Cloud Concepts

Question 1

What are the 3 AWS Cloud Computing models?

Answer 1

1) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
2) Platform as a Service (PaaS)
3) Software as a Service (SaaS)

Question 2

What does Amazon IaaS Cloud Computer Model offers?

Answer 2

1) Basic building blocks for cloud IT and provide access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space.
2) Provides highest level of flexibility and management control over IT resources
3) Most similar to existing IT resources that many IT departments and developers are familiar with today.

Question 3

What does Amazon PaaS Cloud Computer Model offers?

Answer 3

1) Removes customer’s need to manage underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems)
2) Customer focuses on the deployment and management of applications.
3) Improves efficiency: no more resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.

Question 4

What does Amazon SaaS Cloud Computer Model offers?

Answer 4

1) Provides completed product that is run and managed by AWS.
2) Customer only has to use completely developed product by AWS
3) Customer doesn’t manager the underlying infrastructure or the application itself, customer only has to use the app.

Question 5

What are the 3 management interfaces to access your AWS Account?

Answer 5

1) AWS Management Console: website and mobile app, easy-to-use
2) CLI (Command Line Interface): direct access to AWS services
3) SDKs (Software Development Kits): used to interact with AWS via various programming languages.

Question 6

What is Cloud Computing?

Answer 6

1) On-demand delivery of IT resources through a cloud service platform (Iaas, Paas, or Saas) via the internet
2) With a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
3) IT resources include: computer power, storage, database services, applications, and other resources

Question 7

Why is AWS more economical than traditional data centers for applications with varying compute workloads?

Answer 7

Amazon EC2 instances can be launched on-demand when needed.

Question 8

What is an AWS Region?

Answer 8

1) Each AWS Region consists of multiple, isolated, and physically separate Availability Zones within a geographic area.
2) Regions can support data residency requirements (GDPR, etc.)
3) Using multiple regions supports disaster recovery (flood, fire, blackouts, etc)

Question 9

What is an AWS Availability Zone?

Answer 9

1) It’s a group of one or more data centers. Each data center has redundant power, network, and connectivity resources.
2) It’s used to support High Availability, Fault Tolerance, and Scalability
3) Each AZ is isolated, but AZs in same region are connected through private high speed network connections to provide low-latency.

Question 10

What does Fault Tolerance mean in AWS?

Answer 10

This term relates to Availability Zones, and it means a system can remain operational even if some the system components fail.

Question 11

What are AWS Edge Locations?

Answer 11

1) Services endpoints that allow users to access AWS services over the internet with reduced latency. Apps are not built here though.
2) Are used to reduce latency (delay in accessing a web page or downloading a file) by caching (storing) a temporary copy of application for people to access.
3) Amazon CloudFront ensure that end-user requests are served by the closest edge location.
4) Are components of a global Content Deliver Network (CDN) through AWS.

Question 12

What does Amazon CloudFront use to distribute content to global users with low latency?

Answer 12

AWS Edge Locations

Question 13

You want to create a backup of your data in another geographical location. Where should you create this backup?

Answer 13

In another Region

Question 14

What is Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage)?

Answer 14

1) It’s a block level storage that provides storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS.

Question 15

Provide an example of global content delivery network (CDN) services?

Answer 15

1) Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that gives businesses and web application developers an easy and cost effective way to distribute content (such as videos, data, applications, and APIs) with low latency and high data transfer speeds.
2) Like other AWS services, Amazon CloudFront is a self-service, pay-per-use offering, requiring no long term commitments or minimum fees.
3) With CloudFront, your files are delivered to end-users using a global network of edge locations.
4) CloudFront is integrated with other AWS services such as AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon EC2 as origins for your applications, and Lambda@Edge to run custom code close to your viewers.

Question 16

What is the AWS service that provides a virtual network dedicated to your AWS account?

Answer 16

1) Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) allows you to carve out a portion of the AWS Cloud that is dedicated to your AWS account.
2) Amazon VPC enables you to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that you’ve defined.
3) This virtual network closely resembles a traditional network that you’d operate in your own data center, with the benefits of using the scalable infrastructure of AWS.

Question 17

Which service provides DNS in the AWS cloud?

Answer 17

1) Amazon Route 53 is a global service that provides highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) services, domain name registration, and health-checking web services.
2) It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like example.com into the numeric IP addresses, such as 192.0.2.1, that computers use to connect to each other.
3) Route 53 also simplifies the hybrid cloud by providing recursive DNS for your Amazon VPC and on-premises networks over AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN.

Question 18

What is a benefit of Availability Zones within a Region?

Answer 18

1) Each AWS Region contains multiple distinct locations, or Availability Zones.
2) Each Availability Zone is engineered to be independent from failures in other Availability Zones.
3) An Availability Zone is a data center, and in some cases, an Availability Zone consists of multiple data centers.
4) Availability Zones within a Region provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other zones in the same Region.
5) This allows you to replicate data across data centers in a synchronous manner so that failover can be automated and appear transparent to your users.

Question 19

What is Auto Scaling?

Answer 19

1) Auto Scaling is the service that can be used to automate the process of creating new compute resources.

Question 20

A company is planning to host an educational website on AWS. Their video courses will be streamed all around the world. What AWS services will help achieve high transfer speeds?

Answer 20

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. The use cases of Amazon CloudFront include:
1- Accelerate static website content delivery.
2- Live & on-demand video streaming.
3- Security
4- Customizable content delivery with Lambda@Edge.

Question 21

What are the benefits of having infrastructure hosted in AWS?

Answer 21

1) All of the physical security are taken care of for you. Amazon data centers are surrounded by three physical layers of security. “Nothing can go in or out without setting off an alarm”. It’s important to keep bad guys out, but equally important to keep the data in which is why Amazon monitors incoming gear, tracking every disk that enters the facility. And “if it breaks we don’t return the disk for warranty. The only way a disk leaves our data center is when it’s confetti.”
2) Most (not all) data and network security are taken care of for you. When we talk about the data/network security, AWS has a “shared responsibility model” where AWS and the customer share the responsibility of securing them. For example the customer is responsible for creating rules to secure his network traffic using the security groups and is also responsible for protecting data with encryption.
3) “Increase speed and agility” because in a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only a click away, which means it requires less time to make those resources available to developers - from weeks to just minutes. This results in a dramatic increase in agility for the organization, since the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower.

Question 22

Why is AWS so reliable?

Answer 22

1) Automatically provisioning new resources to meet demand.

2) Ability to recover quickly from failures

Question 23

In order to implement best practices when dealing with a “Single Point of Failure,” you should aim to build as much automation as possible in both detecting and reacting to failure. What AWS services would help?

Answer 23

1) Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
2) You should aim to build as much automation as possible in both detecting and reacting to failure.
3) You can use services like ELB and Amazon Route53 to configure health checks and mask failure by only routing traffic to healthy endpoints.
4) In addition, Auto Scaling can be configured to automatically replace unhealthy nodes. You can also replace unhealthy nodes using the Amazon EC2 auto-recovery feature or services such as AWS OpsWorks and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
5) It won’t be possible to predict every possible failure scenario on day one. Make sure you collect enough logs and metrics to understand normal system behavior. After you understand that, you will be able to set up alarms that trigger automated response or manual intervention.