General Cloud Concepts - Flashcards
How does CloudFront work?
CloudFront delivers your content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations. When a user requests content that you’re serving with CloudFront, the request is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency (time delay), so that content is delivered with the best possible performance.
What are Six advantages of cloud computing?
Trade capital expense for variable expense
Benefit from massive economies of scale
Stop guessing capacity
Increase speed and agility
Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers
Go global in minutes
What is AWS Lambda?
A compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda runs your code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all of the administration of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code monitoring, and logging.
How long can an AWS Lambda function execute?
AWS Lambda functions can be configured to run up to 15 minutes per execution. You can set the timeout to any value between 1 second and 15 minutes.
How will I be charged for using AWS Lambda functions?
AWS Lambda is priced on a pay-per-use basis. Please see the AWS Lambda pricing page for details.
Can I save money on AWS Lambda with a Compute Savings Plan?
Yes. In addition to saving money on Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate, you can also use Compute Savings Plans to save money on AWS Lambda. Compute Savings Plans offer up to 17% discount on Duration, Provisioned Concurrency, and Duration (Provisioned Concurrency). Compute Savings Plans do not offer a discount on Requests in your Lambda bill. However, your Compute Savings Plans commitment can apply to Requests at regular rates.
What are the 4 ways to pay for EC2?
On-Demand
Spot
Reserved
Dedicated
and a fifth - Savings plans
What is Reserved Instance in the EC2 pricing model?
Best Long-Term
steady-state or predictable usage or require reserved capacity
commit to EC2 over a 1-3 year term (longer terms = more savings)
Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RI) provide a significant discount (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand pricing and provide a capacity reservation when used in a specific Availability Zone.
he following summarizes features of all RIs.
Provide a significant discount compared to running instances On-Demand.
Can apply to usage across all Availability Zones in an AWS region, or can provide a capacity reservation when assigned to a specific Availability Zone.
Are offered under three upfront payment options to provide you with payment flexibility at the point of purchase.
Can be shared between multiple accounts within a consolidated billing family.
Can you resell your AWS EC2 Reserved Instances?
Yes
The Reserved Instance Marketplace is a platform that supports the sale of third-party and AWS customers’ unused Standard Reserved Instances, which vary in term lengths and pricing options. For example, you might want to sell Reserved Instances after moving instances to a new AWS Region, changing to a new instance type, ending projects before the term expiration, when your business needs change, or if you have unneeded capacity.
What is Service Quotas?
With Service Quotas, you can view and manage your quotas for AWS services from a central location. Quotas, also referred to as limits in AWS services, are the maximum values for the resources, actions, and items in your AWS account. Each AWS service defines its quotas and establishes default values for those quotas. If your business needs aren’t met by the default limit of service resources or operations that apply to an AWS account or an AWS Region, you might need to increase your service quota values. Service Quotas enables you to look up your service quotas and to request increases. AWS Support might approve, deny, or partially approve your requests.
EC2 Reserved Instance Cost Considerations
Since reserved instances are basically discounts applied to on-demand instances, their prices are tied to the base price of the on-demand instance.
However, four key variables determine the cost of a reserved instance:
Instance attributes -
four instance attributes (instance type, region, tenancy, and platform) determine if a discount is applied.
Term commitment -
One year, defined as 3,1536,000 seconds (365 days)
Three years, defined as 94,608,000 seconds (1,095 days)
Payment options -
Three payment options are available for AWS reserved instances:
All Upfront (where full payment is made at the beginning of the term)
Partial Upfront
No Upfront
You receive better savings when you pay more upfront.
Offering class - t
there are two offering classes
1. Standard Instances
You receive the highest savings with standard instances, but they cannot be exchanged. They can only be modified. Standard reserved instances bind you to one instance family on the same operating system. This instance class is recommended for reliable workloads and maximum savings.
- Convertible Instances
Discounts are lower for convertible instances compared to standard instances. However, they can be exchanged or modified. Convertible reserved instances provide the flexibility to change families, operating systems, and tenancies, but at a lower discount.
These variables determine the amount of savings you can expect with a reserved instance compared to the on-demand pricing.
AWS IAM Access Analyzer provides the following capabilities
IAM Access Analyzer helps identify resources in your organization and accounts that are shared with an external entity.
IAM Access Analyzer validates IAM policies against policy grammar and best practices.
IAM Access Analyzer generates IAM policies based on access activity in your AWS CloudTrail logs.
A large enterprise with multiple VPCs in several AWS Regions around the world needs to connect and centrally manage network connectivity between its VPCs.
Which AWS service or feature meets these requirements?
A. AWS Direct Connect
B. AWS Transit Gateway
C. AWS Site-to-Site VPN
D. VPC endpoints
B. AWS Transit Gateway
Keyword here is “centrally”. Transit gateway acts as a central hub to connect VPCs.
AWS Transit Gateway routes all traffic to and from each VPC or VPN, and you have one place to manage and monitor it all.
A company is preparing to launch a new web store that is expected to receive high traffic for an upcoming event. The web store runs only on AWS, and the company has an AWS Enterprise Support plan.
Which AWS resource will provide guidance about how the company should scale its architecture and operational support during the event?
A. AWS Abuse team
B. The designated AWS technical account manager (TAM)
C. AWS infrastructure event management
D. AWS Professional Services
B
The designated AWS technical account manager (TAM)
Note : c provides this too
tricky - not real sure if B or C is the real answer
A user wants to deploy a service to the AWS Cloud by using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) principles.
Which AWS service can be used to meet this requirement?
A. AWS Systems Manager
B. AWS CloudFormation
C. AWS CodeCommit
D. AWS Config
b
What does AWS Global Accelerator do?
AWS Global Accelerator
Improve application availability, performance, and security using the AWS global network
What is AWS Direct Connect?
AWS Direct Connect is a networking service that provides an alternative to using the internet to connect to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, data that would have previously been transported over the internet is delivered through a private network connection between your facilities and AWS. In many circumstances, private network connections can reduce costs, increase bandwidth, and provide a more consistent network experience than internet-based connections. All AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon DynamoDB can be used with AWS Direct Connect.
What is the difference between AWS PrivateLink vs AWS Direct Connect?
AWS Direct Connect is a cloud service that helps us to create a network connection from our location to AWS. It also helps to transfer data through a private connection. Data is transferred between the facilities and AWS. This was previously delivered over the Internet. The advantages of AWS Direct Connect are as follows:
Low network costs
High bandwidth
Stable network
AWS PrivateLink on the other hand streamlines data security. It prevents data from being exposed to the public Internet when exchanged with cloud apps. With PrivateLink, we can connect services across several accounts and VPCs. This results in a simple network architecture. The advantages of PrivateLink are as follows:
Secure Traffic
Simple network management
Ease of Migration
AWS tool to visualize you AWS usage and bills by service
AWS Cost Explorer is a tool provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows users to visualize their AWS usage and bills by service. AWS Cost Explorer allows users to document and manage AWS expenses through cost, usage and Reserved Instance (RI) reports.
AWS Local Zones
AWS Local Zones places compute, storage, database, and other select AWS resources close to large population and industry centers. You can use Local Zones to provide your users with low-latency access to your applications.
What are some reasons for using AWS local zones?
Here are some reasons to use AWS Local Zones.
Run low-latency applications at the edge — Build and deploy applications close to end users to enable real-time gaming, live streaming, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), virtual workstations, and more.
Simplify hybrid cloud migrations — Migrate your applications to a nearby AWS Local Zone, while still meeting the low-latency requirements of hybrid deployment.
Meet stringent data residency requirements — Comply with state and local data residency requirements in sectors such as healthcare, financial services, iGaming, and government.
How does AWS global accelerator work?
Take advantage of the performance, security, and availability of the AWS Global Infrastructure to onboard your user traffic at one of the Global Accelerator edge locations. Users can access your application endpoints through static IP addresses to enjoy deterministic routing independent of DNS.
AWS Global Accelerator uses a global network of 104 Points of Presence in 88 cities across 48 countries.
Which AWS-managed service can be used to process vast amounts of data using a hosted Hadoop framework?
Amazon EMR
Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. EMR utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.
