Notes Flashcards
What is Durability?
Durability can be described as the probability that you will eventually be able to get your object back from the storage system from one of the stores and archives
What is Availability?
Availability is the probability that you will be able to get an object back the moment that you ask for it (the object might be persistent but you might not be able to read it all the time)
What are the 5 pillars of the Well-Architected Framework?
- Operational Excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance Efficiency
- Cost Optimization
What are the 4 available plans for AWS Support?
- Basic
- Developer
- Business
- Enterprise
How can you access AWS resources without an AWS Account?
You can authenticate using a corporate portal (SSO) which generates a SAML authentication response. This response is redirected to an AWS console endpoint which gives users account or IAM role access depending on the setup
What type of consistency do new files have in S3?
Read after Write Consistency
What type of consistency do updates to existing files in S3 have?
Eventual consistency
What type of consistency does deletions in S3 have?
Eventual consistency
If you update a file in S3, can you receive the file in a partially updated or corrupted state?
No, changes are atomic meaning that you will either receive the old version or the new version.
What are the 5 storage classes for data?
- Standard
- Reduced Redundancy
- Standard Infrequently Accessed
- One Zone IA
- Archived (Glacier)
If you have data that is highly reproducible and are willing to lose some of it, what is the best storage option without losing availability?
Reduced Redundancy
If you have data that needs strong durability, but does not need to be read often, what is the best storage option without losing availability?
Standard Infrequently Accessed
What is the most cost effective data storage option for data that almost never has to be accessed and does not require immediate access?
Archive in Glacier
What are the 3 encryption options for S3 data at rest?
- SSE-S3 : Fully managed encryption
- SSE-C: Encryption at rest with custom keys that are not stored by AWS
- SSE-KMS : Encryption at rest using keys managed by Amazon Key Management Service (KMS)
What is a way to ensure greater security to protect against deletes in S3?
You can enable multi factor authentication to be able to delete a file
How can you optimize data transfer if latency is an issue (ex. uploading a lot of files)?
S3 Transfer Acceleration
How can you optimize data transfer if transfer speed is an issue (ex. uploading a large file)?
Multi-Part Upload
What AWS service should you use to transfer massive amounts of data into AWS?
Snowball
If you need a hybrid storage solution (both in the cloud and on premises), what service should you use?
Storage Gateway
What are the four gateway types for Storage Gateway?
- File Gateway: For flat files, stored directly in S3
- Cached Volumes Gateway: stores files in the cloud and keeps a local cache to speed up reads. Block based storage for things like Virtual Hard Disks
- Stored Volumes Gateway: optimized for low latency, storing files locally and asynchronously sends a back up point-in-time snapshot to S3. Block based storage for things like Virtual Hard Disks
- Gateway Virtual Tape Library:
Used for backup and uses popular backup applications like NetBackup
What are the requirements to enable Cross Region Replication (CRR) on an S3 bucket?
- Both source and destination bucket must have versioning enabled
What is the default url for a bucket named MYBUCKET with a resource named MYRESOURCE
https://MYBUCKET.s3.amazonaws.com/MYRESOURCE
What is the default url for a static web page hosted in an S3 bucket named MYBUCKET in us-east-1?
https://MYBUCKET.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com
What is Amazon SQS
A message based queue system. The system is a pull based system meaning that consumers of the queue have to read from the queue instead of having the data pushed to them.
What are the 2 types of queues for SQS?
- Standard : Higher throughput, messages delivered at least once, best effort ordering
- FIFO: Lower throughput, messages processed exactly once, guarantees order
What is the visibility timeout in connection with Amazon SQS?
The visibility timeout is the time it takes for a message to become visible again within the queue. If the consumer takes too long to process the data, then the message will become visible again and can be consumed again. The default is 30s and it can be set as high as 12 hours.
What are delay seconds in connection with Amazon SQS?
Delay seconds is the amount of time it takes for a message to become visible within the queue. The default is 0 seconds and it can be set as high as 15 minutes.
What is Long Polling in connection with Amazon SQS?
Long polling reduces the number of polls to the queue from the consumer. It does this by not responding to the consumer until a message is found or a set amount of time has passed.
What is the maximum retention period for Messages in SQS?
14 days
What are the two types of virtual machine images
- HVM (Hardware Virtual Machine): fully virtualized hardware and boot, best performance.
- PV (Paravirtual) : uses a special boot loader that runs on hardware that doesn’t have support for virtualization. Recommended for older generation instances.
What is the Metadata API endpoint?
https://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data
If you are planning on running EC2 instances for several years and want to reduce costs and ensure compliance, what should you use?
Dedicated Hosts or Dedicated Instances
What is the difference between Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated Instances
Dedicated hosts gives you additional visibility and control over the number of instances on your physical server which allows for the use of server bound licenses.
Dedicated Instances are less configurable and don’t allow added capacity.
What is an EBS Volume?
An EBS volume is a block level storage devices that you can attach to a SINGLE ec2 instance. That can be used as primary storage for data that requires frequent updates such as storage for a database application.
How can you back up an EBS volume?
AWS Snapshots. These are point in time, incremental backups of your data. Each snapshot saves the disk changes since the last snapshot.
(T/F) A snapshot is by default available to all regions?
False, a snapshot is only available in the region it was created and must be copied to another region before using it to create new volumes
How can you take application consistent snapshots of your data?
Shut down your EC2 instance and detach the EBS volume. Then take a snapshot
How can you encrypt an EBS volume?
Take a snapshot, encrypt the snapshot, and then create a volume using the encrypted snapshot.
What is Amazon ECS?
AWS Container Service: This is a container management service that can be used to manage and deploy docker containers across clusters of EC2 instances.
What is Dynamo DB?
AWS NoSQL database service
How do you control the performance of a Dynamo DB instance?
Dynamo DB performance is defined using read capacity units and write capacity units.
What is the capacity of a read capacity unit in Dynamo DB?
A read capacity unit means one strongly consistent read per second or two eventually consistent reads per second for up to 4KB in size.
What is the capacity of a write capacity unit in Dynamo DB?
A write capacity unit means one write per second for an item up to 1KB in size.
What is Amazon Redshift?
AWS analytics database. This is often used to do columnar operations on databases (ex. find total number of units sold across all stores). Redshift is commonly used with OLAP (online analytics processing)
What types of databases does Amazon RDS Support?
- Oracle
- Sql Server
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- PostgreSQL
- Amazon Aurora
If you want duplicate a Relational Database for read operations what should you use
Read Replicas
What consistency do Read Replicas of DB’s have
Eventual Consistency
What types of Databases are Read Replicas supported for?
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- PostgreSQL
- Amazon Aurora
Can you encrypt an unencrypted database directly?
No, you have to create a new database that is encrypted and then manually copy over your data.
What can you do to protect the availability of your database against outages or failures?
Use Multi-AZ deployment which will automatically route traffic to the replica upon failure.
What is AWS VPC?
Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud which allows you to create complex private networks in the cloud.
What is AWS Cloudwatch?
Cloudwatch is a service that allows you to collect metrics, logs, and monitor provisioned resources such as EC2 instances. You can also create dashboards and alerts around these metrics (stored for 15 months by default)
What is AWS SWF?
Amazons Simple Workflow Service allows you to define and run workflows with parallel or sequential steps. This is a push based system than can allow for manual (human) steps.
What are AWS Organizations?
Organizations allow policy based managements for multiple aws accounts, creation of groups of accounts, and a centralized billing location for multiple accounts with consolidated billing.
(T/F) When using consolidated billing, the payment account should only be used for billing purposes?
True
What is the benefit of consolidated billing?
Volume based pricing can reduce costs for large volumes of use.
What are the benefits of tagging resources in AWS?
Tags can be used for Cost Allocation and Conditional Access Control Policies which define permission based on tags
What is a resource group?
A collection of resources that share one or more tags
What are some ways you can mitigate against a DDOS attack?
- Distribute the load (ELB)
- Scale to absorb the attack (auto scaling)
- Use CloudWatch to analyze expected traffic
- Safeguard resources by using aliases to hide IPs
- Use CloudFront geo restriction
- NACLs
T/F IAM is restricted to the region it was created in?
False. IAM roles are global
What is RTO?
Recovery Time Objective: The time it takes after a disruption to restore a business process to its service level.
What is RPO?
Recovery Point Objective: Acceptable amount of data loss measured in time before the disaster occurs
What are the four techniques for disaster recovery from the Disaster Recovery White paper
- Backup & Restore: Data is backed up and restored. Nothing is running in the meantime
- Pilot light: Only minimal critical services while the rest are recreated and scaled
- Warm Standby: Fully functional site with minimal configuration is available and can be scaled during recovery
- Multi-site: Fully functional site with identical configuration is available and picks up the load
You need to monitor the performance of your EC2 instances (including metrics such as CPU Utilization, Disk IO, etc.) Which service would best meet this requirement?
a) Cloudaudit
b) CloudWatch
c) CloudTrail
d) CloudMonitor
b) Cloudwatch
Which AWS service is used for collating large amounts of data streamed from multiple sources?
a) Kinesis
b) SQS
c) Cloudcapture
d) CloudFront
a) Kinesis
Which AWS service is a Content Delivery Network?
a) CloudFront
b) CloudStream
c) CloudPush
d) CloudFormation
a) CloudFront
Which of the following is a petabyte scale data transfer solution?
a) Snowball
b) SQS
c) SWF
d) Avalanche
a) Snowball
You need a service that will aggregate your data from multiple sources (S3, DynamoDB, RDS, etc.) and provide business intelligence based on this data. Which AWS service should you use?
a) Spice
b) CloudViewer
c) Quick Sight
d) CloudOracle
c) Quick Sight
- Quick Sight is a fast cloud powered business analytic service that makes it easy to build visualizations, perform analysis, and quickly get business insight from your data.
Your system administrators need to receive notification of specified events affecting your AWS environment such as alarms. Which service should you enable?
a) Mobile Hub
b) Device Farm
c) SNS
d) Cognito
c) SNS
What AWS Service would you use primarily for data warehousing?
a) Redshift
b) DynamoDB
c) DMS
d) RDS
Redshift
Which AWS service would you use to migrate a database from Oracle to MySQL?
a) Redshift
b) DMS
c) RDS
d) Elasticache
c) DMS - AWS Database Migration Service
Which AWS service allows you to run code without having to worry about provisioning any underlying resources (such as VMs, databases, etc.)
a) Lambda
b) EC2 Container Service
c) DynamoDB
d) EC2
a) Lambda
You need to implement an automated service that will scan your AWS environment with the goal of both improving security and reducing costs
a) Service Catalog
b) Config Rules
c) CloudTrail
d) Trusted Advisor
d) Trusted Advisor
An AWS VPC is a component of which group of AWS services?
a) Networking Services
b) Global Infrastructure
c) Compute Services
d) Database Services
a) Networking Services
You need a configuration management service that will allow your system administrators to use Chef to configure and operate your web applications. Which AWS service would best suit your needs?
a) CloudTrail
b) OpsWorks
c) CloudWatch
d) Trusted Advisor
b) OpsWorks
Your company is interested in implementing a VDI solution to replace their local desktop environment. Which AWS service should you consider?
a) ioT
b) WorkMail
c) WorkDocs
d) WorkSpaces
WorkSpaces
What is the fundamental difference between Elastic BeanStalk and CloudFormation?
Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment of your code – from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring – based on the code you upload to it, whereas CloudFormation is an automated provisioning engine designed to deploy entire cloud environments via a JSON script.
What does an AWS Region consist of?
A distinct location within a geographic area designed to provide high availability to a specific geography.
Which AWS service is specifically designed to automatically provision the resources required to host the code a developer uploads during the Development process?
a) CloudFormer
b) Elastic Beanstalk
c) CloudFormation
d) CloudTrail
b) Elastic Beanstalk
Which AWS service is specifically designed to assist you in processing large data sets?
a) Elasticache
b) Big data Processing
c) EMR
d) EC2
c) EMR - a service that makes it easy to process large amounts of data efficiently
Which AWS service is effectively a NAS in the cloud, allowing you to connect it to multiple EC2 instances at once?
a) SQS
b) SNS
c) EBS
d) EFS
d) EFS
You need to add new users to your AWS account and set password rotation policies for these new users. Which AWS service should you use to do so?
a) IAM
b) Inspector
c) Directory Service
d) Key Management Service
a) IAM
Which of the following services connects an on-premise software appliance (or virtual machine) with cloud based storage?
a) S3
b) Snowball
c) Storage Gateway
d) Glacier
c) Storage Gateway
Your digital media agency needs to convert its media files to formats that can be viewed on a variety of devices. Which AWS service should you use to meet this need?
a) SQS
b) SWF
c) Appstream
d) Elastic Transcoder
d) Elastic Transcoder
Amazon’s highly scalable DNS service is known as
a) Directory Service
b) Route 53
c) CloudTrail
d) Elastic Map Reduce
b) Route53
Describe Availability Zones
Distinct locations from within an AWS region that are engineered to be isolated from failures.
You need to supply auditors with logs showing which Users provisioned given resources on your AWS infrastructure. Which service would best satisfy this need?
a) CloudFormation
b) OpsWorks
c) CloudTrail
d) CloudWatch
c) CloudTrail - a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of you AWS account.
(T/F) Using SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0), you can give your federated users single sign-on (SSO) access to the AWS Management Console.
True
Power User Access allows ________.
Access to all AWS services except the management of groups and users within IAM
You have created a new AWS account for your company and are about to create your new users. What is a good strategy to consider in order to ensure that there is good security on these accounts?
Enact a strong password policy: user passwords must be changed every 45 days, with each password containing a combination of capital letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special symbols.
T/F You only need to set up Users AND Policy documents only once, as these are applied globally?
True
What is the default level of access a newly created IAM User is granted?
No access to any AWS services
T/F IAM allows you to setup biometric authentication, so that no passwords are required?
False
What is a Policy?
A document that provides a formal statement of one or more permissions
What language are policy documents written in?
JSON
What are 3 ways to allow users to have secure access to private files located in S3?
- Cloudfront Origin Access Identity
- CloudFront Signed URLs
- CloudFront Signed Cookies
How many S3 buckets can I have per account by default?
a) 10
b) 20
c) 50
d) 100
d) 100
S3 has eventual consistency for which HTTP Methods?
overwrite PUTS and DELETES
What is AWS Storage Gateway?
It is a virtual appliance that can be used to cache S3 locally at the customers site.
You run a popular photo sharing website that depends on S3 to store content. Paid advertising is your primary source of revenue. However, you have discovered that other websites are linking directly to the images in your buckets, not to the HTML pages that serve the content. This means that people are not seeing the paid advertising, and you are paying AWS unnecessarily to serve content directly from S3. How might you resolve this issue?
Remove the ability for images to be served publicly to the site and then use signed URLs with expiry dates.
You work for manufacturing company who operate a hybrid infrastructure with systems located both in a local Datacentre and in AWS, connected via Direct Connect. Currently, all on premise servers are backed up to a local NAS, but your CTO wants you decide on the best way to store copies of these backups in AWS. He has asked you to propose a solution which; maintains maximum durability, on-demand access to the files, but minimizes cost. Choose the best option from the following which meets the brief.
a) S3 One Zone IA
b) S3 Standard
c) S3 Reduced Redundancy
d) Copy thee files to an EC2 instance with a large EBS volume attached
a) S3 One Zone IA
What is the minimum file size I can store on S3?
0 bytes
(T/F) I can move a reserved instance from one region to another?
False
What is the underlying HyperVisor for EC2 (choose 2)
a) Hyper-V
b) Xen
c) Nitro
d) OVM
e) ESX
b) and c)
Xen and Nitro
(T/F) I can change the permission on a role, even if that role is already assigned to an existing EC2 instance, and these changes will take effect immediately.
True
The use of a placement group is ideal _____
a) Your fleet of EC2 instances requires high network throughput and low latency within a single availability zone.
b) When you need to distribute content on a CDN network.
c) When you need to deploy EC2 instances that require high disk IO.
d) Your fleet of EC2 Instances requires low latency and high network throughput across multiple availability zones.
a) Your fleet of EC2 instances requires high network throughput and low latency within a single availability zone.
(T/F) You can add multiple volumes to an EC2 instance and then create your own RAID 5/RAID 10/RAID 0 configurations using those volumes.
True
What is RAID?
RAID, short for redundant array of independent disks, is a disk subsystem that stores your data across multiple disks to either increase the performance or provide fault tolerance to your system (some levels provide both).
(T/F) You can delete a snapshot of an EBS Volume that is used as the root device of a registered AMI?
False. The emphasis is if the snapshot is of a volume that is still registered.
If you need to know both the private IP address and public IP address of your EC2 instance you should ____
a) Run IPCONFIG (Windows) or IFCONFIG (Linux)
b) Retrieve the instance metadata from http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data
c) Use the following command: AWS EC2 DisplayIP
d) b) Retrieve the instance Userdata from http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data
b) Retrieve the instance metadata from http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data
Will an Amazon EBS root volume persist independently from the life of the terminated EC2 instance to which it was previously attached? In other words, if I terminated an EC2 instance, would that EBS root volume persist?
a) Only if I specify that it should do so
b) yes
c) no
d) It depends on the region in which the EC2 instance is provisioned
a) Only if I specify that it should do so
You want to ensure that traffic from Asia is directed to the India Region. What two routing policies would allow you to accomplish that?
Route 53: Geoproximity and Geolocation routing policies