Services - Management and Governance Flashcards
1
Q
Auto Scaling - Characteristics
A
- Monitors applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost
- There’s no charge for using this service
- From a single UI can configure automatic scaling policies for multiple resources like:
- EC2 instances and Spot Fleets
- ECS tasks
- DynamoDB tables and global secondary indexes
- Aurora Replicas
- Can also select to auto-scale an application defined in a CloudFormation stack or in Elastic Beanstalk
2
Q
Auto Scaling - Steps for CloudFormation application
A
- Select the CloudFormation stack used for your application
- Auto scaling will identify the supported resource types that can be scaled
- Create and review a scaling plan, which is a unit that consists of several resource items
- Select a scaling strategy: scale with availability, cost savings, or a balance of both
- Based on the scaling strategy, Auto scaling will create the target tracking scaling policies for each resource
3
Q
Auto Scaling - Scaling recommendations
A
- Based on the most popular scaling metrics and thresholds used for auto scaling
- Also calculate the minimum and maximum limits between which your resources will scale. At any time you can quickly gauge the minimum / maximum performance cost of your environment
4
Q
Auto Scaling - Scaling strategies
A
- Availability: a low resource utilization target is used to ensure capacity to absorb spikes on demand
- Balance strategy: a moderate resource utilization target is used to provide high availability and reduce costs
- Cost strategy: a high resource utilization target is used to optimize usage and reduce costs
- Custom strategy: can set your own target resource utilization with your own values
5
Q
Auto Scaling - Target tracking scaling policies
A
- Lets you select a metric and set a target value. So it creates and manage CloudWatch alarms that trigger the scaling policy and calculates the scaling adjustment based on the metric and the target value
- Adds / removes capacity as required to keep the metric at or close to the specified target value
- Also it self‑optimizes to adjust to changes in the metric due to a changing load pattern. Therefore, it reduces the fluctuations in the capacity of that target
6
Q
Auto Scaling - EC2 scaling options
A
- Maintain current instance levels at all times: a periodic health check is performed on running instances. When there’s an unhealthy instance, it’s terminated and a new one is created
- Scale manually: when you specify only the minimum, maximum, or desired capacity of your Auto Scaling group
- Scale based on a schedule: scaling actions are performed automatically as a function of time and date. Useful when you know when to increase or decrease the number of instances
- Scale based on demand: using dynamic scaling, lets you define a scaling policy that dynamically resizes your Auto Scaling group to meet changes in demand
- Predictive scaling: when you want to increase instances in advance of daily and weekly patterns in traffic flows
7
Q
Auto Scaling - EC2 auto scaling group characteristics
A
- Can schedule scaling to increase / decrease capacity at preset times
- Cooldown period, measured in seconds, is a setting that ensures that the Auto Scaling group doesn’t launch or terminate additional instances before the previous scaling activity takes effect
- Lifecycle hooks allow to put the instances to be terminated into a wait state. Can perform custom activities during the wait state. The default wait period is 1 hour
- Termination policy allows to specify which instances to terminate first during scale in
8
Q
Backup - Characteristics 1
A
- It’s a managed service that centralizes and automate data protection across AWS services, in the cloud, and on-premises
- Supports automatic backups, centralized backup monitoring, and backups retention as long as they are needed
- Supports cross-region backups, cross-account management and cross-account backups
- Pay only for the amount of backup storage used and the amount of backup restored per month
9
Q
Backup - Characteristics 2
A
- Integrates with CloudTrail to register activity logs, and SNS for notification delivery
- Uses backup vaults to offer encryption and resource-based access policies to define who has access to them
- Supports encryption of backup data, additional to the encryption of the resources being backed up
- Some AWS resources support incremental backups. A full backup is performed only the first time
10
Q
Backup - Policy-based backups
A
- Can create backup policies, known as backup plans to define backup requirements
- Can create separate backup plans to meet business and regulatory compliance requirements
11
Q
Backup - Supported resources
A
- FSx
- EFS, EBS
- RDS databases, Aurora clusters, DynamoDB tables
- EC2 instances
- Storage Gateway volumes
12
Q
Config - Characteristics
A
- It’s a managed service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources
- Continuously monitors and records your resource configuration
- Payment is based on the number of configuration items recorded, number of active AWS Config rule evaluations, and number of conformance pack evaluations in your account
- Can also be used to discover existent resources
- Can help to troubleshoot operational issues by identifying recent configuration changes
13
Q
Config - How it works
A
- A configuration change occurs in any AWS resource
- Config records and normalizes changes in a consistent format
- Changes history and snapshot files are delivered to a S3 bucket, accessed through Config API, and alerts are optionally generated using SNS or EventBridge
- (Optional) Config automatically evaluates recorded configurations against desired configurations
- (Optional) Evaluations are displayed on a dashboard, accessed through Config API, and optionally sent via SNS
14
Q
Config - Rules
A
- Allow to check if a change to a resource configuration meet a desired configuration
- Rules types:
- AWS-managed config rules: defined by AWS
- Customer-managed config rules: authored by a client, or an AWS Partner using Lambda. Examples: INSTANCES_IN_VPC (Do all EC2 instances belong to a VPC?), ENCRYPTED_VOLUMES (Are all attached EBS volumes encrypted?)
15
Q
EventBridge - Characteristics 1
A
- A serverless event bus service that can connect your applications with data from a variety of sources. Formerly known as CloudWatch Events
- Delivers a stream of real-time data from applications, SaaS applications, and AWS services to targets such as Lambda, API destinations, or event buses in other AWS accounts
- Pay for events published on the event bus, events ingested for Schema Discovery, and for Event Replay
