Cloud Practitioner Flashcards
AWS Cost Explorer
A tool that enables you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
It includes a default report of the costs and usage for your top five cost-accruing AWS services. You can apply custom filters and groups to analyze your data. For example, you can view resource usage at the hourly level.
AWS Budgets
Can create budgets to plan your service usage, service costs, and instance reservations.
The information updates three times a day. This helps you to accurately determine how close your usage is to your budgeted amounts or to the AWS Free Tier limits.
You can also set custom alerts when your usage exceeds (or is forecasted to exceed) the budgeted amount.
AWS Pricing Calculator
Lets you explore AWS services and create an estimate for the cost of your use cases on AWS. You can enter details for your cloud computing requirements and then receive a detailed estimate that can be exported and shared.
AWS Artifact
A service that enables you to access AWS security and compliance reports and special online agreements.
AWS CAF: Operations
Helps you to enable, run, use, operate, and recover IT workloads to the level agreed upon with your business stakeholders.
Define how day-to-day, quarter-to-quarter, and year-to-year business is conducted. Align with and support the operations of the business. The AWS CAF helps these stakeholders define current operating procedures and identify the process changes and training needed to implement successful cloud adoption. Includes principles for operating in the cloud by using agile best practices.
Common roles in this Perspective include:
IT operations managers IT support managers
AWS CAF: Business
Helps you to move from a model that separates business and IT strategies into a business model that integrates IT strategy.
Ensures that IT aligns with business needs and that IT investments link to key business results.
Use this Perspective to create a strong business case for cloud adoption and prioritize cloud adoption initiatives. Ensure that your business strategies and goals align with your IT strategies and goals.
Common roles in this Perspective include:
Business managers Finance managers Budget owners Strategy stakeholders
AWS CAF: People
Helps Human Resources (HR) employees prepare their teams for cloud adoption by updating organizational processes and staff skills to include cloud-based competencies.
Supports development of an organization-wide change management strategy for successful cloud adoption.
Use this Perspective to evaluate organizational structures and roles, new skill and process requirements, and identify gaps. This helps prioritize training, staffing, and organizational changes.
Common roles in this Perspective include:
Human resources Staffing People managers
AWS CAF: Governance
Helps you understand how to update the staff skills and organizational processes that are necessary to ensure business governance in the cloud.
Focuses on the skills and processes to align IT strategy with business strategy. This ensures that you maximize the business value and minimize risks.
Use this Perspective to understand how to update the staff skills and processes necessary to ensure business governance in the cloud. Manage and measure cloud investments to evaluate business outcomes.
Common roles in this Perspective include:
Chief Information Officer (CIO) Program managers Enterprise architects Business analysts Portfolio managers
AWS CAF: Platform
This Perspective includes principles and patterns for implementing new solutions on the cloud, and migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud.
Use a variety of architectural models to understand and communicate the structure of IT systems and their relationships. Describe the architecture of the target state environment in detail.
Common roles in this Perspective include:
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) IT managers Solutions architects
AWS CAF: Security
This Perspective ensures that the organization meets security objectives for visibility, auditability, control, and agility.
Use the AWS CAF to structure the selection and implementation of security controls that meet the organization’s needs.
Common roles in this Perspective include:
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) IT security managers IT security analysts
Six Core Perspectives of Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)
Business
People
Governance
Platform
Security
Operations
Six Benefits of Cloud Computing
Trade upfront expense for variable expense
Stop spending money to run and maintain data centers
Stop guessing capacity
Benefit from massive economies of scale
Increase speed and agility
Go global in minutes
Six Pillars of Well-Architected Framework
Operational excellence
Security
Reliability
Performance efficiency
Cost optimization
Sustainability
Pillar: Operational Excellence
Ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures.
Design principles for this pillar include performing operations as code, annotating documentation, anticipating failure, and frequently making small, reversible changes.
Pillar: Security
Ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.
When considering the security of your architecture, apply these best practices:
- Automate security best practices when possible.
- Apply security at all layers.
- Protect data in transit and at rest.
Pillar: Reliability
Ability of a system to do the following:
- Recover from infrastructure or service disruptions
- Dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand
- Mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues
This includes testing recovery procedures, scaling horizontally to increase aggregate system availability, and automatically recovering from failure.
Pillar: Performance Efficiency
Ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
Evaluating the performance efficiency of your architecture includes experimenting more often, using serverless architectures, and designing systems to be able to go global in minutes.
Pillar: Cost Optimization
Ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point.
Includes adopting a consumption model, analyzing and attributing expenditure, and using managed services to reduce the cost of ownership.
Pillar: Sustainability
Ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point.
Cost optimization includes adopting a consumption model, analyzing and attributing expenditure, and using managed services to reduce the cost of ownership.
EC2 Savings Plans
Enable you to reduce your compute costs by committing to a consistent amount of compute usage for a 1-year or 3-year term.
This results in savings of up to 72% over On-Demand Instance costs.
Any usage up to the commitment is charged at the discounted Savings Plan rate (for example, $10 an hour). Any usage beyond the commitment is charged at regular On-Demand Instance rates.
EC2 Reserved Instances
Billing discount that is applied to the use of On-Demand Instances in your account.
You can purchase Standard and Convertible Instances for a one-year or three-year term, and Scheduled Instances for a one-year term.
Unlike Savings Plans, these do not require you to commit to a consistent amount of compute usage over the duration of the contract.
EC2 Spot Instances
Ideal for workloads with flexible start and end times or that can withstand interruptions. These Instances leverage unused EC2 computing capacity and offer you cost savings at up to 90% of On-Demand Instance prices.
EC2 Dedicated Hosts
Physical servers with EC2 instance capacity that is fully dedicated to your use.
You can use your existing per-socket, per-core, or per-VM software licenses to help maintain license compliance. You can purchase On-Demand or Reserved. Of all the Amazon EC2 options that were covered in this course, these are the most expensive.
AWS Organizations
Centrally control permissions for the accounts in your organization by using service control policies (SCPs).
Additionally, you can use the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations to combine usage and receive a single bill for multiple AWS accounts.
You can group accounts into organizational units (OUs) to make it easier to manage accounts with similar business or security requirements. When you apply a policy to an OU, all the accounts in the OU automatically inherit the permissions specified in the policy.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Service that you can use to manage access to AWS services and resources.
AWS Marketplace
A digital catalog that includes thousands of listings from independent software vendors.
You can use AWS Marketplace to find, test, and buy software that runs on AWS.
AWS Support
A resource that can answer questions about best practices and assist with troubleshooting issues.
Technical Account Manager (TAM)
A resource that provides guidance, architectural reviews, and ongoing communication with your company as you plan, deploy, and optimize your applications.
AWS Trusted Advisor
A web service that inspects your AWS environment and provides real-time recommendations in accordance with AWS best practices.
It compares its findings to AWS best practices in five categories: cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits. For the checks in each category, this offers a list of recommended actions and additional resources to learn more about AWS best practices.
The guidance provided by this can benefit your company at all stages of deployment. For example, you can use this to assist you while you are creating new workflows and developing new applications. Or you can use it while you are making ongoing improvements to existing applications and resources.
DynamoDB
A key-value database service. A key-value database might include data pairs such as “Name: John Doe,” “Address: 123 Any Street,” and “City: Anytown”.
In a key-value database, you can add or remove attributes from items in the table at any time. Additionally, not every item in the table has to have the same attributes.
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
A service that enables you to run relational databases in the AWS Cloud.
A managed service that automates tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. With these capabilities, you can spend less time completing administrative tasks and more time using data to innovate your applications. You can integrate it with other services to fulfill your business and operational needs, such as using AWS Lambda to query your database from a serverless application.
Provides a number of different security options. Many of these database engines offer encryption at rest (protecting data while it is stored) and encryption in transit (protecting data while it is being sent and received).
Amazon Aurora
An enterprise-class relational database. It is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL relational databases. It is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and up to three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases.
Helps to reduce your database costs by reducing unnecessary input/output (I/O) operations, while ensuring that your database resources remain reliable and available.
Consider if your workloads require high availability. It replicates six copies of your data across three Availability Zones and continuously backs up your data to Amazon S3.
Amazon DocumentDB
A document database service that supports MongoDB workloads.
Elastic Load Balancing
A service that distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances.
Acts as a single point of contact for all incoming web traffic to your Auto Scaling group. This means that as Amazon EC2 instances are added or removed in response to the amount of incoming traffic, these requests are routed here first and then spread across multiple resources that will handle them.
AWS Auto Scaling
A service that monitors your applications and automatically adds or removes capacity from your resource groups in response to changing demand.
Amazon CloudWatch
A service that provides data that you can use to monitor your applications, optimize resource utilization, and respond to system-wide performance changes.
You can create alarms that automatically perform actions if the value of your metric has gone above or below a predefined threshold.
Amazon ElastiCache
A service that adds caching layers on top of your databases to help improve the read times of common requests.
It supports two types of data stores: Redis and Memcached.
AWS Trusted Advisor Categories
Cost Optimization
Performance
Security
Fault Tolerance
Service Limits
AWS Command Line Interface (CLI)
Enables you to control multiple AWS services directly from the command line within one tool. For example, you can use commands to start an Amazon EC2 instance, connect an Amazon EC2 instance to a specific Auto Scaling group, and more. This tool is available for users on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Amazon Redshift
Data warehousing service that you can use for big data analytics. It offers the ability to collect data from many sources and help you to understand relationships and trends across your data.
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB)
A ledger database service. You can use this to review a complete history of all the changes that have been made to your application data.
AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized
A device that enables you to transfer large amounts of data into and out of AWS.
Suited for large-scale data migrations and recurring transfer workflows, in addition to local computing with higher capacity needs.
- Storage: 80 TB of hard disk drive (HDD) capacity for block volumes and Amazon S3 compatible object storage, and 1 TB of SATA solid state drive (SSD) for block volumes.
- Compute: 40 vCPUs, and 80 GiB of memory to support Amazon EC2 sbe1 instances (equivalent to C5).
AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized
A powerful computing resources for use cases such as machine learning, full motion video analysis, analytics, and local computing stacks.
- Storage: 42-TB usable HDD capacity for Amazon S3 compatible object storage or Amazon EBS compatible block volumes and 7.68 TB of usable NVMe SSD capacity for Amazon EBS compatible block volumes.
- Compute: 52 vCPUs, 208 GiB of memory, and an optional NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU. Devices run Amazon EC2 sbe-c and sbe-g instances, which are equivalent to C5, M5a, G3, and P3 instances.
Amazon Route 53
A DNS web service. It gives developers and businesses a reliable way to route end users to internet applications that are hosted in AWS.
Additionally, you can transfer DNS records for existing domain names that are currently managed by other domain registrars, or register new domain names directly within Amazon Route 53.
Amazon CloudWatch
Monitor your applications and respond to system-wide performance changes.
AWS Quick Starts
Automate the deployment of workloads into your AWS environment
AWS Artifact: Agreements
Can review, accept, and manage agreements for an individual account and for all your accounts in AWS Organizations. Different types of agreements are offered to address the needs of customers who are subject to specific regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
AWS Artifact: Reports
Provides compliance reports from third-party auditors. These auditors have tested and verified that AWS is compliant with a variety of global, regional, and industry-specific security standards and regulations. Remains up to date with the latest reports released. You can provide the reports to your auditors or regulators as evidence of AWS security controls.
Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering
S3 monitors objects’ access patterns. If you haven’t accessed an object for 30 consecutive days, Amazon S3 automatically moves it to the infrequent access tier, Amazon S3 Standard-IA. If you access an object in the infrequent access tier, Amazon S3 automatically moves it to the frequent access tier, Amazon S3 Standard.
Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval
A low-cost storage class that is ideal for data archiving. You can retrieve objects stored in this storage class within a few minutes to a few hours.
