Deployments and Managing Infrastructure at Scale

Question 1

CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk are free of use.

True or False

Answer 1

True

CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk are free of use, but you do pay for the resources created.

Question 2

Which AWS managed service allows to automate software deployments to a hybrid mix of EC2 Instances and On-Premises servers?

a) CodeDeploy
b) CloudFormation
c) Elastic Beanstalk
d) CodeStar

Answer 2

a) CodeDeploy

AWS CodeDeploy is a service that automates code deployments to any instance, including Amazon EC2 instances and instances running on-premises.

Question 3

You need a unified user interface that gives you visibility, control, and patching capabilities for your EC2 Instances on AWS, as well as for servers running in your on-premises data centers. Which service should you use?

a) Storage Gateway
b) OpsWorks
c) Elastic Container Service
d) Systems Manager

Answer 3

d) Systems Manager

AWS Systems Manager gives you visibility and control of your infrastructure on AWS. It is used for patching systems at scale.

Question 4

You need to use Chef or Puppet. Which AWS service should you use?

a) CloudFormation
b) CodeDeploy
c) OpsWorks
d) CodeCommit

Answer 4

c) OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet.

Question 5

Which of the following allows you to deploy any AWS Infrastructure as a Code?

a) Elastic Beanstalk
b) OpsWorks
c) CloudFormation
d) Systems Manager

Answer 5

c) CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to model and provision AWS and third-party application resources in your cloud environment. It allows you to deploy Infrastructure as a Code.

Question 6

Which service is referred to as a Platform as a Service (PaaS)?

a) Elastic Beanstalk
b) OpsWorks
c) CloudFormation
d) EC2

Answer 6

a) Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform as a Service (PaaS). You only manage data and applications. AWS Elastic Beanstalk makes it even easier for developers to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud

Question 7

What is called the declaration of the AWS resources that make up a stack?

a) CloudFormation Schemas
b) CloudFormation Diagrams
c) CloudFormation Templates
d) CloudFormation Models

Answer 7

c) CloudFormation Templates

AWS CloudFormation templates are JSON or YAML-formatted text files. They are declarations of the AWS resources that make up a stack.

Question 8

Mention some benefits of CloudFormation:

Answer 8

As infrastructure as code:

• No resources are manually created, which is excellent for control
• Changes to the infrastructure are reviewed through code

For costs:

• Each resource within the stack is tagged with an identifier, so it can be easy to check how much a stack costs.
• It allows estimating the costs of the resources using the CloudFormation template.
• Allows defining a savings strategy, for example, in DEV, automate the creation of resources at 8 AM and delete them at 5 PM

For productivity:

• Provides the ability to destroy and re-create an infrastructure on the cloud on the fly.
• There is an automated generation of diagrams for templates.
• Provides declarative programming, there is no need to figure out ordering and orchestration.

Don’t reinvent the wheel:

• Leverage existing templates on the web.
• Leverage the documentation

Supports (almost) all AWS resources:
- Is possible to use “custom resources” for all those that are not supported.

Question 9

Why Elastic Beanstalk is a managed service?

Answer 9

Because:

• Beanstalk manages the configuration for instance creation and the OS configuration too.
• The deployment strategy is configurable but performed by Elastic Beanstalk.

Application code is the responsibility of the developer.

Question 10

What are the architecture models for Elastic Beanstalk?

Answer 10

There are three architecture models:

• Single instance deployment: good for dev
• LB + ASG: great for prod or pre-prod web apps.
• ASG only: great for non-web apps in production

Question 11

Does CodeDeploy use Beanstalk and CloudFormation to deploy an application?

Answer 11

No, it doesn’t, CodeDeploy is completely independent.

Question 12

CodeDeploy provisions all the servers/instances required automatically

True or False

Answer 12

False, for CodeDeploy the required servers/instances must be provisioned and configured ahead of time with the CodeDeploy Agent.