Cloud Fundamentals Flashcards
What is “cloud computing”?
Renting resources like storage space or CPU cycles on another company’s computers
What are the four typical computing services offered by cloud providers?
**Compute power - i.e. Linux servers or web apps
**Storage - such as files and databases
Networking - secure connection user -> provider
Analytics - i.e. visualizing telemetry/performace data
What is the difference between a container and a VM?
Containers do not require an OS and rely on a runtime environment that runs the app and all of its dependencies from within the container. VMs are simply virtual computers.
What is “vertical scaling” in cloud computing?
Vertical scaling (a.k.a. “scaling up”) is the process of adding resources to increase the power of an existing server (add more CPUs, storage, or memory)
What is “horizontal scaling” in cloud computing?
Horizontal scaling (a.k.a. “scaling out”) is the process of adding more servers that function together as a unit (multiple servers processing incoming requests)
What is “fault tolerance”?
When one component fails, a backup component takes its place
What are “Capital expenditures” (a.k.a. CapEx)?
Physical resources that have an upfront cost for a business
What are “Operational expenditures” (a.k.a. OpEx)?
Money spent on services or products as you use them (no upfront cost)
For accounting purposes, what are the costs of all cloud services classified as?
Operational expenditures (OpEx)
What does “agile” refer to in terms of cloud services?
The ability to rapidly scale IT infrastructure to adapt to evolving business needs
What is the difference between “public cloud” and “private cloud”?
Public cloud refers Azure in the online portal using their servers, whereas private cloud is a deployment of Azure used on-premises
What is “hybrid” cloud in cloud computing?
It refers to an approach that uses Azure both locally (on-prem) and through Microsoft’s servers
What are the three major categories of cloud computing?
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Platform as a Service (Paas)
Software as a Service (SaaS)
What is IaaS?
Infrastructure as a Service is a cloud-provisioned service that provides the hardware, virtualization, storage and networking required to run your software
What is PaaS?
Platform as a Service eliminates the need to set up and maintain dependent hardware/software (i.e. OS, web server, system updates) elements required to run a web application (you only provide application and data)
What is SaaS?
Software as a service is software that is centrally hosted and managed for the end customer (i.e. Office 365 or Skype)
What are Azure subscriptions?
Logical containers for Azure resources that separate out resources and data
What are the three tiers of support offered for Azure support plans?
Developer (lower response priority)
Standard (production, mid-level priority)
Professional Direct (highest priority)
What is a “hypervisor”?
A piece of software that manages virtualization of hardware (mimicking different computers)
What is Kubernetes used for in Azure?
It enables management of a cluster of VMs that run containerized services
What tool is used as a console within Azure?
Azure Cloud Shell
What options of consoles do you have for Azure CLI?
Bash or PowerShell
In Azure CLI, what command lists account information?
az account list
In Azure CLI, what command lists resource groups?
az group list
In Azure CLI, what flag and option allow for output to be displayed as a table?
–output table
How would you use Azure CLI to filter down to web sites within a certain Resource Group?
az resource list –resource-group replace-with-group-name –resource-type Microsoft.Web/sites
What are “Availability zones” in Azure?
They are physically separate datacenters within an Azure region that can be used for redundancy
What is a “region pair” in Azure?
An Azure region is always paired with another at least 300 miles away within the same geography (i.e. East US and West US)
What does SLA stand for?
Service-level agreement
What are the three key characteristics of a SLA?
- Performance Targets
- Uptime and Connectivity Guarantees
- Service Credits
What is a “composite SLA value”?
Applications that have multiple components with different uptime rates (i.e. SQL Database with 99.99% and web app with 99.95%) will have a composite value equal to the percentage of both multiplied together (i.e. .9995 * .9999)
How can you improve the composite SLA for a web application using a SQL database?
If the SQL database is unavailable, put the transactions into a queue for processing
How do you calculate the percentage chance of simultaneous failure?
Failure rate A * Failure rate B
i.e. .001 * .0001