EC2 Basics

Question 1

What are the 5 types of EC2 instances?

Answer 1

General Purpose
Memory Optimized
Compute Optimized
Accelerated Computing
Storage Optimized

Question 2

What is EBS?

Answer 2

Elastic Block Store. Persistent storage that can be attached and reattached to an EC2 instance in one availability zone.

Question 3

Where do EBS Snapshots live?

Answer 3

S3

Question 4

How do you attach an EBS instance in AZ A to an EC2 instance in AZ B?

Answer 4

Create a snapshot, restore in another A Z, then attach

Question 5

What are the General Purpose SSD EBS volumes?

Answer 5

GP2 and GP3

Question 6

What are the Provisioned IOPS SSD types?

Answer 6

io1 and io2

Question 7

What are the HDD based volume types?

Answer 7

St1 and Sc2

Question 8

Why might you want to use GP2 or GP3?

Answer 8

Medium IOPS intense applications. Default, not as costly as io1/io2.

Question 9

Why might you want to use io1 or io2?

Answer 9

Very IOPS sensitive workloads

Question 10

Why might you want to use St1?

Answer 10

Throughput optimized workloads when cost is a factor

Question 11

Why might you want to use Sc1?

Answer 11

“Cold” storage. Data requires few scans. Cheaper than St1.

Question 12

What is an Instance store volume?

Answer 12

Temporary instance store that is very high performance

Question 13

When would you lose instance store?

Answer 13

instance move (host change), resize, hardware failure.

Question 14

How do EBS volumes typically restore?

Answer 14

Lazily. Data only fetched when requested.

Question 15

How does KMS generate DEKs for EBS snapshots?

Answer 15

Same DEK that is used to encrypt volume initially is used for snapshots

Question 16

True or False: Encryption can be turned off for EBS volumes.

Answer 16

False, once enabled it cannot be turned off.

Question 17

How can you recover an Ec2 instance when it doesn’t pass status checks?

Answer 17

Use CloudWatch to create an alarm on status checks, then can either stop, terminate, reboot.