Technology Flashcards

1
Q

What is Amazon EC2?

A

Elastic Cloud Compute.
This is the most popular part of AWS offering - run computing on EC2, store data on EBS, use ELB to distribute workload, scale with ASG. (

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2
Q

What can you choose / customise with an EC2 instance?

A
> OS: Linux/Windows
> CPU
> RAM
> Storage (either EBS/EFS, or EC2 Instance Store)
> Network card
> Firewall & bootstrap
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3
Q

What are the different instance types available?

A

> general purpose: balance of compute, memory, and networking resources
compute optimized: ideal for compute-bound applications, such as gaming servers
memory optimized: fast performance, workloads process large datasets in memory
accelerated computing: use hardware accelerators (coprocessors) to perform some functions more efficiently
storage optimized: for high, sequential read and write access to large datasets on local storage

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4
Q

What are the different pricing options with EC2 instances?

A
> On demand
> Saving Plans (1-year / 3-year)
> Reserved Instances
> Spot Instances
> Dedicated hosts
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5
Q

What AWS service manages the adding / removing of instances in response to changing demand?

A

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

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6
Q

What methods can be used in EC2 Auto Scaling?

A

> Dynamic scaling: responds to changing demand.

> Predictive scaling: automatically schedules the right number of Amazon EC2 instances based on predicted demand.

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7
Q

What do you have to set with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?

A

> Min number of EC2 instances
Max number of EC2 instances
Desired number

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8
Q

What AWS Service directs incoming traffic between your EC2 instances?

A

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

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9
Q

What does ELB do?

A

Directs incoming traffic between your EC2 instances. It ensures:
> Decoupled architecture between your public facing resources, and private resources
> Workload is balanced between instances in use

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10
Q

What is Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)?

A

A pub/sub service - push notifications to users. E.g., send an email to an email list, or elicit an action of AWS Lambda functions.

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11
Q

What is Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)?

A

A message queuing service, to communicate between components/services in AWS.

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12
Q

What is Amazon Virtual Private Cloud?

A

It is a service to contain your resources in a logically isolated virtual network.

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13
Q

How do you allow access into your resources (VPC)?

A

Using an Internet Gateway

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14
Q

What service/product can you use to establish a private dedicated connection to your VPC?

A

AWS Direct Connect.

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15
Q

What do subnets do?

A

They group and separate different resources in the cloud.

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16
Q

What is a Network Access Control List (Network ACL)?

A

“Passport control” - subnet boundaries.

Define what traffic can enter and exit a subnet.

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17
Q

What is a Security Group?

A

“Doorman” - Instance boundaries

Defines what traffic can enter/exit an instance. By default, allows none in, and all out.

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18
Q

True / False: A Network ACL is Stateful.

A

False. A network ACL is Stateless. A Security Group is Stateful.

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19
Q

What is Amazon Route 53?

A

AWS’s Domain Name Service.

I.e., it translates website URLs into IP Addresses.

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20
Q

For an On Demand EC2 instance, what unit of time are you billed by?

A

> For a Linux instance, by the second (after the first minute)
For any other OS, by the hour

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21
Q

What type of Reserved Instances are there?

A

1) Convertible: You can change the instance type

2) Scheduled: Launch within the time window you reserve

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22
Q

Under the Shared Responsibility Model, who is responsible for operating-system patches and updates on EC2 Instances?

A

You (the customer).

The customer is responsible for operating-system patches and updates on EC2 Instances, as well as data security on the instances, Security Groups rules, etc.

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23
Q

What is an Instance Store?

A

Temporary memory attached to an EC2 instance. It is deleted between an Instance terminating and restarting.

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24
Q

What is an EBS Volume?

A

Elastic Block Store: A network drive you can attach to a specific instance for persistent storage.

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25
Q

What is a good (general) use case for EBS?

A

When you want to make block changes to a file / data object. E.g., change certain parts of a single 8GB video, using EBS, you can just change parts in isolation, rather than having to reupload all of the file.

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26
Q

What is an AMI?

A

Amazon Machine Image

They are a customization of an EC2 instance. You can use Public Amazon ones, or build your own.

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27
Q

What is EC2 Image Builder?

A

A service for automating VMs / other container images. E.g., create, maintain and validate EC2 AMIs, making changes as needed and pushing the AMI across instances across regions.

28
Q

What is an EFS?

A

Elastic File System

It’s a managed “Network File System”, similar to an EBS but can be attached to 100s of EC2 Instances. (works only with Linux instances)

29
Q

What are you responsible for in EC2 storage?

A

> Setting up backup / snapshots
Encryption
Data on drives
Understanding risk of Instance Stores

30
Q

Which service can be used to automate image management processes?

A

EC2 Image Builder

31
Q

What is Amazon S3?

A

Simple Storage Service: “Infinitely scaling storage”

32
Q

What ways are there to control access to an S3 bucket?

A

Either (1) User based (using IAM), or (2) Resource Based, specifying rules for access to the Bucket.

33
Q

What % availability is there for S3 Standard?

A

99.99%

34
Q

What is AWS Storage Gateway?

A

AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that gives you on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage.

35
Q

How long is retrieval time in S3 Glacier Deep Archive?

A

You can retrieve data in 12 or 48 hours.

36
Q

How long is standard retrieval time in S3 Glacier?

A

Standard retrieval usually takes between 3 and 5 hours to complete.

37
Q

What does Amazon S3 Lifecycle Rules do?

A

Define when S3 objects should be transitioned to another storage class or when objects should be deleted after some time.

38
Q

A research team deployed in a location with low-internet connection would like to move 5 TBs of data to the Cloud. Which service can it use?

A

AWS Snowcone: A small, portable, rugged, and secure edge computing and data transfer device. It provides up to 8 TB of usable storage.

39
Q

What service will you use to set up a relational database on AWS?

A

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Using this, you can set up a database using one of the following engines:

  • Amazon Aurora
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • MariaDB
  • Oracle Database
  • Microsoft SQL Server
40
Q

Why would you use RDS instead of deploying your own Database on EC2?

A

It’s a managed service, so it’ll take much less work.

41
Q

What is one strength, and one drawback, or using Aurora over another RDS?

A

Strength: It’s supposed to be 3x / 5x faster than PostgreSQL and MySQL;
Weakness: It costs 20% more

42
Q

What is AWS ElastiCache?

A

A fully managed in-memory data store, compatible with Redis or Memcached. Used to power applications with latency of sub-millisecond figures.

43
Q

What is AWS DynamoDB?

A

A Serverless NoSQL Database. Very low latency, performance stays constant despite size.

44
Q

What is Amazon Redshift?

A

A managed Data Warehouse service on AWS - used primarily for analysis of historical data, rather than the instant read/write functions to RDS/Aurora.

45
Q

What is Amazon EMR?

A

Elastic MapReduce - helps creating Hadoop cluster to cluster hundreds of EC2 instances to work together to analyse data.

46
Q

What is AWS Athena?

A

A serverless database with SQL capabilities, where you pay per query.

It’s used to query data in S3, for one-time-use queries.

47
Q

What is Amazon Quicksight?

A

Serverless BI tool to create dashboards.

48
Q

What is Amazon DocumentDB?

A

Amazon’s version of MongoDB (no-SQL database). It’s similar to DynamoDB, although you do more things manually, such as select the number of instances for the cluster and the instance sizes.

49
Q

What is Amazon Neptune?

A

A fully managed graph database.

50
Q

What is Amazon QLDB?

A

Quantum Ledger Database. Used to review all changes to your data over time. E.g. good for a ledger database.

51
Q

What is Amazon DMS?

A

Database Migration Service.
Supports homogenous migrations (e.g. just straight lift over), or heterogeneous (move to a new database engine, manage the required changes).

52
Q

What is AWS Glue?

A

A managed ETL service.

53
Q

What is Amazon Managed Blockchain?

A

It’s a managed decentralised blockchain service.

54
Q

What is Amazon ECS?

A

Elastic Container Service. It’s used to launch Docker containers on AWS.

55
Q

What is Amazon EKS?

A

Elastic Kubernetes Service. Used for Kubernetes clusters.

56
Q

What is Amazon Fargate?

A

Serverless option for ECS.

57
Q

What is Amazon Lightsail?

A

Lightsail is an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers everything needed to build an application or website (light touch do everything with little personal configuration).

58
Q

What is the Elastic Container Registry (ECR)?

A

A service where you store your Docker image so they can be run by ECS or Fargate.

59
Q

What is Amazon CloudFormation?

A

Basically, a tool to easily manage all the infrastructure around your resources (Instances, Storage, Auto-Scaling, ELBs, etc), via templates.

60
Q

What is Amazon Elastic Beanstalk?

A

A PaaS to help developers, by setting all the infrastructure automatically!

61
Q

What is AWS CodeDeploy?

A

A service to help manage the deployment of new code across all your instances at once (and local servers too, if present).

62
Q

What is AWS CodeCommit?

A

A source-control repository hosted on AWS (e.g. the same as Github, Bitbucket, etc.)

63
Q

What is AWS Cloud9?

A

An in the cloud IDE.

64
Q

With HTTP and HTTPS traffic, what feature of an Application Load Balancer can be used to bind a user’s session to a specific instance?

A

Sticky sessions

65
Q

With EC2 instances, which of the following is a snapshot of a particular state of that resource?

A

Golden image

66
Q

What are Amazon S3 Lifecycle Rules?

A

Amazon S3 Lifecycle Rules can be used to define when S3 objects should be transitioned to another storage class or when objects should be deleted after some time.