Global Infrastructure and Reliability

Question 1

What must you consider when selecting a region?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What are availability zones?

Answer 2

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

Question 3

What are edge locations?

Answer 3

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

Question 4

What is an API?

Answer 4

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

Question 5

How can you make requests to AWS API’s?

Answer 5

1. 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

2. 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

3. AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs)

Interact with AWS resources using various programming languages (e.g., C++, Java, .NET)

Question 6

What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Answer 6

Provide application code and configurations and EB builds an environment for you

Helps users focus efforts on the business application rather than the infrastructure

Question 7

What is AWS CloudFormation?

Answer 7

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