EC2 Flashcards by T. R.

What pricing models are available for EC2

On-Demand
Reserved (contract 1-3 yrs)
Spot
Dedicated Hosts

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EC2 Family F is for

FPGA (Genomics, Financial Analytics, Big Data)

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EC2 Family I is for

IOPS (NoSQL, DBMS, Data warehousing)

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EC2 Family G is for

Graphics (Video encoding, 3d Streaming)

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EC2 Family H is for

High Disk Throughput (MapReduce, File System)

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EC2 Family T is for

Cheap General Purpose (think t2.Micro)

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EC2 Family D is for

Density (Fileservers, data warehouses, Hadoop)

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EC2 Family R is for

RAM (Memory intensive apps)

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EC2 Family M is for

Main choice (Applications)

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EC2 Family C is for

Compute (CPU intensive)

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EC2 Family P is for

Graphics (Think Pics; Machine Learning, BitCoin mining)

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EC2 Family X is for

Xtreme Memory (Hana, Apache Spark)

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EC2 Family Z is for

Xtreme Memory AND CPU (Electronic Design Automation)

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EC2 Family A is for

ARM-based workloads

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EC2 Family U is for

Bare-metal (to eliminate virtualization overhead)

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True or False: Termination protection is off by default for new instances?

True; you must enable it yourself

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True or False: By default, your root EBS volume will be deleted when you terminate your instance

True

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True or False: You can blacklist specific ports or IP addresses using security groups.

False; You can specify allowed traffic only

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What is the maximum number of security groups you can have per region?

2500

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What are your cheap EBS volume options?

The Hard Disk ones, st1 and sc1

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What are the SSD options for EBS volumes?

gp2 (general purpose) and io1 (for provisioned IOPs)

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When would you use an Instance Store volume as opposed to an EBS?

When you only need ephemeral storage; instance store volumes are deleted when the instance is terminated

What are the components of an AMI?

The EBS snapshot or instance store templates
Launch permissions that control which AWS accounts can use the AMI
Block device mapping that specifies the volumes to attach when an instance is launched

You can select an AMI based on the following characteristics

Region
OS
Architecture
Launch Permissions
Storage for root device

True or False: You can modify the instance type, kernal, RAM, and volume usage on an instance-store backed instance?

False; you can't stop (you can only run or terminate) an instance store backed instance so you can't modify these parameters once you start.

What scenarios would you attach additional ENIs to an instance?

To create separate networks for your workloads, i.e. a management workload and an application workload. Adding ENIs won't increase your throughput.

What scenarios would you use Enhanced Networking (ENA or Intel 82599 VF)?

You would use theses for SR-IOV device virtualization for higher I/o and lower CPU utilization to achieve speeds of 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps at no additional charge.

When would you use an Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)

To accelerate HPC for machine learning applications and to achieve OS-bypass on Linux machines.

What CloudWatch metrics are available for EC2 instances by default?

CPU, network, disk, and status checks (you'd have to create a custom one for memory utilization for example)

What is the default interval CloudWatch polls your EC2?

Every 5 minutes

What is the main difference between CloudWatch and CloudTrail?

CloudWatch is all about monitoring performance; CloudTrail is about auditing AWS calls and actions and resource activity

What information is available at 169.254.169.254/latest/user-data?

The bootstrap script

What information is available at 169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data?

Lots of information, including your public and private IP addresses, your tags, security groups, etc.

How do you attach an EFS to EC2s?

1. Create the EFS 2. Create an inbound rule on your instance security groups to allow NFS port 2049 3. Mount EFS to the instances

What protocol is used for EFS?

NFSv4

How large can an EFS scale?

Petabytes

How many NFS connections can EFS support?

1000s

What kind of consistency does EFS provide?

Read after Write

What kind of availability does EFS provide?

Storage across multi-AZ

What type of file system would you use for SMB file storage?

Windows SFx

What high-performance file system is available for Linux machines and provides hundreds of Gbps throughput, millions of IOPs, and sub-millisecond latency?

SFx for Lustre

What is unique to a Spread Placement Group?

You can only have up to 7 running instances per availability zone per group

What are the features of a Partitioned Placement Group?

It's like a Spread Placement Group, but allows multiple instances per partition. Each partition is within its own set of racks. This is ideal for workloads for HDFS, Hbase, Cassandra. You can have a maximum of 7 partitions per Availability Zone.

What is the use case for a Clustered Placement Group?

Workloads that require high-throughput, low latency network for instances running logically clustered together within a single Availability Zone.

True or False: You can merge placement groups?

False

The name of a placement group must be unique within your AWS account within a

Region

True or False: You can launch host tenancy instances within a placement group

False

How can you specify your spot instance/fleet to run for a specified duration?

By using a Spot Block that reserves for a specified amount of time and will only be interrupted for capacity needs

What is the use case for spot instances?

Stateless, fault-tolerant, flexible applications like big data, containerized workloads, ci/cd, stateless web servers, HPC, and rendering workloads

What is specified in a spot instance request?

``` The persistence (one-time or persistent) Maximum spot price ```

What is specified in a spot fleet request?

Set of instances (which can include on-demand instances) Target capacity Maximum spot price

What AWS service allows you to run 100s of thousands of scheduled, parallel jobs spanned crossed instances

AWS Batch

Which AWS service provides an easy way to model an HPC cluster using a text file to define instances, resources, VPCs, subnets, cluster types, and scaling?

AWS ParallelCluster