Module 2: Compute in the cloud Flashcards
What is an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance?
An AWS server you can deploy to
What are the 5 instance types?
- General purpose
- Compute optimized
- Memory optimized
- Accelerated computing
- Storage optimized
What are the features of a general purpose EC2 instance?
Balances compute, memory and networking resources
Suitable for a broad range of workloads
What are the features of a compute optimized EC2 instance?
Offers high-performance processors
Ideal for compute-intensive applications and batch processing workloads
What are features of memory optimized EC2 instances?
Delivers fast performance for memory-intensive workloads
Well suited for high-performance databases
What are the features of accelerated computing EC2 instances? What is the EC2 ideal for?
Uses hardware accelerators to expedite data processing
Ideal for applications streaming and graphics workloads
What are the features of storage optimized EC2 instances? What is the instance ideal for? (the use case)
Offers low latency and high input/output per second
Suitable for workloads such as distributed file systems and data warehousing applications
What are the 6 pricing options for EC2 instances and their definitions?
- On-demand - No upfront cost or minimum contract. Ideal for short-term, irregular workloads
- Spot - Like picking stock price. Ideal for workloads with flexible start and end times. Offers savings over on-demand prices.
- Reserved - Provides a billing discount over On-Demand pricing. Required a 1 OR 3 years commitment.
- Compute savings plan - Offers up to 72% savings over on-demand costs fir a consistent amount of compute usage. Requires 1 OR 3 year commitment.
- Dedicated instance - An EC2 instance that runs in a VPC on hardware for a single customer. Higher cost to standard EC2 instances
- Dedicated host - A physical server with EC2 instance capacity for a single customer. Most expensive EC2 option.
What is Amazon’s EC2 Auto-Scaling service?
The number of EC2 servers will automatically scale out or in when demand/computing requirements fluctuate.
What does and Elastic Load Balancer do? (2)
Automatically distributes traffic across multiple resources
Provides a single point of contact for your Auto Scaling group
What are the 2 Amazon Messaging services?
Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Simple Queue Service (SQS)
What are the main differences between SNS and SQS?
SNS is a publisher-subscriber messaging service where it doesn’t consider the implications of the message being sent (Doesn’t need a response). Good for messaging only.
SQS sends a message/request to a server and if there is no response then it addes it to a queue for the next available server. Good for sequential automations
What is AWS Lambda?
Serverless computing service.
Run code without managing servers. Only pay for the compute time whilst the code is running. Can be used in tandem with other AWS services to automatically trigger code.
Considered the ‘glue’ between services in the cloud. Helps automation e.g. Netflix receives a video with high resolution and uses Lambda to compress the file/change the resolution so it can be streamed and viewed on different devices.
E.g. Cloud guru - Static HTML that is serverless - no instances.
What are containers?
A standardised way to package the code necessary to run an application
What are the 3 categories of container services provided by AWS?
Orchestrate
Compute
Tools (Don’t need to know about this one)
