1.What kind of network performance parameters can you expect when you launch instances in cluster placement group?
The network performance depends on the instance type and network performance specification, if launched in a placement group you can expect up to
2.To deploy a 4 node cluster of Hadoop in AWS which instance type can be used?
First let’s understand what actually happens in a Hadoop cluster, the Hadoop cluster follows a master slave concept. The master machine processes all the data, slave machines store the data and act as data nodes. Since all the storage happens at the slave, a higher capacity hard disk would be recommended and since master does all the processing, a higher RAM and a much better CPU is required. Therefore, you can select the configuration of your machine depending on your workload. For e.g. – In this case c4.8xlarge will be preferred for master machine whereas for slave machine we can select i2.large instance. If you don’t want to deal with configuring your instance and installing hadoop cluster manually, you can straight away launch an Amazon EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) instance which automatically configures the servers for you. You dump your data to be processed in S3, EMR picks it from there, processes it, and dumps it back into S3.
3.Where do you think an AMI fits, when you are designing an architecture for a solution?
AMIs(Amazon Machine Images) are like templates of virtual machines and an instance is derived from an AMI. AWS offers pre-baked AMIs which you can choose while you are launching an instance, some AMIs are not free, therefore can be bought from the AWS Marketplace. You can also choose to create your own custom AMI which would help you save space on AWS. For example if you don’t need a set of software on your installation, you can customize your AMI to do that. This makes it cost efficient, since you are removing the unwanted things.
4.How do you choose an Availability Zone?
Let’s understand this through an example, consider there’s a company which has user base in India as well as in the US.
Let us see how we will choose the region for this use case :
So, with reference to the above figure the regions to choose between are, Mumbai and North Virginia. Now let us first compare the pricing, you have hourly prices, which can be converted to your per month figure. Here North Virginia emerges as a winner. But, pricing cannot be the only parameter to consider. Performance should also be kept in mind hence, let’s look at latency as well. Latency basically is the time that a server takes to respond to your requests i.e the response time. North Virginia wins again!
So concluding, North Virginia should be chosen for this use case.
5.Is one Elastic IP address enough for every instance that I have running?
Depends! Every instance comes with its own private and public address. The private address is associated exclusively with the instance and is returned to Amazon EC2 only when it is stopped or terminated. Similarly, the public address is associated exclusively with the instance until it is stopped or terminated. However, this can be replaced by the Elastic IP address, which stays with the instance as long as the user doesn’t manually detach it. But what if you are hosting multiple websites on your EC2 server, in that case you may require more than one Elastic IP address.
6.What are the best practices for Security in Amazon EC2?
There are several best practices to secure Amazon EC2. A few of them are given below:
Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access to your AWS resources.
Restrict access by only allowing trusted hosts or networks to access ports on your instance.
Review the rules in your security groups regularly, and ensure that you apply the principle of least
Privilege – only open up permissions that you require.
Disable password-based logins for instances launched from your AMI. Passwords can be found or cracked, and are a security risk
7.You need to configure an Amazon S3 bucket to serve static assets for your public-facing web application. Which method will ensure that all objects uploaded to the bucket are set to public read?
Answer B.
Explanation: Rather than making changes to every object, its better to set the policy for the whole bucket. IAM is used to give more granular permissions, since this is a website, all objects would be public by default.
8.A customer wants to leverage Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Glacier as part of their backup and archive infrastructure. The customer plans to use third-party software to support this integration. Which approach will limit the access of the third party software to only the Amazon S3 bucket named “company-backup”?
Answer D.
Explanation: Taking queue from the previous questions, this use case involves more granular permissions, hence IAM would be used here.
9.Can S3 be used with EC2 instances, if yes, how?
Yes, it can be used for instances with root devices backed by local instance storage. By using Amazon S3, developers have access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. In order to execute systems in the Amazon EC2 environment, developers use the tools provided to load their Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) into Amazon S3 and to move them between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.
Another use case could be for websites hosted on EC2 to load their static content from S3.
10.A customer implemented AWS Storage Gateway with a gateway-cached volume at their main office. An event takes the link between the main and branch office offline. Which methods will enable the branch office to access their data?
Answer C.
Explanation: The fastest way to do it would be launching a new storage gateway instance. Why? Since time is the key factor which drives every business, troubleshooting this problem will take more time. Rather than we can just restore the previous working state of the storage gateway on a new instance.
11.When you need to move data over long distances using the internet, for instance across countries or continents to your Amazon S3 bucket, which method or service will you use?
Answer C.
Explanation: You would not use Snowball, because for now, the snowball service does not support cross region data transfer, and since, we are transferring across countries, Snowball cannot be used. Transfer Acceleration shall be the right choice here as it throttles your data transfer with the use of optimized network paths and Amazon’s content delivery network upto 300% compared to normal data transfer speed.
12.How can you speed up data transfer in Snowball?
The data transfer can be increased in the following way:
13.If you want to launch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and assign each instance a predetermined private IP address you should:
Answer C.
Explanation: The best way of connecting to your cloud resources (for ex- ec2 instances) from your own data center (for eg- private cloud) is a VPC. Once you connect your datacenter to the VPC in which your instances are present, each instance is assigned a private IP address which can be accessed from your datacenter. Hence, you can access your public cloud resources, as if they were on your own network.
14.Can I connect my corporate datacenter to the Amazon Cloud?
Yes, you can do this by establishing a VPN(Virtual Private Network) connection between your company’s network and your VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), this will allow you to interact with your EC2 instances as if they were within your existing network.
15.Is it possible to change the private IP addresses of an EC2 while it is running/stopped in a VPC?
Primary private IP address is attached with the instance throughout its lifetime and cannot be changed, however secondary private addresses can be unassigned, assigned or moved between interfaces or instances at any point.
16.Why do you make subnets?
Answer B.
Explanation: If there is a network which has a large no. of hosts, managing all these hosts can be a tedious job. Therefore we divide this network into subnets (sub-networks) so that managing these hosts becomes simpler.
17.Which of the following is true?
Answer B.
Explanation: Route Tables are used to route network packets, therefore in a subnet having multiple route tables will lead to confusion as to where the packet has to go. Therefore, there is only one route table in a subnet, and since a route table can have any no. of records or information, hence attaching multiple subnets to a route table is possible.
18.In CloudFront what happens when content is NOT present at an Edge location and a request is made to it?
Answer B.
Explanation: CloudFront is a content delivery system, which caches data to the nearest edge location from the user, to reduce latency. If data is not present at an edge location, the first time the data may get transferred from the original server, but from the next time, it will be served from the cached edge.
19.If I’m using Amazon CloudFront, can I use Direct Connect to transfer objects from my own data center?
Yes. Amazon CloudFront supports custom origins including origins from outside of AWS. With AWS Direct Connect, you will be charged with the respective data transfer rates.
20.If my AWS Direct Connect fails, will I lose my connectivity?
If a backup AWS Direct connect has been configured, in the event of a failure it will switch over to the second one. It is recommended to enable Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) when configuring your connections to ensure faster detection and failover. On the other hand, if you have configured a backup IPsec VPN connection instead, all VPC traffic will failover to the backup VPN connection automatically. Traffic to/from public resources such as Amazon S3 will be routed over the Internet. If you do not have a backup AWS Direct Connect link or a IPsec VPN link, then Amazon VPC traffic will be dropped in the event of a failure
21.If I launch a standby RDS instance, will it be in the same Availability Zone as my primary?
Answer D.
Explanation: No, since the purpose of having a standby instance is to avoid an infrastructure failure (if it happens), therefore the standby instance is stored in a different availability zone, which is a physically different independent infrastructure.
22.When would I prefer Provisioned IOPS over Standard RDS storage?
Answer A.
Explanation: Provisioned IOPS deliver high IO rates but on the other hand it is expensive as well. Batch processing workloads do not require manual intervention they enable full utilization of systems, therefore a provisioned IOPS will be preferred for batch oriented workload.
23.How is Amazon RDS, DynamoDB and Redshift different?
24.If I am running my DB Instance as a Multi-AZ deployment, can I use the standby DB Instance for read or write operations along with primary DB instance?
Answer D.
Explanation: No, Standby DB instance cannot be used with primary DB instance in parallel, as the former is solely used for standby purposes, it cannot be used unless the primary instance goes down.
25.Your company’s branch offices are all over the world, they use a software with a multi-regional deployment on AWS, they use MySQL 5.6 for data persistence.
The task is to run an hourly batch process and read data from every region to compute cross-regional reports which will be distributed to all the branches. This should be done in the shortest time possible. How will you build the DB architecture in order to meet the requirements?
Answer A.
Explanation: For this we will take an RDS instance as a master, because it will manage our database for us and since we have to read from every region, we’ll put a read replica of this instance in every region where the data has to be read from. Option C is not correct since putting a read replica would be more efficient than putting a snapshot, a read replica can be promoted if needed to an independent DB instance, but with a Db snapshot it becomes mandatory to launch a separate DB Instance.
26.Can I run more than one DB instance for Amazon RDS for free?
Yes. You can run more than one Single-AZ Micro database instance, that too for free! However, any use exceeding 750 instance hours, across all Amazon RDS Single-AZ Micro DB instances, across all eligible database engines and regions, will be billed at standard Amazon RDS prices. For example: if you run two Single-AZ Micro DB instances for 400 hours each in a single month, you will accumulate 800 instance hours of usage, of which 750 hours will be free. You will be billed for the remaining 50 hours at the standard Amazon RDS price.
27.Which AWS services will you use to collect and process e-commerce data for near real-time analysis?
Answer B,C.
Explanation: DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service. DynamoDB, therefore can be fed any type of unstructured data, which can be data from e-commerce websites as well, and later, an analysis can be done on them using Amazon Redshift. We are not using Elastic MapReduce, since a near real time analyses is needed.
28.Can I retrieve only a specific element of the data, if I have a nested JSON data in DynamoDB?
Yes. When using the GetItem, BatchGetItem, Query or Scan APIs, you can define a Projection Expression to determine which attributes should be retrieved from the table. Those attributes can include scalars, sets, or elements of a JSON document.
29.A company is deploying a new two-tier web application in AWS. The company has limited staff and requires high availability, and the application requires complex queries and table joins. Which configuration provides the solution for the company’s requirements?
Answer D.
Explanation: DynamoDB has the ability to scale more than RDS or any other relational database service, therefore DynamoDB would be the apt choice.
30.What happens to my backups and DB Snapshots if I delete my DB Instance?
When you delete a DB instance, you have an option of creating a final DB snapshot, if you do that you can restore your database from that snapshot. RDS retains this user-created DB snapshot along with all other manually created DB snapshots after the instance is deleted, also automated backups are deleted and only manually created DB Snapshots are retained.
31.Which of the following use cases are suitable for Amazon DynamoDB? Choose 2 answers
Answer C,D.
Explanation: If all your JSON data have the same fields eg [id,name,age] then it would be better to store it in a relational database, the metadata on the other hand is unstructured, also running relational joins or complex updates would work on DynamoDB as well.
32.How can I load my data to Amazon Redshift from different data sources like Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon EC2?
You can load the data in the following two ways:
33.Your application has to retrieve data from your user’s mobile every 5 minutes and the data is stored in DynamoDB, later every day at a particular time the data is extracted into S3 on a per user basis and then your application is later used to visualize the data to the user. You are asked to optimize the architecture of the backend system to lower cost, what would you recommend?
Answer C.
Explanation: Since our work requires the data to be extracted and analyzed, to optimize this process a person would use provisioned IO, but since it is expensive, using a ElastiCache memoryinsread to cache the results in the memory can reduce the provisioned read throughput and hence reduce cost without affecting the performance.
34.You are running a website on EC2 instances deployed across multiple Availability Zones with a Multi-AZ RDS MySQL Extra Large DB Instance. The site performs a high number of small reads and writes per second and relies on an eventual consistency model. After comprehensive tests you discover that there is read contention on RDS MySQL. Which are the best approaches to meet these requirements? (Choose 2 answers)
Answer A,C.
Explanation: Since it does a lot of read writes, provisioned IO may become expensive. But we need high performance as well, therefore the data can be cached using ElastiCache which can be used for frequently reading the data. As for RDS since read contention is happening, the instance size should be increased and provisioned IO should be introduced to increase the performance.
35.A startup is running a pilot deployment of around 100 sensors to measure street noise and air quality in urban areas for 3 months. It was noted that every month around 4GB of sensor data is generated. The company uses a load balanced auto scaled layer of EC2 instances and a RDS database with 500 GB standard storage. The pilot was a success and now they want to deploy at least 100K sensors which need to be supported by the backend. You need to store the data for at least 2 years to analyze it. Which setup of the following would you prefer?
Answer C.
Explanation: A Redshift cluster would be preferred because it easy to scale, also the work would be done in parallel through the nodes, therefore is perfect for a bigger workload like our use case. Since each month 4 GB of data is generated, therefore in 2 year, it should be around 96 GB. And since the servers will be increased to 100K in number, 96 GB will approximately become 96TB. Hence option C is the right answer.
36.Suppose you have an application where you have to render images and also do some general computing. From the following services which service will best fit your need?
Answer B.
Explanation: You will choose an application load balancer, since it supports path based routing, which means it can take decisions based on the URL, therefore if your task needs image rendering it will route it to a different instance, and for general computing it will route it to a different instance.
37.What is the difference between Scalability and Elasticity?
Scalability is the ability of a system to increase its hardware resources to handle the increase in demand. It can be done by increasing the hardware specifications or increasing the processing nodes.
Elasticity is the ability of a system to handle increase in the workload by adding additional hardware resources when the demand increases(same as scaling) but also rolling back the scaled resources, when the resources are no longer needed. This is particularly helpful in Cloud environments, where a pay per use model is followed.
38.How will you change the instance type for instances which are running in your application tier and are using Auto Scaling. Where will you change it from the following areas?
Answer D.
Explanation: Auto scaling tags configuration, is used to attach metadata to your instances, to change the instance type you have to use auto scaling launch configuration.
39.You have a content management system running on an Amazon EC2 instance that is approaching 100% CPU utilization. Which option will reduce load on the Amazon EC2 instance?
Explanation:Creating alone an autoscaling group will not solve the issue, until you attach a load balancer to it. Once you attach a load balancer to an autoscaling group, it will efficiently distribute the load among all the instances. Option B – CloudFront is a CDN, it is a data transfer tool therefore will not help reduce load on the EC2 instance. Similarly the other option – Launch configuration is a template for configuration which has no connection with reducing loads.
40.When should I use a Classic Load Balancer and when should I use an Application load balancer?
A Classic Load Balancer is ideal for simple load balancing of traffic across multiple EC2 instances, while an Application Load Balancer is ideal for microservices or container-based architectures where there is a need to route traffic to multiple services or load balance across multiple ports on the same EC2 instance.
41.What does Connection draining do?
Answer B.
Explanation: Connection draining is a service under ELB which constantly monitors the health of the instances. If any instance fails a health check or if any instance has to be patched with a software update, it pulls all the traffic from that instance and re routes them to other instances.
42.When an instance is unhealthy, it is terminated and replaced with a new one, which of the following services does that?
Answer B.
Explanation: When ELB detects that an instance is unhealthy, it starts routing incoming traffic to other healthy instances in the region. If all the instances in a region becomes unhealthy, and if you have instances in some other availability zone/region, your traffic is directed to them. Once your instances become healthy again, they are re routed back to the original instances.
43.What are lifecycle hooks used for in AutoScaling?
Answer B.
Explanation: Lifecycle hooks are used for putting wait time before any lifecycle action i.e launching or terminating an instance happens. The purpose of this wait time, can be anything from extracting log files before terminating an instance or installing the necessary softwares in an instance before launching it.
44.A user has setup an Auto Scaling group. Due to some issue the group has failed to launch a single instance for more than 24 hours. What will happen to Auto Scaling in this condition?
Answer B.
Explanation: Auto Scaling allows you to suspend and then resume one or more of the Auto Scaling processes in your Auto Scaling group. This can be very useful when you want to investigate a configuration problem or other issue with your web application, and then make changes to your application, without triggering the Auto Scaling process.
45.You have an EC2 Security Group with several running EC2 instances. You changed the Security Group rules to allow inbound traffic on a new port and protocol, and then launched several new instances in the same Security Group. The new rules apply:
Answer A.
Explanation: Any rule specified in an EC2 Security Group applies immediately to all the instances, irrespective of when they are launched before or after adding a rule.
46.To create a mirror image of your environment in another region for disaster recovery, which of the following AWS resources do not need to be recreated in the second region? ( Choose 2 answers )
Answer A,B.
Explanation: Elastic IPs and Route 53 record sets are common assets therefore there is no need to replicate them, since Elastic IPs and Route 53 are valid across regions
47.A customer wants to capture all client connection information from his load balancer at an interval of 5 minutes, which of the following options should he choose for his application?
Answer A.
Explanation: AWS CloudTrail provides inexpensive logging information for load balancer and other AWS resources This logging information can be used for analyses and other administrative work, therefore is perfect for this use case.
48.A customer wants to track access to their Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets and also use this information for their internal security and access audits. Which of the following will meet the Customer requirement?
Answer A.
Explanation: AWS CloudTrail has been designed for logging and tracking API calls. Also this service is available for storage, therefore should be used in this use case.
49.Which of the following are true regarding AWS CloudTrail? (Choose 2 answers)
Answer B,C.
Explanation: Cloudtrail is not enabled for all the services and is also not available for all the regions. Therefore option B is correct, also the logs can be delivered to your S3 bucket, hence C is also correct.
50.What happens if CloudTrail is turned on for my account but my Amazon S3 bucket is not configured with the correct policy?
CloudTrail files are delivered according to S3 bucket policies. If the bucket is not configured or is misconfigured, CloudTrail might not be able to deliver the log files.
51.How do I transfer my existing domain name registration to Amazon Route 53 without disrupting my existing web traffic?
You will need to get a list of the DNS record data for your domain name first, it is generally available in the form of a “zone file” that you can get from your existing DNS provider. Once you receive the DNS record data, you can use Route 53’s Management Console or simple web-services interface to create a hosted zone that will store your DNS records for your domain name and follow its transfer process. It also includes steps such as updating the nameservers for your domain name to the ones associated with your hosted zone. For completing the process you have to contact the registrar with whom you registered your domain name and follow the transfer process. As soon as your registrar propagates the new name server delegations, your DNS queries will start to get answered.
52.Which of the following services you would not use to deploy an app?
Answer B.
Explanation: Lambda is used for running server-less applications. It can be used to deploy functions triggered by events. When we say serverless, we mean without you worrying about the computing resources running in the background. It is not designed for creating applications which are publicly accessed.
53.How does Elastic Beanstalk apply updates?
Answer A.
Explanation: Elastic Beanstalk prepares a duplicate copy of the instance, before updating the original instance, and routes your traffic to the duplicate instance, so that, incase your updated application fails, it will switch back to the original instance, and there will be no downtime experienced by the users who are using your application.
54.How is AWS Elastic Beanstalk different than AWS OpsWorks?
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an application management platform while OpsWorks is a configuration management platform. BeanStalk is an easy to use service which is used for deploying and scaling web applications developed with Java, .Net, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go and Docker. Customers upload their code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment. The application will be ready to use without any infrastructure or resource configuration.
In contrast, AWS Opsworks is an integrated configuration management platform for IT administrators or DevOps engineers who want a high degree of customization and control over operations.
55.What happens if my application stops responding to requests in beanstalk?
AWS Beanstalk applications have a system in place for avoiding failures in the underlying infrastructure. If an Amazon EC2 instance fails for any reason, Beanstalk will use Auto Scaling to automatically launch a new instance. Beanstalk can also detect if your application is not responding on the custom link, even though the infrastructure appears healthy, it will be logged as an environmental event( e.g a bad version was deployed) so you can take an appropriate action.
56.How is AWS OpsWorks different than AWS CloudFormation?
OpsWorks and CloudFormation both support application modelling, deployment, configuration, management and related activities. Both support a wide variety of architectural patterns, from simple web applications to highly complex applications. AWS OpsWorks and AWS CloudFormation differ in abstraction level and areas of focus.
AWS CloudFormation is a building block service which enables customer to manage almost any AWS resource via JSON-based domain specific language. It provides foundational capabilities for the full breadth of AWS, without prescribing a particular model for development and operations. Customers define templates and use them to provision and manage AWS resources, operating systems and application code.
In contrast, AWS OpsWorks is a higher level service that focuses on providing highly productive and reliable DevOps experiences for IT administrators and ops-minded developers. To do this, AWS OpsWorks employs a configuration management model based on concepts such as stacks and layers, and provides integrated experiences for key activities like deployment, monitoring, auto-scaling, and automation. Compared to AWS CloudFormation, AWS OpsWorks supports a narrower range of application-oriented AWS resource types including Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, Elastic IPs, and Amazon CloudWatch metrics.
57.I created a key in Oregon region to encrypt my data in North Virginia region for security purposes. I added two users to the key and an external AWS account. I wanted to encrypt an object in S3, so when I tried, the key that I just created was not listed. What could be the reason?
Answer C.
Explanation: The key created and the data to be encrypted should be in the same region. Hence the approach taken here to secure the data is incorrect.
58. A company needs to monitor the read and write IOPS for their AWS MySQL RDS instance and send real-time alerts to their operations team. Which AWS services can accomplish this?
Answer B.
Explanation: Amazon CloudWatch is a cloud monitoring tool and hence this is the right service for the mentioned use case. The other options listed here are used for other purposes for example route 53 is used for DNS services, therefore CloudWatch will be the apt choice.
59. What happens when one of the resources in a stack cannot be created successfully in AWS OpsWorks?
When an event like this occurs, the “automatic rollback on error” feature is enabled, which causes all the AWS resources which were created successfully till the point where the error occurred to be deleted. This is helpful since it does not leave behind any erroneous data, it ensures the fact that stacks are either created fully or not created at all. It is useful in events where you may accidentally exceed your limit of the no. of Elastic IP addresses or maybe you may not have access to an EC2 AMI that you are trying to run etc.
60.What automation tools can you use to spinup servers?
Any of the following tools can be used: