Global Infrastructure and Reliability Flashcards
What must you consider when selecting a region?
Compliance requirements – e.g. is data allowed to be shared outside of the UK?
Proximity – distance from region to the actual customer base
Feature availability – sometimes the closest region may not have the features you need. Newer features are often rolled out region by region
Pricing – AWS is more expensive in some regions than others
What are availability zones?
AZs are single data centres or a group of data centres within a region
These are isolated, physically separate locations-based tens of miles apart
This is close enough to maintain low latency (speed)
Using more than one EC2 instance can allow you to take advantage of multiple AZs and better contingency in the event of a disaster. Best practice is to run across at least two AZs
What are edge locations?
Run Amazon CloudFront to store cached copies of content closer to your customers for faster delivery
Pushes content from inside a region to a collection of edge locations around the world to accelerate communication and content delivery
Also run Domain Name Service (DNS) called Amazon Route 53 help direct customers to the correct web locations with reliably low latency
E.g. if data is stored in Brazil and customers are based in China, you can cache a copy locally at an edge location. CloudFront retrieves this and sends it to a customer. The file is delivered to the customer faster as it came from an edge location rather than the original source in Brazil
What is an API?
Application Programming Interface
Used to interact with the AWS resources and services
E.g. make an API call to launch an EC2 instance or create a Lambda function
How can you make requests to AWS API’s?
- AWS Management Console
Web-based interface for accessing and managing AWS services
Quickly access recently used services
Useful for building test environments
View monitoring, alarms and billing information on mobile app
- AWS Command Line Interface (CLI)
Make API calls using terminal on machine, rather than visual navigation of the console
Run pre-written commands and scripts for efficiency and less human error
- AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs)
Interact with AWS resources using various programming languages (e.g., C++, Java, .NET)
What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
Provide application code and configurations and EB builds an environment for you
Helps users focus efforts on the business application rather than the infrastructure
What is AWS CloudFormation?
Users can define what they want using templates and CF handles the detail to implement it
Helps repeatedly build infra and apps without having to perform manual actions
