Database on AWS

Question 1

What RDS Databases are available?

Answer 1

SQL

MySQL

PostgesSQL

Oracle

Aurora

MariaDB

Question 2

What is the best DB option for online analytics

Answer 2

Red Shift

Question 3

You need an RDS database, but do not want to manage the OS. What can you use?

Answer 3

Any RDS, it runs on VMs but you cannot RDP or SSH to them

Question 4

Is RDS serverless?

Answer 4

No, except for aurora

Question 5

What are the RDS backup options?

Answer 5

Automated

Manual Snapshots

Question 6

You need to improve your RDS DB performance. What can you do?

Answer 6

Use read replicas

Question 7

What are the characteristics of read replicas?

Answer 7

Increases performance

Must have backups turned on

Can be multi-az

Can be in different regions

Can be aurora or MySQL

Can promote RR to master

Question 8

You promoted a read replica to master, what will break?

Answer 8

replication

Question 9

Why would you use multi-az RR?

Answer 9

DR

Question 10

How can you force a multi-az failover?

Answer 10

Reboot one of the instances

Question 11

What RDS DB’s provide encryption?

Answer 11

MySQL

Oracle

SQL Server

Postgres

MariaDB

Aurora

Question 12

What encryption service does RDS use?

Answer 12

AWS Key mgmt Service (KMS)

Question 13

What are the characteristics of DynamoDB?

Answer 13

SSD

Spread across thre geographically distinct data centers

Eventual consistent reads (default)

Strongly consistent reads (available for higher cost)

Question 14

What is the use case for red shift?

Answer 14

OLAP Data Warehouse for Business Intelligence

Question 15

Is multi-az available for red shift?

Answer 15

No

Question 16

What is the maximum retention for red shift backups?

Answer 16

35 days

Question 17

How many copies does red shift maintain of your data?

Answer 17

three. Original and replica on compute and an S3 backup

Question 18

What DR options are available for red shift?

Answer 18

asynchronously replicate snapshots to S3 in another region

Question 19

How many copies of your data are maintained in Aurora?

Answer 19

6 copies. 2 copies in each AZ with a minimum of 3 az’s

Question 20

What is the use case for RDS?

Answer 20

Online transaction processing

Question 21

What are the types of elasticache?

Answer 21

memcached

redis

Question 22

You need data written to a dynamo DB read back within seconds. What option do you choose

Answer 22

Enable strongly consistent reads

Question 23

What is elasticache?

Answer 23

A cloud-based in-memory cache used by app/web servers to improve database performance for frequently used database calls.

Question 24

Describe redis

Answer 24

key/value store

master slave architecture

multi az

Question 25

Describe memcached

Answer 25

Simple, widely adopted, in-memory key/value store for small chunks of arbitrary data from the results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

Question 26

What database service categories are available on AWS?

Answer 26

RDS - (OnLine Transaction Processing, standard Relational Databases) DynamoDB (NoSQL) RedShift (OnLine Analytics Processing, Business Intelligence) Elasticache (in memory caching) Database Migration Service

Question 27

What OLTP databases are available in RDS?

Answer 27

MS SQL Server MySQL PostgreSQL Oracle MariaDB Aurora

Question 28

How does Automated Backups work?

Answer 28

Automated Backups allow you to recover your DB to any point in time within a "retention period". Retention Period can be between 1 and 35 days. Automated Backups will take a full daily snapshot and will also store the transaction logs throughout the day.

Question 29

What is Multi-AZ RDS?

Answer 29

Multi-AZ allows to have an exact copy of your production database in another AZ. In the event of planned DB maintenance, BD instance failure, or an Availability Zone failure, Amazon RDS will automatically failover to the standby.

Question 30

What is the use case for Multi-AZ RDS

Answer 30

Multi-AZ is for disaster recovery. It is not used for improving performance. For performance improvement, Read Replicas are needed.

Question 31

Can Multi-AZ be used to performance improvement?

Answer 31

No. Multi-AZ is for disaster recovery. It is not used for improving performance. For performance improvement, Read Replicas are needed.

Question 32

What options do you have to improve DB performance

Answer 32

Read replicas and elasticache

Question 33

What are the maximum number of read replicas?

Answer 33

5

Question 34

How do read replicas improve performance?

Answer 34

App/web servers can be confiured to use the relica copies to spread out the load

Question 35

What is the DB service that provides OLAP?

Answer 35

Red shift

Question 36

What is the cost of RDS backups?

Answer 36

nothing. stored in S3

Question 37

Characteristics of RDS snapshots?

Answer 37

Manual retained after RDS instance is deleted

Question 38

When an RDS instance is restored will the end point be the same

Answer 38

No

Question 39

In RDS multi-az you lose the primary. What happens

Answer 39

Endpoint auto fails over by re-pointing the DNS alias to a healthy copy.

Question 40

What DBs provide multi-az?

Answer 40

MySQL Postgres MariaDB Aurora

Question 41

What DBs provide read replicas??

Answer 41

Aurora MySQL

Question 42

What are the two types of redshift configurations?

Answer 42

single node multi node

Question 43

What are the max number of compute nodes in a redshift multi node config?

Answer 43

128

Question 44

Describe red shift security characteristics?

Answer 44

To keep data secure in transit, Amazon Redshift supports SSL-enabled connections between your client application and your Redshift data warehouse cluster. To keep your data secure at rest, Amazon Redshift encrypts each block using hardware-accelerated AES-256 as it is written to disk. The blocks are backed up as is, which means that backups are encrypted as well. By default, Amazon Redshift takes care of key management but you can choose to manage your keys using your own hardware security modules (HSMs) or manage your keys through AWS Key Management Service.

Question 45

What are the max number of aurora replicas?

Answer 45

15

Question 46

Aurora scaling characteristics?

Answer 46

10 GB to 64TB up to 32 vCPUs and 244 GB or mem 2 copies of DB in each AZ w/ min of 3 AZs Transparently handle loss of up to two copies Self healing

Question 47

Max # of read-replicas on their DBs?

Answer 47

Aurora Replicas 15 MySQL replicas 5