Compute in the Cloud

Question 1

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Answer 1

Provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

Question 2

List 4 Benefits of Amazon EC2

Answer 2

1) Provision and launch an Amazon EC2 instance in minutes
2) Stop using it when have finished running a workload
3) Pay only for the compute time used when an instance is running, not when it is stopped or terminated.
4) Save costs by paying only for server capacity that is needed or wanted.

Question 3

Identify the 5 Amazon EC2 instance types

Answer 3

1) General Purpose Instance
Balance of compute, memory and networking resources.
Use for: Application servers, Gaming servers, Backend servers for enterprise applications, Small/med databases

2) Compute Optimized Instance
Ideal for compute-bound applications that benefit from high-performance processors
Use for: High-performance web, compute-intensive application and dedicated gaming servers. Also batch processing w/many transactions in a single group

3) Memory Optimized Instance
Designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large datasets in memory
Use for: Workload that requires large amounts of data to be preloaded before running an application, like a high-performance database or a workload that involves performing real-time processing of a large amount of unstructured data

4) Accelerated Computing Instance
Use hardware accelerators or coprocessors to perform functions more efficiently than possible in software running on CPUs.
Use for: Floating-point number calculations, graphics processing, data pattern matching -> graphics applications, game streaming, application streaming

5) Storage Optimized Instance
Designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to large datasets on local storage
Used for: Distributed file system, data warehousing application and high-frequency online transaction processing (OLTP) systems

Question 4

Differentiate between the 5 billing options for Amazon EC2

Answer 4

1) On-Demand
* Ideal for short-term, irregular workloads that cannot be interrupted
* No upfront costs or minimum contracts apply
* Instances run continuously until you stop them and pay for only the compute time used
Use for: Developing/testing applications and running applications that have unpredictable usage patterns
Not recommended for workloads that last a year or longer (greater cost than Reserved Instance)

2) Amazon EC2 Savings Plans
* Reduce compute costs by committing to a consistent mount of compute usage for a 1-year or 3-year term
* Savings up to 72% of On-Demand
* Usage up to the committed is charged at discounted Savings Plan rate, beyond at regular On-Demand rate

3) Reserved Instances
* Billing discount applied to the use of On-Demand Instances in account
* Standard Reserved and Convertible Reserved Instances for 1 or 3-year term
* Scheduled Reserved Instance for 1-year term

4) Spot Instances
* Ideal for workloads with flexible start and end times or that can withstand interruptions
* Use unused Amazon C computing capacity and offer cost savings at up to 90% off On-Demand prices
* Do not require contract or commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage
Use for: Background processing job that can start and stop as needed, like a customer survey

5) Dedicated Hosts
* Physical servers with Amazon EC2 instance capacity that is fully dedicated to your use
* Most expensive

Question 5

Summarize the benefits of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Answer 5

• Enables to automatically add or remove Amazon EC2 instances in response to changing application demand
• Able to maintain a greater sense of application availability
• Dynamic scaling -> responds to changing demand
• Predictive scaling -> automatically schedules the right number of Amazon EC2 instances based on predicted demand

Question 6

Summarize the benefits of Elastic Load Balancing

Answer 6

• Distributes incoming application traffic across multiple resources like Amazon EC2 instances

Question 7

Example of the uses for Elastic Load Balancing

Answer 7

Employee directing customers to an open register

Question 8

Difference between Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS

Answer 8

1) Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
* Publish/subscribe service
* Push messages to subscribers
* Subscribers can be web servers, email addresses, AWS Lambda function or other options

2) Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
* Message queuing service
* Can send, store and receive messages between software components
* An application can send messages into a queue -> A user or application retrieves a message from the queue, processes it and deletes it from the queue

Question 9

Summarize 4 additional AWS compute options

Answer 9

1) Serverless Computing -> AWS Lambda
* Service that allows to run code without needing to provision or manage servers
* Upload code, set a trigger for code to run, Lambda runs code when triggered, pay only for compute time

2) Containers -> Amazon Elastic Container Server (Amazon ECS)
* Highly scalable, high performance container management system that enable to run and scale containerized applications on AWS
* Supports Docker containers - software platform that enables to build, test and deploy application quickly

3) Containers -> Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS)
* Fully managed service that can use to run Kubernetes on AWS
* Kubernetes is open-source software that enables to deploy and manage containerized applications at scale

4) Containers -> AWS Fargate
* Serverless compute engine for containers
* Works with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS
* Do not need to provision or manage servers