Cloud Practitioner Study Deck Flashcards

1
Q

Define Cloud Computing

A

the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer

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2
Q

Give 3 examples of Cloud Providers

A

AWS, GCP, Azure

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3
Q

What’s the opposite of a cloud provider?

A

On-premise

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4
Q

What’s the difference between cloud provider and on-premise?

A

Cloud provider - somebody owns the whole thing (IT, servers, hardware).

On-premise - you own everything

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5
Q

What are the six benefits/advantages of cloud computing and what do they mean?

A
  1. No more capital expense
  2. Benefitting from massive economies of scale
  3. Stop guessing capacity needs
  4. Increase speed and agility
  5. Stop spending money on running/maintaining data centers
  6. Go global in minutes
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6
Q

Why is having less or no more capital expense a benefit/advantage of cloud computing?

A

The opposite of capital expense is variable expense. That means that you only pay-on-demand for when you consume computing resources. Capital expense means that you are paying for fixed assets and their maintenance = buying your servers, hiring IT, etc.

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7
Q

What does “benefitting from massive economies of scale” mean in the context of advantages/benefits of cloud computing?

A

The capital expense that is handled by cloud providers (IT, configuration of servers, buying servers, maintaining servers, etc.) is distributed amongst a large consumer base, making it cheaper.

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8
Q

Why does cloud computing enable customers to “stop guessing capacity needs”?

A

Cloud providers offer auto-scaling/and in general the ability to scale up/down the size/CPU of your servers at the click of a button. It enables customers to stop paying for underutilized servers.

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9
Q

How does cloud computing increase speed and agility?

A

You can deploy and provision resources at the click of a few buttons instead of waiting around for a dedicated IT team to set it up.

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10
Q

Why is helping customers stop spending money on running/maintaining data centers valuable?

A

Because they can focus on building their business solutions and serving their customers instead of allocating resources on maintaining servers.

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11
Q

Why is it important to deploy globally?

A

Low latency internationally!

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12
Q

What are the three types of cloud computing?

A

IaaS (infrastructure as a service)
PaaS (platform as a service)
SaaS (software as a service)

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13
Q

What is IaaS? Who is it for? What are some examples? What does it provide?

A

Infrastructure as a Service
It’s for administrators.
Examples: AWS, Azure, GCP
It provides networking features, computers, data storage space. The user of an IaaS does not need to worry about data centers or hardware or IT staff.

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14
Q

What is PaaS? Who is it for? What are some examples? What does it provide?

A

Platform as a Service
It’s for developers.
Examples: Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku
It provides the ability to deploy and manage applications. The user of a PaaS does not need to worry about underlying infrastructure. (we don’t care about how EB auto-scales, we just use it).

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15
Q

What is SaaS? Who is it for? What are some examples? What does it provide?

A

Software as a Service
It’s for customers.
Examples: Salesforce, The Hiring Engine, Gmail
It is the completed product that is run and managed by the service provider. The user of a SaaS does not need to worry about how the service is maintained, it just works and remains available.

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16
Q

What are the three cloud computing deployment models? And what is the use case/an example of each?

A

Cloud - fully on Cloud Computing Services - Yonomi
Hybrid - some on-premise, some cloud - Legacy on-premise, banks, fintech
On-Premise - owned servers, private cloud - gov’t insurance companies, hospitals

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17
Q

What is an AWS region?

A

A geographically distinct location (separate water supply, power supply, etc.) which has multiple data centers (AZs).

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18
Q

True/False - an AZ can have more than one data center.

A

True - an AZ is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region.

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19
Q

How many AZs are in an AWS region?

A

Each AWS region has at least 2 AZs.

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20
Q

What is the largest AWS region?

A

us-east-1 (N. Virginia)

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21
Q

Which AWS region most always is the first to get new services made available?

A

us-east-1 (N. Virginia)

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22
Q

Which region is Billing hosted?

A

us-east-1 (N. Virginia)

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23
Q

How many AWS regions are there as of Aug 2020?

A

24

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24
Q

How many AWS AZs are there as of Aug 2020?

A

77

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25
Q

What is an edge location?

A

An edge location is a data center owned by a trusted partner of AWS which has a direct connection to the AWS network

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26
Q

us-east-1a is an example of an identifier for ______

A

an Availability Zone (AZ)

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27
Q

Define multi-AZ

A

Distributing your instances across multiple AZs - for failover routing when handling requests in one AZ goes down.

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28
Q

How is the distance between AZs determined?

A

There is less than 10 ms latency between AZs.

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29
Q

What services use Edge Locations?

A

Edge locations serve requests for CloudFront and Route 53. They are usually used to get data or upload data for low latency. Requests to these two services will be routed to the nearest edge location automatically.

API GW endpoint traffic and S3 transfer acceleration also use the Edge Network.

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30
Q

What is GovCloud?

A

GovCloud is used to host sensitive, controlled, unclassified information, and is only operated by employees who are citizens on US soil. It is available on us-east and us-west. It is compliant with a bunch of regulations and policies.

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31
Q

What are the 3 services related to Billing?

A

AWS Billing - Billing Preferences, AWS Budgets, AWS Cloudwatch Billing Alarms

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32
Q

What is offered with AWS Billing?

A

PDF invoices by email, usage alerts, billing alerts

33
Q

What is offered with AWS Budgets?

A

Setting custom budgets (2 free budgets) by monthly/annual, etc., set budget threshold alerts (hitting 80% of budget allotted)

34
Q

What are the steps to complete setting up your AWS account after you’ve created a root user and logged in?

A

Activate MFA on root account
Create individual IAM users
Use groups to assign permissions
Apply an IAM password policy

35
Q

Why is MFA important?

A

Because if the login is compromised, there is an extra layer of security.

36
Q

How can you give someone “effectively” all the permissions of a root user?

A

AdministratorAccess group

37
Q

What are things only a root user can do?

A

Change your account settings. This includes the account name, root user password, and email address. Other account settings, such as contact information, payment currency preference, and Regions, do not require root user credentials.

View certain tax invoices. An IAM user with the aws-portal:ViewBilling permission can view and download VAT invoices from AWS Europe, but not AWS Inc or Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd (AISPL).

Close your AWS account.

Restore IAM user permissions. If the only IAM administrator accidentally revokes their own permissions, you can sign in as the root user to edit policies and restore those permissions.

Change your AWS Support plan or Cancel your AWS Support plan. For more information, see IAM for AWS Support.

Register as a seller in the Reserved Instance Marketplace.

Create a CloudFront key pair.

Configure an Amazon S3 bucket to enable MFA (multi-factor authentication) Delete.

Edit or delete an Amazon S3 bucket policy that includes an invalid VPC ID or VPC endpoint ID.

Sign up for GovCloud.

38
Q

What is an AMI and what is it used for?

A

AMI = Amazon Machine Image

It is a snapshot for saving an entire copy of your server. It is required to create an auto-scaling group.

39
Q

Explain how to create an auto-scaling group with an AMI.

A

You choose the AMI (EC2 server snapshot) to launch your auto-scaling group with. You can configure the auto-scaling group to react to changes in its environment (data transfer, etc.) via scaling policies.

40
Q

Explain the value of an auto-scaling group.

A

Auto-scaling groups give you the ability to have a persistent server. If the instance available becomes unhealthy or is at its max processing/memory, another one will spin up to meet the demand of your traffic.

41
Q

Explain how an auto-scaling group works and how you can show its behavior on AWS

A

Launch an auto-scaling group with an AMI. See on EC2 dashboard that an instance has spun up belonging to an auto-scaling group. Terminate the instance. See that the auto-scaling group’s status has gone from healthy –> unhealthy, the unhealthy instances gets removed, wait for a few mins, see that another instance has launched.

42
Q

True/False - when you delete your auto-scaling groups, all your instances belonging to that auto-scaling group get terminated.

A

True

43
Q

What is an ELB and what’s it used for?

A

ELB = elastic load balancer, and it’s something you put in front of your EC2 instances in order to route traffic evenly between your instances (usually in different AZs).

44
Q

Why are EC2 instances behind ELBs in different AZs?

A

Because if one AZ goes down, traffic will be routed to an instance in another AZ = no downtime babyyyy

45
Q

How many types of load balancers are there and what are they used for?

A

3 types of load balancers: application, network, and classic.

Application is for HTTP(S) traffic, Network is for TCP/TLS/UDP routing; if you need ultra high performance - handling millions of requests securely and have ultra low latency; classic load balance = when you have existing EC2-classic deployed applications

46
Q

What is a target group?

A

Target group contains a reference to the instances that an ELB routes traffic to.

47
Q

What types of things can be in a target group?

A

The target group could contain EC2 instances, Lambdas, or specific IPs.

48
Q

How do you route your traffic to the load balancer?

A

The load balancer has a domain name (DNS in da front). Point traffic to that domain.

49
Q

True/False - deleting the load balancer terminates instances behind the load balancer.

A

False

50
Q

What does S3 stand for?

A

Simple Storage Service

51
Q

What is CloudFront and what does it do/how does it work?

A

CloudFront is a content distribution network (CDN) that makes copies of static content to multiple edge locations in the world. When a request for the static content comes in, the nearest edge location will serve it.

52
Q

What does RDS stand for?

A

Relational Database Service

53
Q

How do you allow Lambda to write to CloudWatch logs?

A

Create an execution role to allow Lambda to write to CW logs

54
Q

What’s the benefit(s) of using Lambda?

A

Don’t have to worry about configuring servers. You just write your code, and it runs.

55
Q

What’s the limitation(s) of using Lambda?

A

Only run for a small amount of time - up to 15 mins

56
Q

What are the four types of pricing in the EC2 pricing model and what’s the main offering of each?

A

On-demand, Spot, Reserved, and Dedicated.

On-demand: least commitment
Spot: Biggest savings
Reserved: Best long-term
Dedicated: Your own hardware, most expensive

57
Q

What are the key features (5) of the On-Demand EC2 pricing model?

A
Low-cost and flexible
Pay-per-hour
Great for short-term things with spikey unpredictable workloads
Cannot be interrupted
Great for first time apps
58
Q

What type of applications is the EC2 On-Demand instances best for?

A

New applications, test applications for experiments

59
Q

What type of applications is the EC2 Reserved instances best for?

A

Long-term applications with stable traffic/predictable usage, or require reserved capacity.

60
Q

What are the three parts to Reserved Instance pricing?

A

RI pricing is based on three things - term (how long), class offering (type), and payment option (all upfront, etc.)

61
Q

What are the three class offerings of RIs and what is the difference between them?

A

Standard, Convertible, and Scheduled.

Standard - 75% reduced pricing compared to on-demand, cannot change RI attributes

Convertible - 54% reduced, can change RI to anything greater than or equal to current offering

Scheduled - Reserve instances for specific periods

62
Q

What are the two choices for RI terms?

A

1 year and 3 year

63
Q

What are the three choices of payment options for RIs and what’s the difference between them?

A

All, partial, and no upfront. They’re just differences with how much you pay up front. The more you pay up front, the cheaper it is

64
Q

True/False: RIs can be shared across multiple accounts within an organization.

A

True

65
Q

Where can you sell unused RIs?

A

Reserved Instance Marketplace

66
Q

Why would you use EC2 Spot Instances?

A

if you have applications that have flexible start and end times or you need to keep costs real low, use Spot instances. (Background processes etc.)

67
Q

What are the three termination conditions for EC2 Spot Instances?

A

AWS can terminate your server at any time.

If your server is terminated by AWS, you will not be charged for partial hour.

If you terminate your instance, you will still be charged for partial hours

68
Q

True/False: AWS Batch can help you manage EC2 Spot Instance usage.

A

True

69
Q

What are dedicated EC2 instances used for?

A

Dedicated EC2 instances are used for when you have strict regulatory requirements where you cannot have virtual separation. It must be physical separation of your servers. You will have dedicated servers.

70
Q

What is multi-tenancy vs. single tenancy?

A

Multi-tenancy = share the same hardware as other AWS users

Single tenant –> dedicated hardware, physical isolation. Offered in both on-demand and reserved instances

71
Q

Which AWS services are truly free?

A

IAM, VPC, AWS Cost Explorer, Organizations & Consolidated Billing

72
Q

Which AWS services are free but the AWS services that they provision may incur costs?

A

Auto-Scaling, CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, Opsworks, Amplify, AppSync, CodeStar

73
Q

What are the four levels of AWS Support offered?

A

Basic, Developer, Business, Enterprise

74
Q

What does Basic Support give you?

A

Support for billing and account (is free 0 bucks)

75
Q

What does Developer Support give you?

A

Costs 20$
Technical support via email; can choose response time system impaired (12 hr), and general guidance (24hr)

~24 hr response time

Support for billing and acct

No third-party support

76
Q

What does Business Support give you?

A

Costs 100$
Chat and phone 24/7 support

Moar response times (prod. system down (1 hr), prod. system impaired (4 hr))

Help with 3rd party support

77
Q

What does Enterprise Support give you?

A

Costs 15,000$

Even moar response times (business critical system down) - 15 min response

Personal concierge

TAM (technical acct manager)

78
Q

What is AWS Marketplace?

A

Curated digital catalogue with thousands of software listings from independent vendors

You can buy/sell solutions - the solution can be free or have an associated charge

79
Q

What is AWS Trusted Advisor?

A

Advises you on security, saving money, performance, service limits, and fault tolerance

Basically a checklist for best practices on AWS