EC2 Flashcards
What is EC2?
Web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud
What is the difference between using the EC2 local instance store and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for the root device?
By using Amazon EBS, data on the root device will persist independently from the lifetime of the instance. Alternatively, the local instance store only persists during the life of the instance.
How do I access my EC2 systems?
The RunInstances call that initiates execution of your application stack will return a set of DNS names, one for each system that is being booted. This name can be used to access the system exactly as you would if it were in your own data center.
How many instances can I run in Amazon EC2?
You are limited to running On-Demand Instances per your vCPU-based On-Demand Instance limit, purchasing 20 Reserved Instances, and requesting Spot Instances per your dynamic Spot limit per region.
How can I run more EC2 instances than specified in the instance limit?
Complete the Amazon EC2 limit increase request form
True or false: There are no limitations in sending email from EC2 instances.
False. In order to maintain the quality of Amazon EC2 addresses for sending email, we enforce default limits on the amount of email that can be sent from EC2 accounts.
How long does it typically take to set up new EC2 instances after a call to RunInstances?
A few minutes
What are vCPU-based limits for EC2?
EC2 measures usage towards each limit based on the total number of vCPUs that are assigned to the running On-Demand instances in your AWS account.
How many vCPUs for nano, micro, small and medium EC2 instances?
1
How many vCPUs for large and xlarge EC2 instances?
2, 4 respectively
How many vCPUs for Nxlarge EC2 instances, as an expression of N?
N*4
What is the default vCPU limit for EC2 On-Demand standard instances (A, C, D, H, I, M, R, T, Z)?
1152 vCPUs
What is the default vCPU limit for EC2 On-demand instances F, G, Inf, P, X?
128 vCPUs
True or false: vCPU-based limits do not apply to EC2 Reserved Instances.
True
When do vCPU limits apply to EC2 Spot Instances?
Only when running, not when requesting
EC2 - What are Accelerated Computing instances?
Use hardware accelerators, or co-processors, to perform some functions more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs (e.g. floating-point number calculation and graphics processing).
EC2- What are the 3 types of Accelerated Computing instances?
GPU compute for general-purpose computing, GPU graphics for graphics-intensive, and FPGA programmable hardware compute instances for advanced scientific workloads
EC2 - When should I use GPU graphics and compute instances?
For applications with massive parallelism such as workloads using thousands of threads.
EC2 - What applications can benefit from P4d?
Machine learning workloads like NLP, image classification, object detection, etc. Increased GPU performance can significantly reduce time to train.
What are the 5 EC2 instance families?
General purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, accelerated computing, storage optimized
What are EC2 T2 instances?
General purpose, burstable performance instances that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline.
Which EC2 T2 instance type allows instance storage?
Trick question! None of them.
What is the memory in GiB for EC2 t2 instance types?
nano - 0.5 micro - 1 small - 2 medium - 4 large - 8 xlarge - 16 2xlarge - 32
What is the memory of EC2 m4.large in GiB, and for m4.Nxlarge, what is the memory as an expression of N?
m4. large - 8 GiB
m4. Nxlarge - N*16
What are EC2 m4 and m5 instances good for?
Small and mid-size databases, data processing tasks requiring additional memory, running backend servers for enterprise applications
What are EC2 t2 instances good for?
Websites and web applications, development environments, build services, microservices, test and staging envs
What are EC2 m5a and m6g instance types?
Balanced general purpose instance types with special processors / SSD hardware. m6g is cheap.
What are M5n EC2 instances good for?
Higher bandwidth variant of M5 general purpose instances. Better for applications that can take advantage of improved throughput.
What are EC2 A1 instances?
Significant cost savings, ideally suited for Arm-based workloads supported by the Arm ecosystem.
What are EC2 T3, T3a, and T4g instance types?
Next-generation burstable instance types. T4g is Arm-based and cheap.
Which EC2 instance type within the T instance family is most cost effective?
T4g
Which EC2 instance type within the M family is most cost effective?
M6g
What are Compute Optimized EC2 instances good for?
Batch processing workloads, media transcoding, high performance web servers, high performance computing, scientific modeling, dedicated gaming servers and ad server engines, machine learning inference
What are C4 and C5 EC2 instance types?
Optimized for compute-intensive workloads and deliver cost-effective high performance
Which EC2 Compute instances are good for applications that need higher networking throughput?
C5n, C6gn
Which EC2 Compute instances deliver up to 40% better price performance?
C6g and C6gn
True or false: The data stored on an EC2 local instance store will persist after the instance is terminated.
False
Which EC2 volume type should you choose for transactional workloads?
SDD - performance depends mostly on IOPS
Which EC2 volume type should you use for throughput workloads?
HDD - throughput-intensive and big-data workloads
True or false: EBS snapshots are only available through the Amazon EC2 APIs.
True
What is the recommended process to ensure consistent EBS snapshots on volumes attached to an instance?
- cleanly detach the volume
- issue the snapshot command
- reattach the volume
True or false: EBS snapshots can be used for point-in-time recovery.
True - each snapshot is given a unique identifier, and customers can create volumes based on any of their existing snapshots
What is AWS EFA?
Elastic Fabric Adapter - network interface for EC2 instances that enables customers to run applications requiring high levels of inter-node communications at scale on AWS
True or false: EFA is available as an optional EC2 networking feature that you can enable on any supported EC2 instance at no additional cost.
True
Why should you use EFA?
Get lower, more consistent latency and higher throughput for tightly-coupled HPC applications
What is ENA?
A custom network interface optimized to deliver high throughput and packet-per-second performance, and consistently low latencies on EC2 instances.
What is the difference between an EFA ENI and an ENA ENI?
EFA ENI provides all the functionality of an ENA ENI, plus hardware support for applications to communicate directly (OS-bypass communication)
True or false: You can attach an EFA device to a running instance.
False. EFA support can be enabled either at the launch of the instance or added to a stopped instance.
EC2 - What are some types of applications that would benefit from the default public IP address instead of an Elastic IP address?
Compute clusters, web crawling, backend services
When should I use the ELB Classic Load Balancer?
Simple load balancing of traffic across multiple EC2 instances based on application or network level information
When should I use ELB Application Load Balancer?
Applications needing advanced routing capabilities, microservices, and container-based architectures, based on advanced application level information that includes the content of the request
EC2 - What is SR-IOV in enhanced networking?
Method of device virtualization that provides higher I/O performance and lower CPU utilization compared to traditional implementations
EC2 - When should I use Enhanced Networking?
If applications benefit from high packet-per-second performance and/or low latency networking
EC2 - What is the additional fee to use Enhanced Netowrking?
Trick question! No additional fee.
Where can I find a history of all EC2 API calls made on my account?
CloudTrail
How long are metrics data for terminated EC2 instances and deleted ELBs stored?
2 weeks
Why should I hibernate an EC2 instance?
To get instance and applications up and running quickly, if they take a long time to bootstrap (e.g. load memory caches)
What is a hibernated instance in EC2?
An instance that has been started and then stopped while maintaining memory state - “pre-warmed” instances that can be resumed to reduce the time it takes for an instance to return to service
What happens when I hibernate my EC2 instance?
Contents from the instance’s memory are persisted to EBS root volume. When instance restarted, returns to previous state and reloads RAM contents
True or false: EBS root volume data is only persisted when you hibernate an EC2 instance, not when you stop it.
False.
True or false: You can stop or hibernate an EC2 instance with local instance storage.
False. Stop and hibernate are only available for EBS backed instances.
EC2 - What is the difference between hibernate and stop?
Hibernate - RAM data persisted
Stop - instance shut down and RAM is cleared
True or false: You can enable hibernation on an existing instance (running or stopped).
False. Hibernation needs to be enabled when you launch the instance.
EC2 - What is the maximum supported time to keep an instance hibernated?
60 days
EC2 - What happens if my root volume doesn’t have enough space for the contents of RAM when hibernating?
Hibernation will fail and the instance will get shutdown instead.
EC2 - How do you leverage previous investments in building VMs?
Migrate VMs to EC2 using VM Import/Export
