Key Services (Cloud) Flashcards
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed serverless service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. APIs act as the “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your backend services.
Amazon Athena
SQL Query Service
Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive analytics/query service built on open-source frameworks, supporting open-table and file formats, that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Amazon Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.
Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. The AWS Product team is responsible for applying patches to the underlying OS for AWS Aurora. You cannot use Amazon Aurora for SQL analysis on S3 based data. Schema change on a relational database is not easy and straight-forward as it is on a NoSQL database. Amazon Aurora does not support flexible schema.
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. It cannot be used to improve application availability and performance using the AWS global network. It is a global service.
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. Amazon CloudWatch provides data and actionable insights to monitor applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. This is an excellent service for building Resilient systems. Think resource performance monitoring, events, and alerts; think CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch cannot be used to block users from certain geographies. Amazon CloudWatch cannot help in identifying the right AWS services to build solutions on AWS Cloud. It cannot provide the status of your AWS resources. Amazon CloudWatch does not offer any recommendations vis-a-vis AWS best practices for cost optimization, security, and performance improvement. Amazon CloudWatch does not provide the general status of AWS services availability for all Regions. You can create an CloudWatch alarm that sends an email message using Amazon SNS when the alarm changes state from OK to ALARM. The alarm changes to the ALARM state when the average CPU use of an EC2 instance exceeds a specified threshold for consecutive specified periods.
Amazon DocumentDB
Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed native JSON document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. It is easy and cost effective to operate critical document workloads at virtually any scale without managing infrastructure.
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond high-performance at any scale. It’s a fully managed, multi-Region, multi-master, durable, serverless, key-value NoSQL database with built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications. You cannot use Amazon DynamoDB for SQL analysis on S3 based data. DynamoDB is not free and you are charged for reading, writing, and storing data in your DynamoDB tables, along with any optional features you choose to enable. Amazon DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases to AWS so that they don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, throughput capacity planning, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling. You can use Amazon DynamoDB to store recommendation results with the LEAST operational overhead for any scale. Amazon DynamoDB enables developers to build modern, serverless applications that can start small and scale globally to support petabytes of data and tens of millions of read and write requests per second. This enables Amazon DynamoDB to have a flexible schema, so each row can have any number of columns at any point in time. This allows you to easily adapt the tables as your business requirements change, without having to redefine the table schema as you would in relational databases. DynamoDB offers built-in security, continuous backups, automated multi-region replication, in-memory caching, and data export tools.
Amazon DAX
Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, highly available caching service built for Amazon DynamoDB.
Amazon EBS
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is an easy to use, high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances for both throughput and transaction-intensive workloads at any scale. A broad range of workloads, such as relational and non-relational databases, enterprise applications, containerized applications, big data analytics engines, file systems, and media workflows are widely deployed on Amazon EBS. For the Cloud Practitioner exam, you should consider that an EBS volume can only be mounted to one EC2 instance at a time, so this option is not correct for the given use-case. As a special case, you should note that Amazon EBS Multi-Attach enables you to attach a single Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1 or io2) volume to multiple nitro based instances that are in the same Availability Zone (AZ). It is a block-storage service and not a file storage service. Encryption (at rest and during transit) is an optional feature for EBS and has to be enabled by the user.
Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the AWS cloud with support for per-second billing, and access to the underlying OS. Hence, it comes under Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) type of Cloud Computing. EC2 can provision virtual servers on AWS Cloud and access the underlying OS. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. This is not a free service. You pay for what you use or depending on the plan you choose. You cannot use EC2 to store and deploy docker container images. You cannot use EC2 to plan, schedule and execute your batch computing workloads by provisioning underlying resources. It is NOT a serverless solution. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Maintaining the server and its software has to be done by the customer; EC2 cannot handle the application deployment automatically. This is a regional service. EC2 cannot be used to decouple components of a microservices-based application.
Amazon ECR
Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) can be used to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images so they can be run by ECS or Fargate. Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) eliminates the need to operate your container repositories.
Amazon ECS
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, fast, high-performance container management service that makes it easy to run, stop, and manage Docker containers on a cluster and allows you to easily run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. You cannot use Amazon ECS to store and deploy docker container images. Amazon ECS allows you to launch Docker containers on AWS, but unlike AWS Fargate, this is not a fully managed service and you need to manage the underlying servers yourself; you must provision and maintain the infrastructure. It is not serverless. Amazon ECS cannot handle the application deployment automatically.
Amazon EFS
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a simple, scalable, elastic, cloud-native fully managed NFS file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It is built to scale on-demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, eliminating the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth. Amazon EFS is designed to provide massively parallel shared access to thousands of Amazon EC2 instances, enabling your applications to achieve high levels of aggregate throughput and IOPS with consistent low latencies. It is accessible from Linux instances via the NFS protocol. Amazon EFS supports two forms of encryption for file systems, encryption of data in transit and encryption at rest. This is an optional feature and has to be enabled by user if needed.
Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that helps users deploy, manage, and scale in-memory caches in the cloud.
Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR (formerly Elastic MapReduce) is the industry-leading cloud big data solution for petabyte-scale data processing, interactive analytics, and machine learning using open-source frameworks and tools such as Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache HBase, Apache Flink, Apache Hudi, and Presto. Amazon EMR can be used to provision resources to run big data workloads on Hadoop clusters. Amazon EMR provisions EC2 instances to manage its workload. Amazon EMR is not a serverless service.
Amazon ETL
Amazon Web Services (AWS) ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) is a set of tools and services that helps move data from one system to another.
Amazon Eventbridge
Amazon EventBridge is a service that provides real-time access to changes in data in AWS services, your own applications, and software as a service (SaaS) applications without writing code. Amazon EventBridge Scheduler is a serverless task scheduler that simplifies creating, executing, and managing millions of schedules across AWS services without provisioning or managing underlying infrastructure.
Amazon FSx
Amazon FSx (File System X) makes it easy and cost effective to launch, run, and scale 3rd party feature-rich, high-performance file systems in the cloud.
Amazon FSx for Lustre
Amazon FSx for Lustre is a secure and stable Linux distribution specifically designed for use on EC2 instances. For compute-intensive and fast processing workloads, like high-performance computing (HPC), machine learning, EDA, and media processing, Amazon FSx for Lustre, provides a file system that’s optimized for performance, with input and output stored on Amazon S3. There is a one-minute minimum charge for Linux based EC2 instances.
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed, highly reliable, and scalable file storage that is accessible over the industry-standard Service Message Block (SMB) protocol. It is built on Windows Server, delivering a wide range of administrative features such as user quotas, end-user file restore, and Microsoft Active Directory (AD) integration. To support a wide spectrum of workloads, Amazon FSx provides high levels of throughput, IOPS and consistent sub-millisecond latencies. Amazon FSx is accessible from Windows, Linux, and macOS compute instances and devices. For Windows-based applications, Amazon FSx provides fully managed Windows file servers with features and performance optimized for “lift-and-shift” business-critical application workloads including home directories (user shares), media workflows, and ERP applications. It is accessible from Windows and Linux instances via the SMB protocol.
Amazon GuardDuty
Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that monitors malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS account. Amazon GuardDuty analyzes billions of events across your AWS accounts from AWS CloudTrail (AWS user and API activity in your accounts), Amazon VPC Flow Logs (network traffic data), and DNS Logs (name query patterns). This service is for AWS account level access, not for instance-level management like an EC2. GuardDuty cannot be used to check OS vulnerabilities. Amazon GuardDuty cannot be used to protect from web exploits such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
Amazon Inspector
Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on your Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications for exposure, vulnerabilities, and deviations from best practices. After performing an assessment, Amazon Inspector produces a detailed list of security findings prioritized by level of severity. These findings can be reviewed directly or as part of detailed assessment reports which are available via the Amazon Inspector console or API. Amazon Inspector cannot be used to prevent Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. Amazon Inspector cannot provide secure shell access to EC2 instances. It cannot provide the status of your AWS resources. Inspector does not offer any recommendations vis-a-vis AWS best practices for cost optimization, security, and performance improvement. Amazon Inspector cannot be used to protect from web exploits such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information.
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams enables you to build custom applications that process or analyze streaming data for specialized needs. You can continuously add various types of data such as clickstreams, application logs, and social media to an Amazon Kinesis data stream from hundreds of thousands of sources. Within seconds, the data will be available for your Amazon Kinesis Applications to read and process from the stream.
Amazon Lightsail
Amazon Lightsail is an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers you everything needed to build an application or website, or launch and manage a virtual private server with AWS. Amazon Lightsail offers several preconfigured, one-click-to-launch operating systems, development stacks, and web applications, including Linux, Windows OS, and WordPress. Lightsail plans include everything you need to jumpstart your project: a virtual machine, SSD- based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP address. Amazon Lightsail comes with monthly payment plans and does not support per second billing.
Amazon Macie
Amazon Macie is a fully managed data security and data privacy service that uses machine learning and pattern matching to discover and protect your sensitive data in AWS. Macie automatically provides an inventory of Amazon S3 buckets including a list of unencrypted buckets, publicly accessible buckets, and buckets shared with AWS accounts outside those you have defined in AWS Organizations. Then, Macie applies machine learning and pattern matching techniques to the buckets you select to identify and alert you to sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII). This service is for securing data and has nothing to do with an EC2 security assessment. Macie cannot be used to check OS vulnerabilities.
Amazon Managed Blockchain
Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB) is a fully managed service designed to help you build resilient Web3 applications on both public and private blockchains. Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the popular open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. It allows multiple parties to execute transactions without the need of a trusted, central authority.
Amazon MQ
Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers on AWS. Amazon MQ reduces your operational responsibilities by managing the provisioning, setup, and maintenance of message brokers for you. Because Amazon MQ connects to your current applications with industry-standard APIs and protocols, you can easily migrate to AWS without having to rewrite code. If you’re using messaging with existing applications, and want to move the messaging functionality to the cloud quickly and easily, AWS recommends you consider Amazon MQ. It supports industry-standard APIs and protocols so you can switch from any standards-based message broker to Amazon MQ without rewriting the messaging code in your applications. If you are building brand new applications in the cloud, AWS recommends you consider Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS.
Amazon Neptune
Amazon Neptune is a serverless fully managed graph database service designed for superior scalability and availability. Amazon Neptune Analytics is an analytics database engine for quickly analyzing large volumes of graph data to get insights and find trends from data stored in Amazon S3 buckets or a Neptune database. Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, fully-managed graph database service that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets. It’s not the right fit to store recommendation results with the LEAST operational overhead for any scale.
Amazon OpenSearch Service
Amazon OpenSearch Service makes it easy for you to perform interactive log analytics, real-time application monitoring, website search, and more. OpenSearch is an open source, distributed search and analytics suite derived from Elasticsearch.
Amazon Pinpoint
Amazon Pinpoint allows marketers and developers to deliver customer-centric engagement experiences by capturing customer usage data to draw real-time insights. Pinpoint cannot be used to debug performance issues for this serverless application built using a microservices architecture.
Amazon Polly
Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Polly’s Text-to-Speech (TTS) service uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize natural sounding human speech.
Amazon Quicksight
Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business intelligence (BI) service that makes it easy for you to deliver insights to everyone in your organization. You can create and publish interactive dashboards.
Amazon RDS
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is an AWS regional managed cloud database service that helps organizations easily set up, operate, and scale relational databases in the AWS cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need. It offers a variety of database engines, including: Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts. RDS can encrypt your database instances. Data that is encrypted at rest includes the underlying storage for DB instances, its automated backups, read replicas, and snapshots. Encryption for RDS is an additional feature and the user needs to enable it. Schema change on a relational database is not easy and straight-forward as it is on a NoSQL database. Amazon RDS does not support flexible schema. Amazon RDS is less operationally efficient than Amazon DynamoDB while building a highly scalable solution.
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a fully-managed, petabyte-scale cloud-based data warehouse service designed for large scale data set storage and analysis, that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data. Amazon Redshift does not support flexible schema. Amazon Redshift is the most popular and fastest cloud data warehouse. Though analytics can be run on Redshift, in the current use case, old data is residing on S3, and Athena is the right choice since analytics can be run directly while data is sitting on S3. You cannot use Amazon Redshift for SQL analysis on S3 based data.
Amazon Rekognition
Amazon Rekognition is a Software as a Service (Saas) model that can add image and video analysis to your applications using proven, highly scalable, deep learning technology that requires no machine learning expertise. Amazon Rekognition can identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities in images and videos as well as detect any inappropriate content. Amazon Rekognition also provides highly accurate facial analysis and facial search capabilities that you can use to detect, analyze, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, people counting, and public safety use cases.
Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53 provides highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service, domain name registration, Routing Policy, and health-checking web services. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. It cannot be used to improve application availability and performance using the AWS global network. Amazon Route 53 cannot provide secure shell access to EC2 instances. You cannot use Amazon Route 53 to connect your on-premises network with AWS Cloud.
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. As S3 is object-based storage, so it cannot be used for file sharing between instances. S3 service is not free and you pay to depend on the storage class you choose for your data. It is not a database service. Amazon S3 is a unique service in the sense that it follows a global namespace but the buckets are regional. You specify an AWS Region when you create your Amazon S3 bucket. This is a regional service.
Amazon SNS
Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a highly available, durable, secure, fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables you to decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications for both application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communication. The A2A pub/sub functionality provides topics for high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging between distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven serverless applications. Amazon SNS allows applications to send time-critical messages to multiple subscribers through a “push” mechanism, which implies that the receiving applications have to be present and running to receive the messages. Using Amazon SNS topics, your publisher systems can fan-out messages to a large number of subscriber endpoints for parallel processing, including Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions, and HTTP/S webhooks. Additionally, SNS can be used to fan out notifications to end users using mobile push, SMS, and email.
Amazon SQS
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) is a reliable, highly scalable fully managed message queuing service for storing messages as they travel between computers. It enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Amazon SQS lets you easily move data between distributed application components and helps you build applications in which messages are processed independently (with message-level ack/fail semantics), such as automated workflows. SQS offers two types of message queues - Standard queues vs FIFO queues. SQS cannot be used to monitor CPU utilization for EC2 instances or send emails. It is not a pub/sub messaging service, and it uses a pull-based system. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available.