WEEK 2 - CLOUD FUNDAMENTAL STRUCTURES

Question 1

What is the cloud?

Answer 1

The cloud is a large quantity of computing and networking resources located in multiple datacenters.

Question 2

What does the cloud provide?

Answer 2

The cloud provides an interface to customers to request and use portions of those resources.

Question 3

What are the layers of the AWS model datacenter and what is their purpose?

Answer 3

1. Perimeter: the first level of security is the physical perimeter).
2. Infrastructure: sustained by its own electrical energy generation (through power generators and solar farms) and the ability to control the temperature and humidity (HVAC and fire suppression).
3. Data Layer: Rows of computing and networking equipment that compose thousands of servers, LAN switches and so forth.
4. Environmental Layer: Public grid, datacenter generators and so forth.

Question 4

What is an AWS Region?

Answer 4

A geographical cluster of datacenters.

Question 5

By September 2021, how many AWS regions were there?

Answer 5

25

Question 6

What is an availability zone?

Answer 6

An Availability Zone is one or more datacenters with redundant power, networking, and connectivity inside an AWS Region

Question 7

What is the idea behind availability zones?

Answer 7

The main idea is to provide redundancy and load distribution.

Question 8

What are the specific models for services that are not exclusively located in the AWS datacenters but on-premises (special cases)?

Answer 8

1. AWS Local Zones
2. AWS Outposts
3. AWS Wavelength

Question 9

What are AWS Local Zones?

Answer 9

Local zones are extensions of Amazon AWS that deploys AWS compute, storage, database, resources and services in proximity to some large population, important industry, and IT centers.

Question 10

What is an AWS Outpost?

Answer 10

An outpost is an extension of the AWS cloud inside the
customer’s premises

Question 11

What is a need for the outpost?

Answer 11

A need behind the outpost concept is that the customer runs “workloads” that require low latency.

Question 12

What is AWS Wavelength?

Answer 12

AWS Wavelength is an extension of the idea of outposts but only applied to cellular 5G networks.

Question 13

What is cloud computing?

Answer 13

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer services and resources over the Internet.

Question 14

How are resources (i.e, the cloud) hosted?

Answer 14

Physically, these resources are hosted on massive datacentres which are interconnected by high-capacity
networks.

Question 15

Customer data is replicated among datacenters for which two reasons?

Answer 15

Reliability and availability.

Question 16

What are the two models that datacenters follow?

Answer 16

In-house and collocated.

Question 17

What is an In-house datacenter model?

Answer 17

A physical space located inside an enterprise. An internal IT organization manages and operates the datacenter.

Question 18

What is a Collocated datacenter model?

Answer 18

Is the practice of leasing space in a third-party datacenter. In this case, an external
organization leases physical space where the customers “co-locate” their equipment. The
datacenter owner takes care of the physical security, environmental (cooling, heat dissipation,
humidity), internal and external network connectivity, etc.

Question 19

What do all cloud providers offer?

Answer 19

An Internet available interface to request resources dynamically.

Question 20

What are the four things that clouds provide?

Answer 20

1. Elasticity
2. Scalability
3. Cost management
4. Reliability

Question 21

What is elasticity in terms of the cloud?

Answer 21

The ability for the customer to add or remove services as needed.

Question 22

What is scalability in terms of the cloud?

Answer 22

The ability for the customer to change the capacity of the services or add more resources to the services.