Week 9 - Cloud Architecture Flashcards
What are the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
- Operational Excellence: Focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value and continuously improve processes.
- Security: Emphasizes protecting data, systems, and assets with risk assessment and mitigation strategies.
- Reliability: Ensures workloads perform as intended and can recover quickly from failures.
- Performance Efficiency: Involves using computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and adapting to changing demands.
- Cost Optimization: Focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs and delivering business value at the lowest price point.
- Sustainability: Aims to minimize the environmental impact of running cloud workloads.
What are the design principles for achieving operational excellence in the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
Perform operations as code: Automate operations to make them consistent and repeatable.
Make frequent, small, reversible changes: Enable faster troubleshooting and rollback if something goes wrong.
Refine operations procedures frequently: Regularly update and improve operational processes for efficiency.
Anticipate failure: Identify potential points of failure and design systems to handle them.
Learn from all operational events and failures: Use incidents as learning opportunities to improve system reliability.
What are the security design principles in the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
Implement a strong identity foundation: Use centralized identity management, enforce least privilege access, and apply multi-factor authentication.
Enable traceability: Monitor and log actions in your environment to ensure accountability.
Apply security at all layers: Protect systems with a defense-in-depth strategy across all layers of the stack.
Automate security best practices: Use automated tools and processes to maintain secure configurations consistently.
Protect data in transit and at rest: Encrypt data to prevent unauthorized access during transmission and storage.
Keep people away from data: Minimize human access to sensitive data by leveraging automated mechanisms.
Prepare for security events: Have incident response processes in place and practice them to ensure quick recovery.
What are the reliability design principles in the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
Automatically recover from failure: Design systems to detect and recover from failures without human intervention.
Test recovery procedures: Regularly test recovery processes to ensure they work effectively and improve over time.
Scale horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability: Use multiple smaller resources instead of a single large resource to improve reliability and availability.
Stop guessing capacity: Use scalable solutions and monitor system demands to ensure resources match the workload.
Manage change in automation: Automate changes to reduce human error and improve reliability in deployments.
What are the performance efficiency design principles in the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
Democratize advanced technologies: Make advanced technologies, such as machine learning and data analytics, accessible to your team by using managed services.
Go global in minutes: Deploy workloads globally using AWS regions to reduce latency and improve performance for users.
Use serverless architectures: Eliminate the need to manage servers and optimize resource utilization automatically.
Experiment more often: Enable rapid innovation by testing different configurations and architectures with minimal cost and time investment.
Consider mechanical sympathy: Match your workload to the underlying hardware or service to maximize performance.
What are the cost optimization design principles in the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
Implement Cloud Financial Management: Establish processes and governance to control and monitor cloud spending effectively.
Adopt a consumption model: Pay only for the resources you use, and scale them up or down based on demand.
Measure overall efficiency: Regularly evaluate the cost of delivering business outcomes and improve resource utilization.
Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting: Focus on activities that add value to your business by using managed services for routine tasks.
Analyze and attribute expenditure: Use tools to track and allocate costs to individual teams or projects for accountability and better decision-making.
What are the sustainability design principles in the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
Understand your impact: Assess the environmental impact of your cloud workloads to identify areas for improvement.
Establish sustainability goals: Set measurable objectives to reduce the carbon footprint of your applications.
Maximize utilization: Optimize resource usage by scaling effectively and consolidating workloads to reduce waste.
Use managed services: Leverage AWS-managed services that are optimized for sustainability to decrease energy consumption.
Optimize workloads: Continuously refine your systems to be energy-efficient and perform tasks with minimal resources.
Anticipate and adopt new, more efficient technologies: Regularly evaluate and implement innovations that improve energy efficiency and reduce environmental impact.
How is reliability defined and measured in the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
MTBF
Definition: Reliability is a measure of your system’s ability to provide functionality as desired by the user when needed. It encompasses all system components, including hardware, firmware, and software.
Probability: It reflects the likelihood that your entire system will function as intended for a specified period.
Metric: Reliability is often measured using Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), calculated as:
TotalTimeinService /
NumberofFailures
What is availability, and how is it measured in the context of reliability?
- Definition: Availability is the ratio of normal operation time to total time, expressed as a percentage of uptime over a specific period (e.g., 99.9% uptime over one year).
- Number of 9s: High availability is often described by the “number of 9s.” For example, five 9s represents 99.999% availability, which equates to approximately 5.26 minutes of downtime per year.
What are the key factors that influence system availability?
- Fault Tolerance: The built-in redundancy of an application’s components and its ability to remain operational despite failures.
- Scalability: The ability of an application to handle increased capacity needs without requiring changes to its design.
- Recoverability: The policies, processes, and procedures involved in restoring service after a catastrophic event or failure.
What is AWS Trusted Advisor, and what does it do?
AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides real-time guidance to help you provision resources by following AWS best practices. It evaluates your entire AWS environment and offers real-time recommendations across five key categories: performance, security, fault tolerance, cost optimization, and service limits. AWS Trusted Advisor can be used to optimize your AWS environment as soon as you begin implementing your architecture designs.
