You are creating a new API for video game scores. Reads are 100 times more common than writes, and the top 1% of scores are read 100 times more frequently than the rest of the scores. What’s the best design for this system, using
DynamoDB?

writes will miss the cache, since the supermajority will hit the top 1% scores. Knowing we need to set the values roughly equal when using caching, we select AWS ElastiCache, because CloudFront cannot directly cache DynamoDB queries, and ElastiCache is an excellent in-memory cache for database queries, rather than a distributed proxy cache for content delivery. … One solution would be to cache these reads at the application layer. Caching is a technique that is used in many high-throughput applications, offloading read activity on hot items to the cache rather than to the database. Your application can cache the most popular items in memory, or use a product such as ElastiCache to do the same. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/GuidelinesForTables.html#GuidelinesForTables.

You have been asked to de-risk deployments at your company. Specifically, the CEO is concerned about outages that occur because of accidental inconsistencies between Staging and Production, which sometimes cause unexpected behaviors in Production even when Staging tests pass. You already use Docker to get high consistency between Staging and Production for the application environment on your EC2 instances. How do you further de-risk the rest of the execution environment, since in AWS, there are many service components you may use beyond EC2 virtual machines?

clouds. https://blogs.aws.amazon.com/application-management/blog/category/Best+practices

What is web identity federation?

token for temporary security credentials in AWS that map to an IAM role with permissions to use the resources in your http://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_roles_providers_oidc.html

You need to create a Route53 record automatically in CloudFormation when not running in production during all launches of a Template. How should you implement this?

records. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/conditions-section-structure.html

You are designing a system which needs, at minumum, 8 m4.large instances operating to service traffic. When designing a system for high availability in the us-east-1 region, which has 6 Availability Zones, you company needs to be able to handle death of a full availability zone. How should you distribute the servers, to save as much cost as possible, assuming all of the EC2 nodes are properly linked to an ELB? Your VPC account can utilize us-east-1’s AZ’s a through f, inclusive.

can. By using a though e, you are allocating 5 zones. Using 2 instances, you have 10 total instances. If a single zone fails, you have 4 zones left, with 2 instances each, for a total of 8 instances. By spreading out as much as possible, you have increased cost by only 25% and significantly de-risked an availability zone failure. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-availability-zones.html#concepts-regions-availability-zones

You work for a company that automatically tags photographs using artificial neural networks (ANNs), which run on GPUs using C++. You receive millions of images at a time, but only 3 times per day on average. These images are loaded into an AWS S3 bucket you control for you in a batch, and then the customer publishes a JSON-formatted manifest into another S3 bucket you control as well. Each image takes 10 milliseconds to process using a full GPU. Your neural network software requires 5 minutes to bootstrap. Image tags are JSON objects, and you must publish them to an S3 bucket.
Which of these is the best system architectures for this system?

money. The Lambda fleet option is incorrect because AWS Lambda does not support GPU usage. The OpsWorks stack option both requires a constantly-polling instance, and also requires complex timing and capacity planning logic. The setting the instance count as high as needed. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/current-supported-versions.html

When thinking of AWS Elastic Beanstalk’s model, which is true?

levels (dev, stage, prod, fo forth). Deployments belong to environments, and are pushes of bundles of code for the environments to run. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/Welcome.html

You are hired as the new head of operations for a SaaS company. Your CTO has asked you to make debugging any part of your entire operation simpler and as fast as possible. She complains that she has no idea what is going on in the complex, service-oriented architecture, because the developers just log to disk, and it’s very hard to find errors in logs on so many services. How can you best meet this requirement and satisfy your CTO?

log analysis and aggregation. All other answers introduce extra delay or require pre-defined queries. Amazon application monitoring, and click stream analytics. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/

For AWS Auto Scaling, what is the first transition state an instance enters after leaving steady state when scaling in due to health check failure or decreased load?

the Auto Scaling group and enter the Terminating state. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AutoScaling/latest/DeveloperGuide/AutoScalingGroupLifecycle.html

Which of these is not an instrinsic function in AWS CloudFormation?

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/intrinsic-function-reference.html