EC2 101

Question 1

Per second billing

Answer 1

Available for instances launched in:

On-Demand, Reserved and Spot forms
All regions and Availability Zones
Amazon Linux and Ubuntu

Question 2

on-demand instance overview

Answer 2

pay fixed rate by hour or second with no commitment

Question 3

reserved instance overview

Answer 3

provide capacity reservation
significant discount on charges
1-3 year terms

Question 4

spot instances overview

Answer 4

let you bid on pricing
allow for greater savings if you have flexible start and stop times
If you terminate, you pay for full hour
if AWS terminates, you get hour for free

Question 5

dedicated hosts overview

Answer 5

physical EC2 server

allow for using existing licenses

Question 6

on-demand instance use cases

Answer 6

users need low cost & flexibility
no upfront payment
applications with short-term, spiky or unpredictable workloads
applications being tested in EC2 for first time

Question 7

reserved instance use cases

Answer 7

applications with steady state or predictable usage
applications requiring reserved capacity
users make upfront payments to reduce costs

Question 8

spot instance use cases

Answer 8

applications that have flexible start, stop times
applications only feasible at very low prices
users with urgent need for large amount of extra capacity

Question 9

dedicated host use cases

Answer 9

if regulations or licensing prevent multi-tenant virtualization
licensing based on cpu, or cores
can buy at hourly rate
can buy as a reservation

Question 10

Types of Reserved Instances

Answer 10

standard RI up to 75% discount
convertible RI’s up to 54% discount. Allow changing attributes of instances\
scheduled RI’s let you set time they run

Question 11

EC2 Instance Types

DRMCGIFTPX

Answer 11

dense storage
memory optimized (RAM)
general purpose (Main choice for gp)
compute optimized
graphics intensive
high speed storage (I for IOPS)
FPGA
general purpose, lowest cost (T2 micro)
graphics general purpose GPU (machine learning)
memory optimized (extreme memory)

Question 12

Elastic Block Storage

Answer 12

block based storage
create volumes and attach them to EC2 instances
for running databases, operating systems
placed in specific AZ and automatically replicated within that AZ

Question 13

EBS Volume Type

GP2

Answer 13

General Purpose SSD
balance price and performance
ratio of 3 IOPS per gig, up to 10,000 IOPS
bursts to 3000 IOPS for volumes over 3334 Gb

Question 14

EBS Volume Type

Provisioned IOPS SSD (IO-1)

Answer 14

for IO intense apps like NoSQL or large relational databases
use if you need more than 10,000 IOPS
can go up to 20,000 IOPS

Question 15

EBS Volume Type

Throughput Optimized HDD (ST1)

Answer 15

Magnetic HD
use for big data, log processing
use if large amounts of sequential data
CANNOT be a boot volume

Question 16

EBS Volume Type
Cold HDD (SC1)

Answer 16

lowest cost storage
for infrequently accessed workloads
use for file servers
CANNOT be a boot volume

Question 17

EBS Volume Type

Magnetic (standard)

Answer 17

CAN be bootable
lowest cost per Gb of all bootable EBS volume types
ideal for infrequently accessed data, lowest cost

Question 18

Can you mount an EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances?

Answer 18

no

Question 19

How to get instance metadata from the instance terminal

Answer 19

curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data

Question 20

EC2 Placement Groups

Answer 20

Grouping of instances in a single AZ for using 10Gb network. Can’t span AZ’s.

Lets applications use a low latency 10Gbs network
For apps that need low latency, high throughput or both

Question 21

Types of instances allowed in Placement Group

Answer 21

compute optimized
GPU
Memory Optimized
Storage Optimized

Question 22

Does AWS recommend using homogenous instances in a placement group?

Answer 22

Yes. Same family and sizes

Question 23

Can you move an existing instance into a placement group?

Answer 23

No.

Have to create an AMI, then move then launch new instance from the AMI

Question 24

Can you merge placement groups?

Answer 24

No

Question 25

HVM

Hardware Virtual Machine

Answer 25

HVM AMI’s have fully virtualized set of hardware and boot by executing MBR of the root block device of your image

Lets you run OS directly on top of a VM with no modification, as if it were bare metal

EC2 hosts system emulates some or all of the hardware

Question 26

PVM

Paravirtual Machine

Answer 26

boot with special boot loader PV-GRUB

Can run on hardware without explicit support for virtualization

CANNOT take advantage of special hardware extensions for GPU processing, advanced networking

Historically had better performance than HVM but HVM has improved and no longer true

Question 27

PVM vs HVM

Answer 27

main differences
how they boot
taking advantage of special hardware extensions

Question 28

Does AWS recommend PVM or HVM?

Answer 28

HVM and current generation instance types