Chapter 18 - Why Do We Automate

Question 1

CloudFormation

Answer 1

• We don’t have to be a coding expert
• Those instances, those networks, those databases, everything that you’re trying to build out.
• Immutable architecture is the best.
• On the exam we like to prefer answers that include a stateless environment.
• Something that I can easily pick up and throw away, and reprovision, it’s that disposable architecture.
• We want to have automation built out that is so robust, that I can turn it off. I can chuck it out the window
• when it’s no longer needed.
• It could mean that I’m throwing away those web servers those backend servers, I’m hosting my data in S3 or EFS,
• and I’m treating that compute as something that is disposable.

Question 2

Parameter Store

Answer 2

• It’s kind of like that universal key value storage,
• and CloudFormation can look up values that are stored in there.
• So mappings and parameters are an appropriate location to store those IDs, as long as we are never hard-coding them directly into the resource section itself,
• That’s much more likely to cause that breakage when you move that template from one environment to another.

Question 3

Elastic Beanstalk

Answer 3

• That it’s your one-stop shop for everything AWS.
• You’re building out a web server, that’s really what it excels in.
• If it’s looking for a situation that is simple, yeah, we want to make a quick migration, or my coworkers are not interested in learning CloudFormation. Well, then we can focus on using Elastic Beanstalk over that CloudFormation architecture.
• If the scenario is a little bit more complex, if it’s talking about things like Lambda functions and sqsqs and load balancers, and API Gateway, and a little bit more robust architecture, then we’d want to think CloudFormation,
• That gives us the most granular level of automation control over everything that we’re building.

Question 4

Systems Manager

Answer 4

• Those automation documents are going to be very useful to you.
• These automation documents can be used to configure the insides of EC2 instances, as well as parts of the AWS environment.
• So they’re kind of the jack of all trades automation tool.