Compute in the Cloud

Question 1

What are the benefits of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?

Answer 1

Provision and launch an Amazon EC2 instance within minutes.
Stop using it when you have finished running a workload.
Pay only for the compute time you use when an instance is running, not when it is stopped or terminated.
Save costs by paying only for server capacity that you need or want.

Question 2

What do you do to launch an instance?

Answer 2

Select a configuration template
Select the hardware configuration
Set the security settings

Question 3

What is a general purpose instance?

Answer 3

General purpose instances provide a balance of compute, memory, and networking resources.

Question 4

Why would you choose a compute-optimized instance?

Answer 4

Compute optimized applications are ideal for high-performance web servers, compute-intensive applications servers, and dedicated gaming servers. You can also use compute optimized instances for batch processing workloads that require processing many transactions in a single group.

Question 5

What instances are best for high-performance databases?

Answer 5

Memory optimized instances are designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large datasets in memory.

Question 6

What are uses for accelerated computing instances?

Answer 6

Accelerated computing instances use hardware accelerators, or coprocessors, to perform some functions more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs. Examples of these functions include floating-point number calculations, graphics processing, and data pattern matching.

Question 7

What instance is best for data warehousing applications?

Answer 7

Storage optimized instances are designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to large datasets on local storage. Examples of workloads suitable for storage optimized instances include distributed file systems, data warehousing applications, and high-frequency online transaction processing (OLTP) systems.

Question 8

Pricing: What EC2 instances are ideal for short-term, irregular workloads that cannot be interrupted?

Answer 8

On-demand instances

Question 9

Pricing: What discount can be applied to on-demand instances?

Answer 9

Reserved (standard or convertible) instances, with 1- or 3-year terms

Question 10

Pricing: What are EC2 instance savings plans?

Answer 10

A 1- or 3-year commitment to an hourly spend to an instance family AND Region

Question 11

Pricing: What is the advantage of a Spot instance?

Answer 11

You can stop and start as needed and it runs on available EC2 resources.

Question 12

Pricing: Does Amazon offer dedicated hosts?

Answer 12

Yes. You can use your existing per-socket, per-core, or per-VM software licenses to help maintain license compliance. You can purchase On-Demand Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated Hosts Reservations. Of all the Amazon EC2 options, Dedicated Hosts are the most expensive.

Question 13

Scaling: What are three specifications for an Amazon EC2 Scaling Group?

Answer 13

Minimum capacity, desired capacity, and maximum capacity

Question 14

Scaling: What’s the difference between Auto Scaling and Load Balancing?

Answer 14

Auto scaling increases or decreases instances based on demand. Load balancing insures no single instance carries the whole workload.

Question 15

Scaling: What service automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances?

Answer 15

Elastic Load Balancing

Question 16

Scaling: What is Amazon SNS?

Answer 16

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a publish/subscribe service. Using Amazon SNS topics, a publisher publishes messages to subscribers.

Question 17

Scaling: What is Amazon SQS?

Answer 17

Using Amazon Simple Queue Service, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. In Amazon SQS, an application sends messages into a queue. A user or service retrieves a message from the queue, processes it, and then deletes it from the queue.

Question 18

Scaling: What is AWS Lambda?

Answer 18

AWS Lambda is a service that lets you run code without needing to provision or manage servers.

While using AWS Lambda, you pay only for the compute time that you consume. Charges apply only when your code is running. You can also run code for virtually any type of application or backend service, all with zero administration.

Question 19

Scaling: What is a standard way to package your application’s code and dependencies into a single object?

Answer 19

Containers

Question 20

Scaling: What system enables you to run and scale containerized applications on AWS?

Answer 20

Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) s a highly scalable, high-performance container management system

Question 21

Scaling: What systems enables you to deploy and manage containerized applications at scale?

Answer 21

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Question 22

Scaling: What is AWS Fargate?

Answer 22

A serverless compute engine for containers. It works with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS. AWS Fargate manages your server infrastructure for you.