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Exam Questions

These are copied from each section of the day-long course

Resilient Architecture

  • EC2 Ephemeral volume - you lose your data if you terminate the instance (stop), if you reset it's OK.
  • EBS is an Independent Lifecycle from EC2 instance
  • Exam question, we need 12000 iops, so which one do you pick?
  • You need Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) (32000 iops) because gp2 (general purpose SSD) is only 10000 IOPS
  • Provisioned is for large database workloads, production environments
  • st1, sc1 is good for log processing, data warehouses, when storage cost is more important than other considerations
  • EBS Volume Types: https://aws.amazon.com/iq/
  • gp2, io1, st1, sc1: LOTS OF EXAM QUESTIONS ON THIS TABLE - see photo in phone
  • Can only attach EBS volume to 1 instance at a time, EFS can work with multiple EC2 instances.
  • Supports NFS version v4.0 and 4.1 - need to know EFS is NFS compatible
  • S3 supports server-side encryption: SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, SSE-C
  • C = customer
  • S3 = ?? probably what you assume
  • KMS = ?? probably what you assume
  • S3 has a multi-part upload API
  • Use this for large files
  • S3: AWS will never move data to a different region unless you tell us to
  • Data soverignty laws
  • EBS: You can move across AZs within a region by creating a snapshot
  • To get volume into new AZ: You restore the snapshot to a new volume, and you select the AZ
  • EBS: Snapshots go to S3
  • S3 Replicates across all AZs in a region
  • except "IA one-zone" which only has 1 zone
  • S3 Exam question, how to save cost? Set up lifecycle policy!
  • 30 days: move to IA,
  • 60 days: move to Glacier
  • delete after 365 days.
  • Durability: "Am I going to lose my data, eleven nines."
  • Availability: "Can I go get my data right now? Ever?"
  • EFS is block storage, S3 is object storage
  • CloudFormation Exam Questions
  • A free service, you only pay for resources it uses
  • is important to High Availability because you can create and replicate resources easily
  • What's a template? The JSON or YAML text file
  • What's a stack? The actual stack of resources created in the account
  • Storage gateway: know the types and what they are meant for
  • LOOK IT UP

Design Cost Optimized Architectures

  • How often and how quickly do you need to access your data?
  • How large is your data set?
  • How transient is your data?
  • Clickstream

  • How much are you prepared to pay to store the data?

  • Durability: The average, expected annual data loss

  • S3 Resiliency: Almost all S3 Resilient against single AD (except for 1-zone IA)
  • Throughput oriented, lowest cost: Cold HDD (sc1)
  • Exam Question: I have an on demand instance, it costs $10/hour, I started at 930 AM and terminated at 1100 AM.
  • You will get charged for 2 hours (not 1.5 hours)
  • Some instances you can pay per second

Define Operationally Excellent Architectures

5.1 Choose design features in solutions that enable operational excellence.

  • metrics: latency, http, 4xx errors, 5xx errors, etc.
  • cloudwatch can give metrics on ec2 based on what we can measure
  • can't measure how much data you have stored on ebs volume - no metric
  • cloudwatch custom metrics - you can report your own metrics to cloudwatch then set alarms
  • CodeDeploy: Amazon EC2, Fargate, lambda, on-prem servers

Performant Architectures

  • Elasticache -
  • Whenever they say "relational" - use RDS
  • Whenever they say "nosql" - DynamoDB
  • Whenever they say "data warehouse" - "Redshift!"
  • Not going to get tested on relational vs nonrelational
  • not an exam question, interview question!
  • 6 RDS Flavors - know them - look on the RDS homepage (mysql, postgres, etc)
  • Not going to get tested on using aurora vs rds choices
  • Do know what engines are supported
  • RDS: Which engines does RDS support read replica for?
  • Question: "offload main database because it's hit hard"
    • Use READ REPLICA
  • Question: "You need HA" and then multi AZ deployment
    • Use MULTI AZ DEPLOYMENT
  • Bring content closer to viewers and increase performance of website: CloudFront
  • Can cache dynamic or static content
  • Your clients are complaining that viewing your videos is really slow
  • Scale Out: I need better performance, should I increase the size of my instance or add a server?
  • The answer is ALWAYS add a server: scale out, add instances, use EC2 instance
  • Exam Question
  • Exam Anecdote: More exam questions about classic load balancer
  • Heard from 2 recent exam takers
  • Exam Question: Load Balancer checks health of ec2 instances behind load balancer
  • Question: "What happens then?"
    • Load balancer just stops routing requests until the instance is replaced or healthy
    • Auto scale manages health of the instance (replaces unhealthy instances with healthy instances)
  • Network Load Balancer: always use DNS name of load balancer, don't point your website at the load balancer IP address
  • EC2 Families: They might ask you what CPU instance type based on your needs

Specify Secure Applications

Security is Job 0 on AWS.

  • big part of exam: how to secure application tiers
  • how to secure data
  • networking infrastructure for a single VPC application

  • acloud.guru vpc training lab (very long)

  • IAM User: Console access versus programmatic access

  • Console requires username + password
  • Guaranteed exam question: Programmatic access just needs access key and secret
    • Not username / password
  • IAM Policy: By default users have access to nothing
  • You must attach an IAM policy (or group with an IAM policy)
  • IAM Roles: When asked, always pick IAM roles over access keys
  • Exam questions will try to confuse you: cloudtrail vs. cloudwatch
  • cloudtrail is a trail - logs
  • cloudwatch is like watching - metrics
  • VPC: What is the biggest size and smallest size for VPC CIDR.
  • Biggest: /16
  • Smallest: /28
  • The allowed block size is between a /28 netmask and /16 netmask.
  • VPC: Only 1 IGW can be attached to 1 VPC
  • I am not getting enough bandwidth, can I attack an additional internet gateway?
    • NO you can ONLY have 1

Shared Responsibility Model

Shared between AWS and the customer (me).