Cloud Practitioner Flashcards
What are the 5 EC2 instance family types?
General Purpose Compute Optimized Memory Optimized Accelerated Computing Storage Optimized
What is a General Purpose instance and what is it good for?
Balance of compute, memory and networking
Application servers
Gaming servers
Backend servers for enterprise applications
Small-medium databases
What is a Compute Optimized instance and what is it good for?
High-performance processors for compute heavy work Application servers Gaming servers Backend servers Batch-processing But when they require a lot more compute
What is a Memory Optimized instance and what is it good?
Processing large datasets in memory
Compute tasks that require a lot of data to be held in memory
Real-time processing of lots of unstructured datasets
What is an Accelerated Computing instance and what is it good for?
Make use of hardware accelerators or coprocessors to perform compute more efficiently
Floating-point number calculations
Graphic processing (game streaming)
Data pattern matching
What is a Storage Optimized instance and what is it good for?
Instance designed for tasks that need a high volume of read/write tasks
Any instance that has a high IOPS (input/output per second requirement)
What are the five EC2 billing options and what do they offer?
On-Demand - per-hour or per-second, but the most expensive
Savings Plan - Lower costs but with a minimum use requirement
Reserved Instances - Used for steady-state workloads
Spot Instances - Cheap, spare capacity instances that can be taken away with 2 minutes notice
Dedicated Hosts - dedicated to you, no one else can use them (policy reasons)
What is the maximum savings from the EC2 Savings Plan?
72%
What is the maximum savings from the EC2 Spot Instances?
90%
What are the three types of Reserved Instances and their available contract times?
Standard Reserved - 1 or 3 years
Scheduled Reserved - 1 year
Convertible Reserved - 1 or 3 years
What AWS service would you use for automatic compute scaling and which direction does it scale?
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Horizontally
What are the two types of scaling?
Dynamic scaling - responds to changing demand
Predictive scaling - automatically scheduled instances based on predicted demand
What are the three configurations of EC2 Auto Scaling?
Minimum capacity - the smallest number of running instances
Desired capacity - Ideal number of instances
Maximum capacity - Maximum number of running instances
What is a Load Balancer?
Responsible for distributing requests across back-end instances
What is Amazon Elastic Load Balancer?
Works with Auto Scaling to distribute work-loads to maximize compute resource.
What is the difference between a monolithic application and microservices?
Monolithic are tightly coupled, where if one component fails then they all will.
Conversely, a microservice is loosely coupled so one component failure does not impact the others
What is Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)?
A publish/subscribe service, i.e. publishes messages to subscribes. These could be web services, e-mail addresses, Lambda functions etc..
What is Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and what is it’s benefit?
Used to send, store and receive messages between components. This means services are not reliant on others to be open to receive a message.
What does “serverless” mean? What is the benefit?
When your code is running on a server but you do not manage/have access to them.
Main benefit is automatic scaling.
What is AWS Lambda and what is the recommended maximum compute time?
A serverless service, upload code, set a trigger and you are only charged for the compute time taken.
Recommended for code that takes <15 minutes to run
What is a container?
A way to package your code and environment
What is Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)?
A container management service used to host Docker images
What is Amazon Kubernetes Service (EKS)?
A container management service used to host Kurbenetes containers
What is Fargate and what are the three benefits?
A serverless compute engine for containers that works with ECS and EKS
No time spent managing infrastructure
Flexible
Secure by isolation
What four considerations need to be made when choosing a region?
Compliance
Customer Proximity
Available services
Pricing
What is the difference between an Availability Zone and a Region?
An Availability Zone is a single or group of data centres within a region
What is an Edge Location?
A site used by Amazon CloudFront to store cached copies of content, to improve the speed to reach further away customers
What are the four ways of interacting with AWS services?
Management Console
Command Line Interface (CLI)
Software Development Kits (SDK)
Amazon manage tools like Elastic Beanstalk or CloudFormation
What is Elastic Beanstalk and what are the 4 main tasks?
Provides configuration settings to manage resources
Adjust capacity
Load balancing
Automatic scaling
Health monitoring
What is AWS CloudFormation and what are the two main benefits?
Manages infrastructure as code through a CloudFormation template
Fully automated
Minimum risk of human error
What is AWS CloudFront?
A global content delivery service, i.e. a network of edge locations
What is AWS Outpost?
Extending the AWS infrastructure & services to on premise data centers
What is the difference between a public and private subnet?
Public subnets can interact publicly, i.e. over the internet - private subnets can’t.
What is a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)?
Allows you to isolate sections of the AWS Cloud in a defined virtual network
What is an Internet Gateway?
A way to connect the public internet to a VPC
What is a Virtual Private Gateway?
A way to restrict internet access to your VPC (like a VPN)
What is AWS Direct Connect?
A dedicated, isolated and private connection between your data centre and a VPC
What is a Network Access Control List (Network ACL)?
Checks packets from the internet have the correct permissions to leave/exit the subnet.
What is a Security Group?
Rules applied to a collection of EC2s
Is Network ACL Stateful or Stateless and what is the difference? How about Security Groups?
Stateless, always checks the packet regardless of circumstance
Security Groups are Stateful, remembers who to let in
What is the default rule for a network ACL?
Allow all inbound and outbound traffic