PAAS

Question 1

What is PAAS?
What does it do?
What used for?

Answer 1

Platform as a Service.
Virtual images ready to deploy your software.
Building cloud applications with SDKs and APIs via basic services.
Used for billing services, handle compute job queuing and launching images.

Question 2

What is “GAE”?

Answer 2

Google App Engine.

Platform for building scalable Web applications.

Question 3

What are some NoSQL features?

Name examples of NoSQL using services?

Answer 3

Automatic scaling.
Changes to underlying data structure possible.
Interface similar to SQL (API with REST calls).
Examples: Google BigTable and Datastore.

Question 4

What is Google BigTable?

Answer 4

A distributed storage system. Designed to scale well.

Deployed on top of HDFS.

Question 5

Difference between SQL and NoSQL?

Answer 5

SQL:
- good for structured data.
- relational database.
- well-defined columns/rows
NoSQL:
- good for unstructured data.
- no schema.
- easy to implement.
- low data consistency reqirement.

Question 6

Name a column based NoSQL database, a document based one and a key-value based one.

Answer 6

Column based: Apache HBase.
Document based: MongoDB.
Key-Value based: Cassandra (Twitter, eBay, Netflix).

Question 7

What is a “sparse table”?

Answer 7

A database table that has many empty fields. It is very inefficient to have such a table.

Question 8

What is Google Big Query?

What does it offer?

Answer 8

A solution for big data analytics.
It offers the power of the Google search engine, fast data scans, easy loading of data from google infrastructure, automatic encryption and replication of data, interactive analysis.

Question 9

What is AppStat?

Answer 9

A GAE SDK library that offers API calls to measure performance of apps. Can show the exact cost of any request to server.

Question 10

Name two games that run on GAE.

Answer 10

Voodoo (a quiz game series).

Angry Birds.

Question 11

What is MemCache?

Answer 11

A cache of recent/frequent queries that can be serviced faster and cheaper by storing especially and checking through before making a query to the main database.

Question 12

What is a TPU?

Answer 12

Tensor Processing Unit. A PAAS service.

Trains and runs machine learning models faster.

Question 13

What is the “Cloud Machine Learning Engine”?

Answer 13

A Google flexible service for ML.

Offers PAAS services for training/testing ML models.