Performance Efficiency - Architecture improvement and monitoring

Question 1

Improvement Considerations - Usage

Answer 1

• Unexpected usage patterns, poor performance, availability of new services (or updates), and new features / requests
• Considerations for future: repeatable builds, rebuildable infrastructure, controlled tests, utilize CI/CD

Question 2

Improvement Considerations - CI/CD and CloudFormation

Answer 2

• Regarding CI/CD: artifacts (source code infrastructure), builds (compile, validate), deployments (infrastructure and application), tests (automation, integration, performance), releases to real users, and gathering of metrics
• Use CloudFormation to automate infrastructure creation, ensure consistency, and better dependency management

Question 3

Monitoring Considerations

Answer 3

• Key points: focus on what to monitor, then practice, and finally improve
• What to monitor? Resources, application errors, and how the resources and applications work together
• How to respond to the gathered metrics?
• Ignore to assess more important issues, or
• Response manually. It’s not recommended to do it frequently, or
• Automate the response, or
• Modify the resources or applications as an strategic step

Question 4

Monitoring Considerations - Observer effect

Answer 4

• When simply observing a situation it necessarily changes that situation
• By adding monitoring, it also adds work to the application. So must focus on what to monitor, and not monitor everything

Question 5

CloudWatch - Characteristics 1

Answer 5

• It’s a monitoring and observability service that provides data and actionable insights. It allows to monitor applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health
• Support two types of metrics: built in, and custom (embedded on the application)
• Can gather data also of on-premises
• CloudWatch Logs store, access, and monitor logs generated from external sources or CloudTrail
• CloudWatch Metrics allow to store, search, visualize, and monitor metrics of AWS resources and applications

Question 6

CloudWatch - Characteristics 2

Answer 6

• Pay for what you use
• Keeps 14 days of historical data
• Provides these actions: autoscaling, notifications to people, and events that can trigger lambda functions
• Provides analytics based on historical data: trends that give insights about users, and infrastructure and applications usage

Question 7

CloudWatch - API Gateway Integration

Answer 7

• Access logging: captures which resource accessed an API and the method used
• Execution logging: captures user request, response payload and error traces