analytics Services
What is Elastic MapReduce (EMR)?
Helps you process large amounts of data
Process big data
Analyze data using Hadoop
Works with big data frameworks
Analytics Services
What is Data Pipeline?
Helps you move data between compute and storage services running either on AWS or on-premises
Moves data at specific intervals
Moves data based on conditions
Sends notifications on success or failure
Analytics Services
What is QuickSight?
Helps you visualize your data
Build interactive dashboards
Embed dashboards in your applications
Analytics Services
Analytics Use Cases
- Search data in S3
Athena helps you query historical data stored in S3 as if they were relational data using standard SQL
- Log Analytics
Kinesis helps you analyze logs in near real time for application monitoring or fraud detection
Machine Learning Services
What is Artificial intelligence (AI)?
Artificial intelligence (AI) teaches computers to do things that normally require human intelligence. Businesses leverage AI and machine learning to add intelligence to their applications and leverage trends and patterns in data.
Machine Learning Services
What is Rekognition?
Allows you to automate your image and video analysis
Image and video analysis
Identify customer labels in images and videos
Face and text detection in images and videos
Use case
Review video and provide analysis
Machine Learning Services
What is comprehend?
A natural-language processing (NLP) service that finds relationships in text.
Natural-language processing (NLP) service
Uncovers insights and relationships
Analyzes text
Use case
Review social media posts for specific words
Machine Learning Services
What is Polly?
Turns text into speech
Mimics natural-sounding human speech
Several voices across many languages
Can create a custom voice
Use case
Convert text to speech for audio recordings
Machine Learning Services
What is SageMaker?
Helps you build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly
Prepare data for models
Train and deploy models
Provides deep learning AMIs
Use case
Build a recommendation engine. Recommend movies and products to buy.
Machine Learning Services
What is Tanslate?
Provides language translation
Provides real-time and batch language translation
Supports many languages
Translates many content formats
Use case
Add localization to websites or applications
Machine Learning Services
What is Lex?
Helps you build conversational interfaces like chatbots
Recognizes speech and understands language
Build highly engaging chatbots
Powers Amazon Alexa
Use case
Integrate voice into a device
Developer Tools
What is Cloud9?
Allows you to write code within an integrated development environment (IDE) from within your web browser.
Integrated development environment (IDE)
Write and debug code
Supports popular programing languages
Use case
Build serverless applications - preconfigures the development environment with the needed SDKs and libraries. You can easily write the code for your Lambda function directly in your web browser
Developer Tools
What is CodeCommit?
A source control system for private Git repositories
Create repositories to store code
Commit, branch, and merge code
Collaborate with other software developers
Use case
Manage versions of source code files for your applications similar to GitHub
Developer Tools
What is CodeBuild?
Allows you to build and test your application source code
Compiles source code and runs tests
Enables continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD)
Produces build artifacts ready to be deployed
Use case
Run tests before deploying a new version of an application to production
Developer Tools
What is CodeDeploy?
Manages the deployment of code to compute services in the cloud or on-premises
Deploys code to EC2, Fargate, Lambda, and on-premises
Maintains application uptime
Use case
Maintain application uptime when rolling out a new version through rolling deployments
Developer Tools
What is CodePipeline?
Deliver new features and updates
Quickly deliver new features and updates
Integrates with CodeBuild to run builds and unit tests
Integrates with CodeCommit to retrieve source code
Integrates with CodeDeploy to deploy your changes
Use case
Add automation to the building, testing, and deployment of your application
Developer Tools
What is X-Ray?
Helps you debug production applications
Analyze and debug production applications
Map application components
View requests end to end
Use case
Trace calls to an RDS database
Developer Tools
What is CodeStar?
Helps developers collaboratively work on development projects
Developers connect their development environment
Integrates with CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy
Contains issue tracking dashboard
Use case
Manage the development pipeline
Deployment and Infrastructure Managed Services
What do Deployment and Infrastructure Managed Services provide?
These services help you quickly stand up new applications, automate the management of infrastructure, and provide real-time visibility into system health.
Deployment and Infrastructure Managed Services
What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) - allows you to write a script to provision AWS resources.
The benefit is that you provision resources in a reproducible manner that saves time.
Deployment and Infrastructure Managed Services
What is CloudFormation?
Allows you to provision AWS resources using Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Provides a repeatable process for provisioning resources
Works with most AWS services
Create templates for the resources you want to provision
Use case
Automate the infrastructure provisioning process for EC2 servers
Deployment and Infrastructure Managed Services
What is Elastic Beanstalk?
Allows you to deploy your web applications and web services to AWS
Orchestration service that provisions resources
Automatically handles the deployment
Monitors application health via a health dashboard
Use case
Quickly deploy a scalable Java-based web application to AWS
Deployment and Infrastructure Managed Services
What is OpsWorks?
Allows you to use Chef or Puppet to automate the configuration of your servers and deploy code
Deploy code and manage applications
Manage on-premises servers for EC2 instances in AWS Cloud
Works with Chef and Puppet automation platforms
Use case
Automate software configurations and infrastructure management for your application
Messaging Integration Services
What is coupling and what is the significance of loose coupling?
Coupling defines the interdependencies or connections between components of a system.
Loose coupling helps reduce the risk of cascading failures between components
Messaging Integration Services
What is the disadvantage of a Monolithic Application that uses tight coupling?
An application that uses Tight coupling - tightly coupled components are highly dependent on each other
Messaging Integration Services
What is the benefit of using Microservices that use loose coupling?
Loose coupling - loosely coupled components are connected but not dependent on each other
Messaging Integration Services
What are queues?
Data structure that holds requests or messages
Used to implement loosely coupled systems
Messaging Integration Services
What is the Simple Queue Service (SQS)?
A message queuing service that allows you to build loosely coupled systems.
Allows component-to-component communication using messages
Multiple components (or producers) can add messages to the queue
Messages are processed in an asynchronous manner
Messaging Integration Services
What is the Simple Notification Service (SNS)?
Allows you to send emails and text messages from your applications
Send email and text messages
Publish messages to a topic
Subscribers receive messages
Messaging Integration Services
What is the Simple Email Service (SES)?
An email service that allows you to send richly formatted HTML emails from your applications
Ideal choice for marketing campaigns or professional emails
Unlike SNS, SES sends HTML emails
Auditing, Monitoring, and Logging Services
What do the Auditing, Monitoring, and Logging Services provide?
Services that give you insights into how well your systems are performing and help you proactively find and resolve errors
Helps to answer the following types of questions
1. Who signed in and made changes via the AWS management console?
2. What is the current load on this EC2 instance?
3. What is the root cause of this application error?
4. Which execution path resulted in this error?
Auditing, Monitoring, and Logging Services
What is CloudWatch?
A collection of services that help you monitor and observe your cloud resources
Collects metrics, logs, and events
Detect anomalies in your environment
Set alarms
Visualize logs
Services
CloudWatch Alarms - Set high resolution alarms
CloudWatch Logs - Monitor application logs
CloudWatch Metrics - Visualize time-series data
CloudWatch Events - Trigger an event based on a condition
Auditing, Monitoring, and Logging Services
What is CloudTrail?
Tracks user activity and API calls within your account
Log and retain account activity
Track activity through the console, SDKs, and CLI
Identify which user made changes
Detect unusual activity in your account
Use Cases
Track the time a particular event occurred in your account
Troubleshoot events over the past 90 days
You can create a custom trail to extend past 90 days
Track
Username
Event time and name
IP address
Access key
Region
Error code
Additional Services
What is Amazon Workspaces?
Host virtual desktops in the cloud
Virtualize Windows or Linux desktops
Enables employees to work from home
Additional Services
What is Amazon Connect?
A cloud contact center service
Provides customer service functionality
Improves productivity of help desk agents
