Cloud Concepts Flashcards
What are the 6 advantages to Cloud Computing?
- Trade capital expense for variable expense
- Benefit from massive economies at scale
- Stop guessing capacity
- Increase speed and agility
- Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers
- Go global in minutes
What are the 4 aspects of AWS Cloud economics?
- Cost savings
- Staff Productivity
- Operational Resilience
- Business Agility
What is tiered pricing? (reduce total cost of ownership TCO)?
Use more, pay less. For storage and data transfer, AWS follows a tiered pricing model. The more storage and data transfer you use, the less you have to pay per gigabyte. In addition, volume discounts and custom pricing are available to customers for high volume projects and unique requirements.
What is Cost Explorer?
Provides pre-configured reports for common AWS spend queries for current historical periods, as well as forecasting. Can also customize reports.
What is Trusted Advisor?
Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment to find opportunities that can save you money, improve your system performance, increase your application reliability, and help you implement security best practices.
What are the 5 pillars of cost optimization?
- Right-sizing your instances
- Increase elasticity
- Pick the right pricing model
- Match the storage type to need
- Designing for cost
What are the 5 cloud architecture design principles?
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance efficiency
- Cost optimization
- Operational Excellence
What is scalability?
The ability to scale without changing the design. In AWS, scalability is achieved by scaling out. Infrastructure and application components are designed with the premise that they will fail.
There are two types of scaling:
- Vertical scaling
- increase in capabilities of the resources - Horizontal scaling
- increase in the number of resources
What is elasticity?
The ability to use resource in a dynamic and efficient way so the traditional anti-pattern of over provisioning of infrastructure resources to cope with capacity requirements is avoided.
What are disposable resources in AWS? Why are they significant?
Resources need to be treated as temporary disposable resources rather than the fixed permanent on premises resources before. Concept of immutable infrastructure - a server once launched, is never updated throughout its lifetime. Updates can be performed on a new server with the latest configuration. This ensures resources are always in a consistent (and tested) state and easier rollbacks.
What is automation in cloud computing and why is it important?
Cloud computing enables automation through a number of events, improving your systems stability and the efficiency of your organization. Some of the AWS resources you can use for automation are:
Elastic Beanstalk (quickest way to get an application up and running on AWS
Auto Scaling (scales EC2 capacity up or down)
CloudWatch Alarms (sends an SNS message when a particular metric goes beyond a specified threshold)
CloudWatch Events (Delivers near real time stream of system events that describe changes in AWS resources, can route each type of event to one or more targets)
Lambda Scheduled Events (allows you to create a lambda function and direct Lambda to execute it on a regular basis)
What is loose coupling and why is it important?
Loose coupling reduces interdependencies, so that a change or failure in a component does not cascade to other components.
Examples:
Asynchronous integration using intermediate durable storage layers like SQS
Route 53 zones to abstract load balancer’s endpoint
Various components interacting with one another through interfaces using API Gateway
What are the AWS solutions for SQL, NoSQL databases and data warehousing?
RDS
- data is normalized into tables
- combines data from multiple tables in a fast and efficient manner
- allows vertical scalability and horizontal scalability
DynamoDB
- flexible data models
- graphs, key-value pairs, JSON documents
- recognized for ease of development, scalable performance, high availability and resilience
Redshift
- specialized type of relational database, optimized for analysis of large amounts of data. It can be used to combine transactional data from disparate sources making them available for analysis and decision making
- massively parallel processing (MPP), columnar data storage, and targeted data compression encoding schemes
What does removing single points of failure mean?
A system is highly available when it can withstand the failure of an individual or multiple components (e.g. hard disks, servers, network links etc.)
Ways to deal with points of failure
- introduce redundancy (by having multiple resources for the same task)
- detection and reaction to failure should be automated as much as possible
- have durable data storage that protects both data availability and integrity
- automated multi-data center resilience is practiced through AZ across data centers that reduce the impact of failures
Why does optimizing for cost mean and how can you do with AWS architecture?
You can reduce cost by selecting the right types, configurations and storage solutions to suit your needs
Taking advantage of the various instance purchasing options (reserved, spot etc.) while buying EC2 instances.
