Hybrid and Migration

Question 1

What is BGP?

Answer 1

Border Gateway Protocol - A protocol that enables routers to exchange networking information for the purposes of path vectoring between a collection of peered ASes (Autonomous Systems).

Question 2

What is the BGP communication protocol?

Answer 2

TCP on port 179.

Question 3

What is an ASN?

Answer 3

Autonomous System Number - a unique 16-bit number allocated to an AS by IANA (private range 64512-65534).

Question 4

What’s the difference between iBGP and eBGP?

Answer 4

The prefix indicates internal (routing within an AS) versus external (routing between ASes).

Question 5

What is an ASPATH?

Answer 5

Autonomous System Path - The routing path or hops between two ASes. The “best” path as identified by BGP is the path with the fewest router hops - not necessarily the fastest based on connection speeds and latency conditions.

Question 6

What is the site-to-site VPN speed limit imposed by AWS?

Answer 6

1.25 Gbps. Also applies to the VGW (Virtual Private Gateway).

Question 7

What’s the main upside of VPNs over other, private connection technologies?

Answer 7

Speed to setup is hours, as it is all software configuration.

Question 8

What is AWS Direct Connect (DX)?

Answer 8

A physical connection into the AWS network from one or more external networks. Not resilient by default.

Specifically, a 1Gpbs or 10Gpbs network port operating at a certain speed belonging to an AWS account.

Question 9

Are DX communications encrypted?

Answer 9

No. But a common work-around is to use a public VIF to connect into a VGW. IPSEC VPN over the public VIF instead of public internet.

Question 10

What is Transit Gateway (TGW)?

Answer 10

A network transit hub which connects VPCs to each other as well as to on-premise networks via site-to-site VPNs and Direct Connect.

TGW is a network gateway product and is thus HA and scalable.

Question 11

Can Transit Gateways peer with each other across regions or across acounts?

Answer 11

Both cross-region and cross-account.

Question 12

When creating Transit Gateway Attachments for VPCs, where are network interfaces placed?

Answer 12

One subnet per AZ in the VPC’s region.

Question 13

When creating Transit Gateway Attachments for VPCs or VPNs, is full transitive routing between VPCs automatically set up?

Answer 13

No. You still need to add routing for the foreign VPC/N’s CIDR that targets the TGW. VPN peers also requires or Transit Gateway Route entries that route to the CGW setup for the VPN.

Question 14

What is Storage Gateway?

Answer 14

A virtual storage appliance designed to run in an existence virtual environment, on-premise or in a datacenter with VMWare.

Question 15

What are the three Storage Gateway modes?

Answer 15

1. Tape Gateway (VTL) Mode - looks like a tape library.
2. File Mode - file shares exposed via SMB or NFS.
3. Volume Mode - Block store volumes exposed over iSCSI.

Question 16

What data size ranges would constitute economical use of Snowball for physical data transfer?

Answer 16

10 TB to 10 PB.

Question 17

What is unique to Snowball Edge over standard Snowball?

Answer 17

Edge has larger capacity and faster networking options, up to 100 Gbps, and can optionally include compute resources to run EC2 instances.

Question 18

What is AWS Directory Service?

Answer 18

A managed service that provides directory services, which can run with AD DS compatibility or SAMBA compatibility.

Question 19

What are the Directory Services modes and functions?

Answer 19

Simple AD - the default with simple requirements, no on-premise connection.
Microsoft AD - for requirements that expect AD DS.
AD Connector - a proxy to an existing on-premise directory.

Question 20

What is AWS DataSync?

Answer 20

An end-to-end managed data transfer service for moving data in/out of AWS, designed to work at huge scale, and by default includes data validation.

Supports encryption, scheduling, throttling, retries, and more.

Question 21

What is FSx?

Answer 21

A file-sharing product for Windows File Server, similar to what EFS offers for Linux.

Question 22

What are some FSx related technologies?

Answer 22

• VSS - User file/folder-level restores with versioning.
• Windows-Native file systems over SMB.
• Uses the Windows permission model.
• Support DFS - Distributed File System for scaling-out file systems in Windows environments.
• Managed - no EC2 admin overhead.
• Integrates with directory services.

Question 23

What is FSx for Lustre?

Answer 23

Managed implementation of the Lustre file system, which is a high performance computing model that supports Linux-style POSIX permissions.