Fundamentals - Core Infrastructure Flashcards
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is a way of using IT which has 5 traits:
- On-demand self-service: No human intervention to get resources
- Broad network access: Access resources over the net from anywhere
- Resource pooling: Provider has a big pool of resources they share with customers (economies of scale get passed on from provider to customers)
- Rapid elasticity: Get more resources quickly as needed
- Measured service: Pay only for what you consume or reserve
What does IaaS stand for?
Infrastructure as a Service
What does PaaS stand for?
Platform as a Service
What does SaaS stand for?
Software as a Service
How are Google Cloud Platform resources organised?
By zones (e.g.: europe-west-2a, europe-west-2b, europe-west-2c) within regions (e.g.: europe-west2)
Is a GCP zone the same as a datacentre?
No - a given zone can be distributed across multiple buildings.
Why would you want your resources to be located on zones within the same region?
All the zones within a region have fast network connectivity between them
Distributing on multiple zones may give you more resiliency
What is the average round trip latency between zones within the same region?
Under 5ms
Why would you want your resources to be distributed on more than one zone?
To make your application more resilient/fault tolerant.
It helps protect against un-expected failure.
Can you run your application on more than one GCP region?
Yes
Why would you want to configure your application to run on more than one region?
Latency: creating resources close to the customers you want to serve reduces latency.
Resiliency: e.g.: in case a natural disaster takes region down.
Do all GCP resources have to be provisioned to a specific zone?
No - some GCP resources support being configured as “multiregion” (e.g.: Google Cloud Storage)
What does it mean if a GCP resource has been configured to a given multiregion?
It means the resource is stored redundantly
in at least two geographic locations …
…separated by at least 160 kilometers
Roughly how many regions does GCP have?
15
Name GCP’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering
Google Compute Engine (IaaS)
Is per-second billing available on GCPs Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering available?
Yes - Google was the first to implement per-second billing on it’s IaaS offering (Google Compute Engine)
What type of workloads might benefit from fine-grained billing?
Ones which come in bursts as opposed to steady constant streams: only pay for the time you use rather than a whole hour.
Name 2 GCP services that support per-second billing
Google Compute Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine
Which GCP service offers “sustained use discounts”?
Google Compute Engine
What is a “sustained use discounts”?
An automatic discount
that you get for running a virtual machine instance
for more than 25% of the billing month
How long do you need to be running your virtual machines during a given billing month to benefit from the sustained use discounts?
More than 25% of the month
How can you estimate your costs before setting up your application in GCP?
GCP has an online calculator to help you estimate your costs.
What makes GCP pricing customer friendly?
Supports:
- Billing in sub-hour increments
- Customer VM types (only pay for the resources your workloads need)
- Discounts for:
- Sustained use (when VMs are used for > 25% of the month)
- Committed use (pay less for steady long-term workloads)
- Preemptible use (pay less for interuptable workloads)
What is a preemptible workload?
A workload that can be interrupted mid run.
