Which EBS volume type is best for high performance NoSQL cluster deployments?

io1 volumes, or Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) SSDs, are best for: Critical business applications that require sustained IOPS performance, or more than 10,000 IOPS or 160 MiB/s of throughput per volume, like large database workloads, such as http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSVolumeTypes.html

You run accounting software in the AWS cloud. This software needs to be online continuously during the day every day of the week, and has a very static requirement for compute resources. You also have other, unrelated batch jobs that need to run once per day at any time of your choosing. How should you minimize cost?

jobs to perform at any time, we should run the batch jobs when the account software is off. We can achieve Heavy https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Cost_Optimization_with_AWS.pdf

What is the scope of an EC2 security group?

to communicate with an instance outside its region using security group rules. Traffic from an instance in another region is seen as WAN bandwidth. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/resources.html

When thinking of AWS Elastic Beanstalk, the ‘Swap Environment URLs’ feature most directly aids in what?

You need to create a simple, holistic check for your system’s general availablity and uptime. Your system presents itself as an HTTP-speaking API. What is the most simple tool on AWS to achieve this with?

four seconds. In addition, the endpoint must respond with an HTTP status code of 200 or greater and less than 400 within two seconds after connecting. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns-failover-determining-health-of-endpoints.html

You need to scale an RDS deployment. You are operating at 10% writes and 90% reads, based on your logging. How best can you scale this in a simple way?

read traffic. To service read-only traffic, you should use a Read Replica. For more information, see Working with http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Concepts.MultiAZ.html

You are creating an application which stores extremely sensitive financial information. All information in the system must be encrypted at rest and in transit. Which of these is a violation of this policy?

the “encryption in transit” requirement in the scenario. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/elb-listener-config.html

Fill the blanks: ____ helps us track AWS API calls and transitions, ____ helps to understand what resources we have now, and ____ allows auditing credentials and logins.

made by using the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awscloudtrail/latest/userguide/cloudtrail-user-guide.html

You run a clustered NoSQL database on AWS EC2 using AWS EBS. You need to reduce latency for database response times. Performance is the most important concern, not availability. You did not perform the initial setup, someone without much AWS knowledge did, so you are not sure if they configured everything optimally. Which of the following is NOT likely to be an issue contributing to increased latency?

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/placement-groups.html

What is server immutability?

instance usage is considered temporary or ephemeral in nature for the period of deployment until the current release is active. During the new release, a new set of EC2 instances are rolled out by terminating older instances. This type of upgrade technique is more common in an immutable infrastructure. https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/overview-of-deployment-options-on-aws.pdf