Questions Flashcards
I’ve heard some rumors that the cloud is more expensive so i’d like to learn how this will affect our bottom line — TCO team
I need to better understand the workloads in discussion, perhaps we can have a session around a particular workload and business needs to perform a Total Cost of Ownership analysis.
There may be areas to further cost-optimize workloads for cloud hosting.
If we enter an enterprise relationship with AWS, what discount structures can we expect?
I can give a broad overview of pricing for various services, but to get into a more detailed discussion, including specific discounts, we should have a followup conversation with your Account Manager as well.
On-demand pricing seems to be a good option, but I need to know how much I need to allocate expenses up-front for budget estimation.
On-demand pricing won’t work for us
We also offer saving with our Reserved Capacity (Reserved Instances for example) pricing, where you can fix-priced the cost with 1 or 3 year engagement.
We just bought lots of new hardware and software licenses, do I need to throw them away to move to AWS?
You don’t need to throw away your current investment, many of our customers use AWS to extend their current datacenters and applications, without more large up-front expenses.
How do we prevent costs going out of control?
It’s great that this can enable our developers to be more agile, but what’s to stop them from spinning up a lot of expensive services?
AWS provides robust billing reporting features. One best-practices is to tag resources, which can help break down costs consumed by application area or business unit, etc.
You can create budgets in your AWS account tied to tags and/or services. By setting a threshold, you can configure alerts to be notified when costs start to approach a level you’re not comfortable with.
Budget alerts can also be tied to functions you can create using our Lambda service to take action on the alert.
Using our Identity and Access Management service, you can also define policies which limit the services certain groups of users can interact with. One could be to ensure only smaller computer instances are available to developers in their account.
If we go over a defined budget, are you going to terminate and delete our instances and data?
AWS won’t terminate or delete your data. We provide tools allowing you to define the actions to take based on alerts, but those are for you to define and manage.
Do you support AIX?
AIX isn’t a supported OS, but what are you looking to migrate?
I’d like to go into more detail on that workload. While the OS itself may not be supported, we can go over architectures to support the workload in AWS.
We can’t have competitors on the same hosts as our workloads. Can AWS guarantee we won’t be sharing hardware?
I’m curious what your concerns are?
AWS fully isolates instances from each other, but we do offer Dedicated Hosts which dedicates the underlying host soley for your account’s use.
We’ve invested heavily in X and its licensed per processor ID, so we can’t use cloud virtualization can we?
If you have licensing requirements tied to hardware IDs, AWS offers Bare Metal instances where you have access to the hardware for use cases like this.
What hypervisor do you run?
How do you guarantee isolation between guests?
AWS historically leveraged the Xen hypervisor. Starting in 2018 AWS launched its own hypervisor named Nitro which uses less resources than traditional hypervisors making performance nearly indistinguishable from bare-metal systems. Hypervisor runs in Ring0
VMs run in Ring3/Ring4 and discuss from there.
Isolation between EC2 and EBS - Understanding the communication.
So, EC2 is basically the same as VMware?
While similar to VMware in terms of being virtualized operating systems, EC2 is compute on demand and there are a lot of options to enable your developers and engineers to create resilient applications with AWS managing the underling infrastructure.
VMware is also a partner and it is possible to run VMware on top of EC2 and to integrate with your on-premises VMWare infrastructure.]
You mentioned encryption at rest and in transit, but that’s a heavy hit to compute power. How much overhead is there when enabling encryption?
That depends on where we’re discussing encryption. For example: encrypted EBS volumes you can expect the same IOPs with minimal impact on latency. For SSL between EC2 instances, you can expect similar performance overhead to hosting on-premises.
Where are you most concerned about performance impact? I can dig deeper into this and get back to you with more details.
How do you guarantee we don’t get impacted by “noisy neighbors”?
How do you guarantee the CPU and memory we’ve requested is actually allocated to us and not stolen by another VM?
As we get into architectural discussions with your teams, we have a Well Architected Framework and whitepapers we can leverage for resiliancy designs. With CloudWatch monitoring, actions can be automated for recovering from impacted components.
AWS also offers Dedicated Hosts, which dedicates the underlying host solely for your account’s use, but I would like to look at the requirements in more detail before making a recommendation.
Microsoft offers instances with 64TB of memory. What’s your largest?
What’s the largest machine we can get in terms of memory?
If you can’t offer 64TB, why would we choose you over Azure?
We’re constantly release new instance types so I’ll need to look it up to be sure [pull up https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ if possible]
What are you looking to run on this instance type?
Our app needs sub milisecond response times between components, so we locate VMs in the same rack in our datacenter. Running these in multiple AZs or even across the datacenter from each other is too slow. Can you guarantee they’ll be hosted physically together?
What are placement groups?
I’d like to dive a little deeper in the architecture at some point, but if there are workloads that require specific placement requirements, you can use Placement Groups to define several scenarios:
- Clusters: logical grouping of instances within a single Availability Zone where all nodes can communicate at the full line rate of 10 Gpbs with very low latency
- Partitions: logical groupings of instances, where contained instances do not share the same underlying hardware across different partitions
- Spread: group of instances that are each placed on distinct underlying hardware
Can I bring my Windows Server licenses to AWS?
AWS supports BYOL for Windows and SQL Server, but you will need to check with your enterprise agreement terms as to whether you’re able to leverage this feature.
Do you support Windows Server 2003?
Windows 2003 R2 is available as an AMI, but we can also discuss steps to migrate your workloads to a newer Windows version since Microsoft ended support in 2015.
How often do you patch Amazon Linux and Windows AMIs? What about other OSs?
Amazon Linux is a rolling-release distribution where the latest package versions are available on first boot. The major releases are packaged every 6 months.
Amazon also releases updated Windows AMIs monthly.
For each AMI release, there’s a changelog of included fixes, but once instances are launched from the AMIs, patching is the responsibility of the customer.
You said we can instantly scale, but realistically how long does it take?
This depends on your workload and services and how you choose to configure the instances.
For services like DynamoDB, when you adjust the throughput capacity, the capacity is available as soon as the configuration change is applied.
For an EC2 instance, you’ll want to do some test runs to determine the average OS bootup time and any post-boot configuration management runs to understand how long from initiating an launch to application availability.
Hardware fails and if we’re running thousands of instances, what do you do to guarnatee we’re not losing VMs when your servers crash or fail?
As we get into architectural discussions with your teams, we have a Well Architected Framework and whitepapers we can leverage for resiliancy designs. At a high level, using multiple Availability Zones, Autoscaling Groups, and Eleastic Load Balancers are some best practices around ensuring high availability.
Is there a particular workload you have in mind?
What type of hardware is this going to run on? We are very particular on what we want.
AWS custom designs most of the hardware in our datacenters in order to meet our capacity, resiliency, and maintenance standards. We don’t purchase off-the-shelf hardware. If you want specifics, I can look into getting more details.
Can you share any examples of your particular requirements?
What is a hypervisor ?
A hypervisor is software that runs on a physical machine to support the EC2 instances on that machine. It is a layer that AWS is responsible for and not something that you would have visibiity of. In the Shared Responsibility Model it is an AWS responsibility to secure that layer.
We’re heavily invested in Oracle RAC. Do you support that?
AWS doesn’t natively support Oracle RAC, but there may be partner solutions [FlashGrid?] to leverage if RAC is a requirement. I’d love to sit down and go over this in more detail. There may be other services like Aurora that can provide the high availability and speed you need.
Do you support TDE? (Transparent Data Encryption)
AWS supports encryption at rest and in transit via a variety of methods. Using server-side encryption, you can provide a key or generate one and using the Key Management Service, configure policies for access. Client-side keys are also supported.
Is there a particular use case you have in mind?
