AWS Cloud Practitioner

Overview of Foundation Knowledge

This section covers key questions. Go back and review.

Course - AWS Cloud Practitioner (Second Edition)

Module 1 - Introduction to AWS Cloud

Elasticity refers to the power to scale computing resources up or down easily

Module2 - AWS Core Services

Q1. The benefits of using Amazon EC2 instances compared to physical servers in your infrastructure is:

• Ability to have different storage requirements
• Pay only for what capacity you use

Note:

• You have to automate your EC2 backups
• You can't hot add RAM
• You can't dynamically resize the EC2

2. An AZ is an AWS Infrastructure that is located / distributed across multiple locations, they are isolated within a AWS Region

3. For an AWS Account VPC's can have many subnets but fewer are recommended to reduce complexity

Module3 - AWS Integrated Services

Module4 - AWS Architecture

Module5 - AWS Security

Module6 - Pricing and Support

Module7 - Summary

Course - The AWS Well-Architected Framework

Defined by Dr. Werner Vogel to make informed decisions that affect 'Cloud Native Architecture' design principles

Module 1 - AWS Design Principles

Always consider the 'What if...' scenarios

The 5 Pillars SPROC (Security, Performance Efficiency, Reliability, Operational Excellence, Cost Optimisation)

Module - Operational Excellence

3 Key focus area of OE are:

1. Ensuring team has procedures & skill to operate workloads
2. Having Defined and tested processes for responding to operational events
3. Reviewing your AWS services selection to innovate with new types and features

A Key service of OE is CloudTrail

An example of OE best practice in prepare - 'Balancing the risk of decision against potential benefit' by considering the trade-offs between operational priorities and making informed decisions

An example of OE best practice in operate - 'Notify Users when they are impacted by events'

An example of OE best practice in evolve - 'Engage business and development teams in operations reviews'

Key Points

• Set operational priorities with business
• Design for operations - and respond to events with procedures
• Evaluate operational readiness
• Understand Cloud operational health
• Prepare for 'War Games' events
• Learn from experiences, and share lessons learnt

Module - Security

Module - Reliability

Module - Performance Efficiency

Module - Cost Optimisation

Module - Well-Architected

Module - AWS Well-Architected Tool

Key questions

What you need to know for Foundation

• How can you ensure SQS messages are delivered in order?
• What is Amazon DynamoDB?
• What is not a security best practice?
• You would like to decouple your application components from demand. What service would you use?
• What is Amazon Redshift?
• You would like to compare costs between AWS and onsite physical servers. What service is best to use?
• You would like to investigate where costs are being wasted. What service is best to use?
• The only difference, other than price, between On-Demand instances and Spot Instances is that Spot instances can be interrupted by EC2 with two minutes of notification when the EC2 needs the capacity back.
• An online resource to help you reduce cost, increase performance, and improve security by optimizing your AWS environment, _________ provides real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices.
• _________ is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. It automatically assesses applications for vulnerabilities or changes from best practices.
• Your users keep forgetting the account ID for logging in to the console. How can you help them?
• What is a best practice for IAM user access?
• A _________ tells Auto Scaling when and much to scale. You can create a _________ based on the occurrence of specified conditions (dynamic scaling) or you can create one based on a specific schedule.
• What happens, by default, when one of the resources in a CloudFormation stack cannot be created?
• Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to your viewers with low latency and high transfer speeds from ________ around the World.
• What AWS service can you use to log API calls to SQS?
• Spot Instances run until either you terminate them or the Spot Price increases above your bid price.
• Your company has a backup policy that requires data to be accessible within seconds for the first 6 months and archived with up to a day to access after 6 months. What is the best solution?
• AWS IAM Pricing is based upon:
• IAM Groups let you specify permissions for a collection of users, which can make it easier to manage the permissions for those users.
• You're creating an application that runs on an AWS EC2 instance and that makes requests to AWS. You need to create an IAM _____.
• AWS _____ is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you.
• You can run your RDS instance in several Availability Zones, an option called a Multi-AZ deployment. When you select this option, Amazon automatically provisions and maintains a synchronous standby replica of your DB instance in a different Availability Zone.
• Amazon S3 bucket names are globally unique, regardless of the AWS region in which you create the bucket.
• Security groups in a VPC specify which traffic is allowed to or from an Amazon EC2 instance.
• What are the five groups of checks conducted by AWS Trusted Adviser?
• With _________, you can send transactional email, marketing messages, or any other type of high-quality content and you only pay for what you use.
• Company B provides an online image recognition service and utilizes SQS to decouple system components for scalability The SQS consumers poll the imaging queue as often as possible to keep end-to-end throughput as high as possible. However, Company B is realizing that polling in tight loops is burning CPU cycles and increasing costs with empty responses. How can Company B reduce the number of empty responses?
• When an Amazon EBS-backed instance is stopped, you're not charged for instance usage and, not charged for volume storage.
• You can stop an Amazon EBS-backed instance, but not an Amazon EC2 instance store-backed instance.
• _________ provides developers and systems administrators an easy, fast way to deploy and manage their applications without having to worry about AWS infrastructure.
• In the shared responsibility model, updates and security patches to EC2 instances is the responsibility of AWS.
• Availability Zones are:
• You can attach an EBS volume to multiple instances.
• Automated backups are enabled by default for RDS instances.
• What licensing options are available for RDS Oracle?
• You can access RDS MySQL Linux instances through SSH.
• IAM users in a group will automatically inherit the permissions of the group.
• What are the main cost components of AWS TCO Analysis?
• What is not a feature of RDS (excluding Aurora)?
• What is a CloudFormation stack?
• You have an application that sends push messages to mobile devices. Which service should you use?
• Design for failure and nothing will fail, is a best practice?
• You would like to estimate the costs of a project on AWS. What service is best to use?
• CloudWatch free monitoring for EC2 is at ________ intervals.
• You can use Amazon ________ to monitor, store, and access your log files from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, AWS CloudTrail, Route 53, and other sources. You can then retrieve the associated log data from _________.
• In Amazon DynamoDB, a database is a collection of items. An item is a collection of tables and each table is a collection of attributes.
• You connect to your EC2 Windows instance using SSH.
• It is best practice to use the instance store available for your EC2 instance to store temporary data.
• An EC2 security group acts as a firewall that controls the traffic allowed to reach one or more instances.
• You have an application that requires ad-hoc data mining and analytics of manufacturing data. What is best suited for this application?
• You have an application that requires collecting data from a voting system and creating real-time metrics and reporting of that data. What is best suited for this application?
• When Multi-AZ is enabled on RDS, the standby replica instance will be located in a different region.
• S3 _______ storage class is optimized for long-lived and less frequently accessed data, for example backups and older data where frequency of access has diminished, but the use case still demands high performance.
• Security groups operate at the subnet level and evaluate traffic entering and exiting a subnet.
• What does elasticity mean to AWS?
• You would like to be able to check department costs have not exceeded budget for the month. What is the best way to achieve this?
• Shifting OpEx costs to CapEx is an advantage of AWS cloud computing.
• Each Amazon EC2 ______ is designed to be completely isolated from the other Amazon EC2 ______. This achieves the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability. When you view your resources, you'll only see the resources tied to the _____ you've specified.
• AWS _________ connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide seamless i