EC2 Flashcards
What does EC2 stand for?
Elastic Compute Cloud
What are the 4 EC2 pricing options?
On Demand, Reserved, Spot, Dedicated
What are the length options for a reserved EC2 instance?
1 or 3 years
What is the spot EC2 instance pricing?
There is no set pricing as it fluctuates with supply and demand
What is the most expensive EC2 option?
Dedicated
What are the benefits of On Demand EC2 pricing?
Flexible, which makes it good for unpredictable markets or for functioning for an unknown length of time
When would you use reserved instances?
When there is predictable usage or specific capacity requirements
What are the types of reserved instances?
Standards, Convertible, and Scheduled
Are reserved instances geographically defined?
Yes, they are reserved in a specific region
What applications should be run on spot instances?
Flexible start and end times
What are some common use cases for dedicated hosts?
Regulatory requirements that may not support multi-tenant virtualization or licensing that does not support multi-tenancy
What are the 3 types of EC2 placement groups?
Cluster, spread, and partition
What is a cluster group placement?
Grouping of instances within a single availability zone
What are cluster placement groups recommended for?
applications that need low network latency, high network throughput, or both
What is a spread placement group?
A group of instances that are each placed on distinct underlying hardware
What are spread placement groups recommended for?
Applications that have a small number of critical instances that should be kept separate from each other
What is a partition placement group?
A partition placement group puts each instance on its own rack. (Each rack has its own network and power source)
What EC2 pricing option should you use to fulfill special licensing requirements?
Dedicated Host
When is a spot instance provisioned?
When it is below your max spot price
What is a spot block?
Stops your spot instance from being terminated even if it goes above your spot max price for between 1 and 6 hours
On what time interval are spot instance prices determined?
1 hour
What are some examples of work that spot instances would suit well?
- Big data and analytics
- Containerized workloads
- CI/CD and testing
- Image and media rendering
- High performance computing
What are spot instances not suited for?
Persistent workloads like a database or critical workloads
How do you terminate a spot instance that is persistent?
First, you have to cancel the request, then terminate the instance
What is a spot fleet?
A spot fleet attempts to launch the number of spot instances and (optionally) On-Damand instances to meet the target capacity you specified in the Spot Fleet request.
What condition effects whether a spot fleet is fulfilled or not?
Whether the maximum price you specified in the request exceeds the current Spot price
What are the potential strategies for a spot fleet?
capacityOptimized, lowestPrice, diversified, InstancePoolsToUseCount (must be used in combination with lowestPrice)
What are the use cases for VMware?
Connecting private cloud to AWS public cloud, cloud migration, disaster recovery
How do you deploy vCenter?
Using VMware on the AWS cloud
What is AWS Outposts?
Outposts allows you to have a large variety of AWS services in your data center
Who manages AWS Outposts infrastructure?
AWS
What are the two options of AWS Outposts?
Outposts Rack and Outposts Servers
What can you save up to with spot instances?
90 percent
What can you save up to with reserved instances?
72 percent
What happens when you start an EC2 instance?
Operating systems boots up, user data script is run (bootstrap scripts), applications start
What is hibernation also called?
Suspsend to disk
What does EC2 hibernation do?
Saves the contents from the instance memory (RAM) to EBS root volume. EBS root volumes and any attached EBS data volumes persist
What is the benefit of EC2 hibernation over stopping the instance?
The instance boots much faster because the OS doesn’t have to reboot
What are some examples where EC2 hibernation would be useful?
Services that take time to initialize
How long can you hibernate an instance for?
up to 60 days
What is a launch template?
Specifies all of the needed settings that go into building out an EC2 instance
What is the difference between a launch template and configurations?
Launch configurations have more limitations than templates such as can only be used for autoscaling, they are immutable, etc
What is an auto scaling group?
A collection of instances that are treated as a collective group for purposes of scaling and management
what is the recommended minimum amount of instances in an autoscaling group?
2
What are the 3 important settings to set on an autoscaling group?
min instances, max instances, desired instances
What are the corresponding services to the 3 W’s?
What: launch templates, Where: autoscaling groups, When: scaling policies
Should you scale in aggressively and scale out conservatively?
No, the opposite, takes more time to scale out than in
What payment type of EC2 instance is best for fulfilling the minimum count of EC2 instances in an autoscaling group?
Reserved instances
