Use AWS Cheatsheets – I also found the cheatsheets provided by Tutorials Dojo very helpful. In my opinion, it is better than Jayendrapatil Patil’s blog since it contains more updated information that complements your review notes. #AWS Cheat Sheet
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Watch this exam readiness 3hr video, it very recent webinar this provides what is expected in the exam. #AWS Exam Prep Video
27
Start off watching Ryan’s videos. Try and completely focus on the hands on. Take your time to understand what you are trying to learn and achieve in those LAB Sessions. #AWS Exam Prep Video
28
Do not rush into completing the videos. Take your time and hone the basics. Focus and spend a lot of time for the back bone of AWS infrastructure – Compute/EC2 section, Storage (S3/EBS/EFS), Networking (Route 53/Load Balancers), RDS, VPC, Route 3. These sections are vast, with lot of concepts to go over and have loads to learn. Trust me you will need to thoroughly understand each one of them to ensure you pass the certification comfortably. #AWS Exam Prep Video
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Make sure you go through resources section and also AWS documentation for each components. Go over FAQs. If you have a question, please post it in the community. Trust me, each answer here helps you understand more about AWS. #AWS Faqs
30
Like any other product/service, each AWS offering has a different flavor. I will take an example of EC2 (Spot/Reserved/Dedicated/On Demand etc.). Make sure you understand what they are, what are the pros/cons of each of these flavors. Applies for all other offerings too. #AWS Services
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Follow Neal K Davis on Linkedin and Read his updates about DVA-C01 #AWS Services
What is the AWS Certified Developer Associate Exam?
The AWS Certified Developer – Associate examination is intended for individuals who perform a development role and have one or more years of hands-on experience developing and maintaining an AWS-based application. It validates an examinee’s ability to:
Demonstrate an understanding of core AWS services, uses, and basic AWS architecture best practices
Demonstrate proficiency in developing, deploying, and debugging cloud-based applications using AWS
There are two types of questions on the examination:
Multiple-choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors).
Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the lifecycle of the project.
Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or incorrect answers, are response options that an examinee with incomplete knowledge or skill would likely choose. However, they are generally plausible responses that fit in the content area defined by the test objective. Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing.
To succeed with the real exam, do not memorize the answers below. It is very important that you understand why a question is right or wrong and the concepts behind it by carefully reading the reference documents in the answers.
Understand bastion hosts, and which subnet one might live on. Bastion hosts are instances that sit within your public subnet and are typically accessed using SSH or RDP. Once remote connectivity has been established with the bastion host, it then acts as a ‘jump’ server, allowing you to use SSH or RDP to login to other instances (within private subnets) deeper within your network. When properly configured through the use of security groups and Network ACLs, the bastion essentially acts as a bridge to your private instances via the Internet.” Bastion Hosts
3
Know the difference between Directory Service’s AD Connector and Simple AD. Use Simple AD if you need an inexpensive Active Directory–compatible service with the common directory features. AD Connector lets you simply connect your existing on-premises Active Directory to AWS. AD Connector and Simple AD
4
Know how to enable cross-account access with IAM: To delegate permission to access a resource, you create an IAM role that has two policies attached. The permissions policy grants the user of the role the needed permissions to carry out the desired tasks on the resource. The trust policy specifies which trusted accounts are allowed to grant its users permissions to assume the role. The trust policy on the role in the trusting account is one-half of the permissions. The other half is a permissions policy attached to the user in the trusted account that allows that user to switch to, or assume the role. Enable cross-account access with IAM
Know which services allow you to retain full admin privileges of the underlying EC2 instances EC2 Full admin privilege
8
Know When Elastic IPs are free or not: If you associate additional EIPs with that instance, you will be charged for each additional EIP associated with that instance per hour on a pro rata basis. Additional EIPs are only available in Amazon VPC. To ensure efficient use of Elastic IP addresses, we impose a small hourly charge when these IP addresses are not associated with a running instance or when they are associated with a stopped instance or unattached network interface. When are AWS Elastic IPs Free or not?
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Know what are the four high level categories of information Trusted Advisor supplies. #AWS Trusted advisor
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Know how to troubleshoot a connection time out error when trying to connect to an instance in your VPC. You need a security group rule that allows inbound traffic from your public IP address on the proper port, you need a route that sends all traffic destined outside the VPC (0.0.0.0/0) to the Internet gateway for the VPC, the network ACLs must allow inbound and outbound traffic from your public IP address on the proper port, etc. #AWS Connection time out error
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Be able to identify multiple possible use cases and eliminate non-use cases for SWF. #AWS
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Understand how you might set up consolidated billing and cross-account access such that individual divisions resources are isolated from each other, but corporate IT can oversee all of it. #AWS Set up consolidated billing
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Know how you would go about making changes to an Auto Scaling group, fully understanding what you can and can’t change. “You can only specify one launch configuration for an Auto Scaling group at a time, and you can’t modify a launch configuration after you’ve created it. Therefore, if you want to change the launch configuration for your Auto Scaling group, you must create a launch configuration and then update your Auto Scaling group with the new launch configuration. When you change the launch configuration for your Auto Scaling group, any new instances are launched using the new configuration parameters, but existing instances are not affected. #AWS Make Change to Auto Scaling group
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Know how you would go about making changes to an Auto Scaling group, fully understanding what you can and can’t change. “You can only specify one launch configuration for an Auto Scaling group at a time, and you can’t modify a launch configuration after you’ve created it. Therefore, if you want to change the launch configuration for your Auto Scaling group, you must create a launch configuration and then update your Auto Scaling group with the new launch configuration. When you change the launch configuration for your Auto Scaling group, any new instances are launched using the new configuration parameters, but existing instances are not affected. #AWS Make Change to Auto Scaling group
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Know which field you use to run a script upon launching your instance. #AWS User data script
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Know how DynamoDB (durable, and you can pay for strong consistency), Elasticache (great for speed, not so durable), and S3 (eventual consistency results in lower latency) compare to each other in terms of durability and low latency. #AWS DynamoDB consistency
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Know the difference between bucket policies, IAM policies, and ACLs for use with S3, and examples of when you would use each. “With IAM policies, companies can grant IAM users fine-grained control to their Amazon S3 bucket or objects while also retaining full control over everything the users do. With bucket policies, companies can define rules which apply broadly across all requests to their Amazon S3 resources, such as granting write privileges to a subset of Amazon S3 resources. Customers can also restrict access based on an aspect of the request, such as HTTP referrer and IP address. With ACLs, customers can grant specific permissions (i.e. READ, WRITE, FULL_CONTROL) to specific users for an individual bucket or object. #AWS Difference between bucket policies
Understand how you can use ELB cross-zone load balancing to ensure even distribution of traffic to EC2 instances in multiple AZs registered with a load balancer. #AWS ELB cross-zone load balancing
Spot instances are good for cost optimization, even if it seems you might need to fall back to On-Demand instances if you wind up getting kicked off them and the timeline grows tighter. The primary (but still not only) factor seems to be whether you can gracefully handle instances that die on you–which is pretty much how you should always design everything, anyway! #AWS Spot instances
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The term “use case” is not the same as “function” or “capability”. A use case is something that your app/system will need to accomplish, not just behaviour that you will get from that service. In particular, a use case doesn’t require that the service be a 100% turnkey solution for that situation, just that the service plays a valuable role in enabling it. #AWS use case
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There might be extra, unnecessary information in some of the questions (red herrings), so try not to get thrown off by them. Understand what services can and can’t do, but don’t ignore “obvious”-but-still-correct answers in favour of super-tricky ones. #AWS Exam Answers: Distractors
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If you don’t know what they’re trying to ask, in a question, just move on and come back to it later (by using the helpful “mark this question” feature in the exam tool). You could easily spend way more time than you should on a single confusing question if you don’t triage and move on. #AWS Exa: Skip Questions that are vague and come back to them later
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Some exam questions required you to understand features and use cases of: VPC peering, cross-account access, DirectConnect, snapshotting EBS RAID arrays, DynamoDB, spot instances, Glacier, AWS/user security responsibilities, etc. #AWS
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The 30 Day constraint in the S3 Lifecycle Policy before transitioning to S3-IA and S3-One Zone IA storage classes #AWS S3 lifecycle policy
Watch Acloud Guru Videos Lectures while commuting / lunch break – Reschedule the exam if you are not yet ready #AWS ACloud Guru
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Watch Linux Academy Videos Lectures while commuting / lunch break – Reschedule the exam if you are not yet ready #AWS Linux Academy
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Watch Udemy Videos Lectures while commuting / lunch break – Reschedule the exam if you are not yet ready #AWS Linux Academy
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The Udemy practice test interface is good that it pinpoints your weak areas, so what I did was to re-watch all the videos that I got the wrong answers. Since I was able to gauge my exam readiness, I decided to reschedule my exam for 2 more weeks, to help me focus on completing the practice tests. #AWS Udemy
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Use AWS Cheatsheets – I also found the cheatsheets provided by Tutorials Dojo very helpful. In my opinion, it is better than Jayendrapatil Patil’s blog since it contains more updated information that complements your review notes. #AWS Cheat Sheet
40
Watch this exam readiness 3hr video, it very recent webinar this provides what is expected in the exam. #AWS Exam Prep Video
41
Start off watching Ryan’s videos. Try and completely focus on the hands on. Take your time to understand what you are trying to learn and achieve in those LAB Sessions. #AWS Exam Prep Video
42
Do not rush into completing the videos. Take your time and hone the basics. Focus and spend a lot of time for the back bone of AWS infrastructure – Compute/EC2 section, Storage (S3/EBS/EFS), Networking (Route 53/Load Balancers), RDS, VPC, Route 3. These sections are vast, with lot of concepts to go over and have loads to learn. Trust me you will need to thoroughly understand each one of them to ensure you pass the certification comfortably. #AWS Exam Prep Video
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Make sure you go through resources section and also AWS documentation for each components. Go over FAQs. If you have a question, please post it in the community. Trust me, each answer here helps you understand more about AWS. #AWS Faqs
44
Like any other product/service, each AWS offering has a different flavor. I will take an example of EC2 (Spot/Reserved/Dedicated/On Demand etc.). Make sure you understand what they are, what are the pros/cons of each of these flavors. Applies for all other offerings too. #AWS Services
45
Ensure to attend all quizzes after each section. Please do not treat these quizzes as your practice exams. These quizzes are designed to mostly test your knowledge on the section you just finished. The exam itself is designed to test you with scenarios and questions, where in you will need to recall and apply your knowledge of different AWS technologies/services you learn over multiple lectures. #AWS Services
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I, personally, do not recommend to attempt a practice exam or simulator exam until you have done all of the above. It was a little overwhelming for me. I had thoroughly gone over the videos. And understood the concepts pretty well, but once I opened exam simulator I felt the questions were pretty difficult. I also had a feeling that videos do not cover lot of topics. But later I realized, given the vastness of AWS Services and offerings it is really difficult to encompass all these services and their details in the course content. The fact that these services keep changing so often, does not help #AWS Services
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Go back and make a note of all topics, that you felt were unfamiliar for you. Go through the resources section and fiund links to AWS documentation. After going over them, you shoud gain at least 5-10% more knowledge on AWS. Have expectations from the online courses as a way to get thorough understanding of basics and strong foundations for your AWS knowledge. But once you are done with videos. Make sure you spend a lot of time on AWS documentation and FAQs. There are many many topics/sub topics which may not be covered in the course and you would need to know, atleast their basic functionalities, to do well in the exam. #AWS Services
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Once you start taking practice exams, it may seem really difficult at the beginning. So, please do not panic if you find the questions complicated or difficult. IMO they are designed or put in a way to sound complicated but they are not. Be calm and read questions very carefully. In my observation, many questions have lot of information which sometimes is not relevant to the solution you are expected to provide. Read the question slowly and read it again until you understand what is expected out of it. #AWS Services
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With each practice exam you will come across topics that you may need to scale your knowledge on or learn them from scratch. #AWS Services
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With each test and the subsequent revision, you will surely feel more confident.
There are 130 mins for questions. 2 mins for each question which is plenty of time.
At least take 8-10 practice tests. The ones on udemy/tutorialdojo are really good. If you are a acloudguru member. The exam simulator is really good.
Manage your time well. Keep patience. I saw someone mention in one of the discussions that do not under estimate the mental focus/strength needed to sit through 130 mins solving these questions. And it is really true.
Do not give away or waste any of those precious 130 mins. While answering flag/mark questions you think you are not completely sure. My advice is, even if you finish early, spend your time reviewing the answers. I could review 40 of my answers at the end of test. And I at least rectified 3 of them (which is 4-5% of total score, I think)
So in short – Put a lot of focus on making your foundations strong. Make sure you go through AWS Documentation and FAQs. Try and envision how all of the AWS components can fit together and provide an optimal solution. Keep calm. This video gives outline about exam, must watch before or after Ryan’s course.#AWS Services
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Walking you through how to best prepare for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C02 exam in 5 steps:
1. Understand the exam blueprint
2. Learn about the new topics included in the SAA-C02 version of the exam
3. Use the many FREE resources available to gain and deepen your knowledge
4. Enroll in our hands-on video course to learn AWS in depth
5. Use practice tests to fully prepare yourself for the exam and assess your exam readiness AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
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Storage:
1. Know your different Amazon S3 storage tiers! You need to know the use cases, features and limitations, and relative costs; e.g. retrieval costs.
2. Amazon S3 lifecycle policies is also required knowledge — there are minimum storage times in certain tiers that you need to know.
3. For Glacier, you need to understand what it is, what it’s used for, and what the options are for retrieval times and fees.
4. For the Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), make sure you’re clear which operating systems you can use with it (just Linux).
5. For the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), make sure you know when to use the different tiers including instance stores; e.g. what would you use for a datastore that requires the highest IO and the data is distributed across multiple instances? (Good instance store use case)
6. Learn about Amazon FSx. You’ll need to know about FSx for Windows and Lustre.
7. Know how to improve Amazon S3 performance including using CloudFront, and byte-range fetches — check out this whitepaper.
8. Make sure you understand about Amazon S3 object deletion protection options including versioning and MFA delete. AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
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Compute:
1. You need to have a good understanding of the options for how to scale an Auto Scaling Group using metrics such as SQS queue depth, or numbers of SNS messages.
2. Know your different Auto Scaling policies including Target Tracking Policies.
3. Read up on High Performance Computing (HPC) with AWS. You’ll need to know about Amazon FSx with HPC use cases.
4. Know your placement groups. Make sure you can differentiate between spread, cluster and partition; e.g. what would you use for lowest latency? What about if you need to support an app that’s tightly coupled? Within an AZ or cross AZ?
5. Make sure you know the difference between Elastic Network Adapters (ENAs), Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) and Elastic Fabric Adapters (EFAs).
6. For the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), make sure you understand how to assign IAM policies to ECS for providing S3 access. How can you decouple an ECS data processing process — Kinesis Firehose or SQS?
7. Make sure you’re clear on the different EC2 pricing models including Reserved Instances (RI) and the different RI options such as scheduled RIs.
8. Make sure you know the maximum execution time for AWS Lambda (it’s currently 900 seconds or 15 minutes). AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
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Network
1. Understand what AWS Global Accelerator is and its use cases.
2. Understand when to use CloudFront and when to use AWS Global Accelerator.
3. Make sure you understand the different types of VPC endpoint and which require an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) and which require a route table entry.
4. You need to know how to connect multiple accounts; e.g. should you use VPC peering or a VPC endpoint?
5. Know the difference between PrivateLink and ClassicLink.
6. Know the patterns for extending a secure on-premises environment into AWS.
7. Know how to encrypt AWS Direct Connect (you can use a Virtual Private Gateway / AWS VPN).
8. Understand when to use Direct Connect vs Snowball to migrate data — lead time can be an issue with Direct Connect if you’re in a hurry.
9. Know how to prevent circumvention of Amazon CloudFront; e.g. Origin Access Identity (OAI) or signed URLs / signed cookies. AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
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Databases
1. Make sure you understand Amazon Aurora and Amazon Aurora Serverless.
2. Know which RDS databases can have Read Replicas and whether you can read from a Multi-AZ standby.
3. Know the options for encrypting an existing RDS database; e.g. only at creation time otherwise you must encrypt a snapshot and create a new instance from the snapshot.
4. Know which databases are key-value stores; e.g. Amazon DynamoDB. AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
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Application Integration
1. Make sure you know the use cases for the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Simple Notification Service (SNS).
2. Understand the differences between Amazon Kinesis Firehose and SQS and when you would use each service.
3. Know how to use Amazon S3 event notifications to publish events to SQS — here’s a good “How To” article. AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
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Management and Governance
1. You’ll need to know about AWS Organizations; e.g. how to migrate an account between organizations.
2. For AWS Organizations, you also need to know how to restrict actions using service control policies attached to OUs.
3. Understand what AWS Resource Access Manager is. AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT SAA-C02 : HOW TO BEST PREPARE IN 5 STEPS
The AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate Examination reparation and Readiness Quiz App (SAA-C01, SAA-C01, SAA) Prep App helps you prepare and train for the AWS Certification Solution Architect Associate Exam with various questions and answers dumps.
This App provide updated Questions and Answers, an Intuitive Responsive Interface allowing to browse questions horizontally and browse tips and resources vertically after completing a quiz.
Features:
100+ Questions and Answers updated frequently to get you AWS certified.
Quiz with score tracker, countdown timer, highest score saving. Vie Answers after completing the quiz for each category.
Ability to navigate through questions for each category using next and previous button.
Resource info page about the answer for each category and Top 60 Tips to succeed in the exam.
Prominent Cloud Evangelist latest tweets and Technology Latest News Feed
The app helps you study and practice from your mobile device with an intuitive interface.
SAA-C01 and SAA-C02 compatible
Resource info page about the answer for each category.
Helps you study and practice from your mobile device with an intuitive interface.
The questions and Answers are divided in 4 categories:
Design High Performing Architectures,
Design Cost Optimized Architectures,
Design Secure Applications And Architectures,
Design Resilient Architecture,
The questions and answers cover the following topics: AWS VPC, S3, DynamoDB, EC2, ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Code Pipeline, Code Deploy, TCO Calculator, AWS S3, AWS DynamoDB, CloudWatch , AWS SES, Amazon Lex, AWS EBS, AWS ELB, AWS Autoscaling , RDS, Aurora, Route 53, Amazon CodeGuru, Amazon Bracket, AWS Billing and Pricing, AWS Simply Monthly Calculator, AWS cost calculator, Ec2 pricing on-demand, AWS Pricing, AWS Pay As You Go, AWS No Upfront Cost, Cost Explorer, AWS Organizations, Consolidated billing, Instance Scheduler, on-demand instances, Reserved instances, Spot Instances, CloudFront, Web hosting on S3, S3 storage classes, AWS Regions, AWS Availability Zones, Trusted Advisor, Various architectural Questions and Answers about AWS, AWS SDK, AWS EBS Volumes, EC2, S3, Containers, KMS, AWS read replicas, Cloudfront, API Gateway, AWS Snapshots, Auto shutdown Ec2 instances, High Availability, RDS, DynamoDB, Elasticity, AWS Virtual Machines, AWS Caching, AWS Containers, AWS Architecture, AWS Ec2, AWS S3, AWS Security, AWS Lambda, Bastion Hosts, S3 lifecycle policy, kinesis sharing, AWS KMS, Design High Performing Architectures, Design Cost Optimized Architectures, Design Secure Applications And Architectures, Design Resilient Architecture, AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud, Resources, Questions, AWS, AWS SDK, AWS EBS Volumes, AWS read replicas, Cloudfront, API Gateway, AWS Snapshots, Auto shutdown Ec2 instances, High Availability, RDS, DynamoDB, Elasticity, AWS Virtual Machines, AWS Caching, AWS Containers, AWS Architecture, AWS Ec2, AWS S3, AWS Security, AWS Lambda, Load Balancing, DynamoDB, EBS, Multi-AZ RDS, Aurora, EFS, DynamoDB, NLB, ALB, Aurora, Auto Scaling, DynamoDB(latency), Aurora(performance), Multi-AZ RDS(high availability), Throughput Optimized EBS (highly sequential), SAA-CO1, SAA-CO2, Cloudwatch, CloudTrail, KMS, ElasticBeanstalk, OpsWorks, RPO vs RTO, HA vs FT, Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting, Access Management Basics, Shared Responsibility Model, Cloud Service Models, etc…
The resources sections cover the following areas: Certification, AWS training, Mock Exam Preparation Tips, Cloud Architect Training, Cloud Architect Knowledge, Cloud Technology, cloud certification, cloud exam preparation tips, cloud solution architect associate exam, certification practice exam, learn aws free, amazon cloud solution architect, question dumps, acloud guru links, tutorial dojo links, linuxacademy links, latest aws certification tweets, and post from reddit, quota, linkedin, medium, cloud exam preparation tips, aws cloud solution architect associate exam, aws certification practice exam, cloud exam questions, learn aws free, amazon cloud solution architect, amazon cloud certified solution architect associate exam questions, as certification dumps, google cloud, azure cloud, acloud, learn google cloud, learn azure cloud, cloud comparison, etc.
Abilities Validated by the Certification:
Effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies
Define a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements
Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the life cycle of the project
Recommended Knowledge for the Certification:
One year of hands-on experience designing available, cost-effective, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed systems on AWS.
Hands-on experience using compute, networking, storage, and database AWS services.
Hands-on experience with AWS deployment and management services.
Ability to identify and define technical requirements for an AWS-based application.
bility to identify which AWS services meet a given technical requirement.
Knowledge of recommended best practices for building secure and reliable applications on the AWS platform.
An understanding of the basic architectural principles of building in the AWS Cloud.
An understanding of the AWS global infrastructure.
An understanding of network technologies as they relate to AWS.
An understanding of security features and tools that AWS provides and how they relate to traditional services.
Note and disclaimer: We are not affiliated with AWS or Amazon or Microsoft or Google. The questions are put together based on the certification study guide and materials available online. We also receive questions and answers from anonymous users and we vet to make sure they are legitimate. The questions in this app should help you pass the exam but it is not guaranteed. We are not responsible for any exam you did not pass.
Important: To succeed with the real exam, do not memorize the answers in this app. It is very important that you understand why a question is right or wrong and the concepts behind it by carefully reading the reference documents in the answers.
What is the AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate Exam?
This exam validates an examinee’s ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies. It validates an examinee’s ability to:
Define a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements.
Multiple-response: Has two correct responses out of five options.
There are two types of questions on the examination:
Multiple-choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors).
Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the lifecycle of the project.
Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or incorrect answers, are response options that an examinee with incomplete knowledge or skill would likely choose. However, they are generally plausible responses that fit in the content area defined by the test objective. Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing.
To succeed with the real exam, do not memorize the answers below. It is very important that you understand why a question is right or wrong and the concepts behind it by carefully reading the reference documents in the answers.
Any content destined to the public that doesn’t rank on Google or Bing is destined to be obscure and gets no visibility. Writing any blog post or article is not enough to be ranked on Google or Bing, the top 2 search engines in the world.
Lack of keywords or misplaced keywords: The primary keyword must be the first word of both your domain name and blog title.
Malformed URLs
Site Not mobile friendly
No inlinks
No meta-tags
No Alt Tags
What to do Next?
If you resolve all the issues above, register your site to google search console,, then submit a sitemap url to google or Bing, then check your site performance and index status regularly to make sure that your site is getting indexed properly.
For privacy sake, it is very important for a lot of people to not trust cloud providers with their financial data. Below are some free desktop financial software products that do not require you to store data in the cloud.
Reliable, clean data, you only pay for what you use, your data stays on your computer.
2- LibreOffice Calc : Calc is the free spreadsheet program you’ve always needed. Newcomers find it intuitive and easy to learn, while professional data miners and number crunchers appreciate the comprehensive range of advanced functions. Built-in wizards guide you through choosing and using a comprehensive range of advanced features.
Calc is the spreadsheet application you’ve always wanted. Newcomers find it intuitive and easy to learn; professional data miners and number crunchers will appreciate the comprehensive range of advanced functions.
4- Google Sheets: With Google Sheets, you can create, edit, and collaborate wherever you are. For free. Price: Free for non-business use $5/month per user for basic G-Suite $10/month per user for business license
5- Excel: Well it is Microsoft Excel….Enough said. Excel provides a simple way to download financial data into a preconfigured spreadsheet at the click of a button.
Money Manager Ex is a free, open-source, cross-platform, easy-to-use personal finance software. It primarily helps organize one’s finances and keeps track of where, when and how the money goes. It is also a great tool to get a bird’s eye view of your financial worth.
Money Manager includes all the basic features that 90% of users would want to see in a personal finance application. The design goals are to concentrate on simplicity and user-friendliness – something one can use everyday.
7- Xero: Xero backs up your data and protects it with multiple layers of security including industry-standard data encryption and secure data centres. We also offer two-step authentication as an additional layer of protection for your Xero account.
8- Smartsheet Smartsheet is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company focused entirely on its core cloud-based work automation platform. Their competency is in simplifying tasks and including many diverse types of output. Since all their efforts revolve around a single product and its extensions, there is strong user support.
What are unique distinctions and similarities between AWS, Azure and Google Cloud services? For each AWS service, what is the equivalent Azure and Google Cloud service? For each Azure service, what is the corresponding Google Service? AWS Services vs Azure vs Google Services? Side by side comparison between AWS, Google Cloud and Azure Service?
Cloud Practitioner Exam Prep: AWS vs Azure vs Google
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Category: Marketplace Easy-to-deploy and automatically configured third-party applications, including single virtual machine or multiple virtual machine solutions. References: [AWS]:AWS Marketplace [Azure]:Azure Marketplace [Google]:Google Cloud Marketplace Tags: #AWSMarketplace, #AzureMarketPlace, #GoogleMarketplace Differences: They are both digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on their respective cloud platform.
Tags: #AlexaSkillsKit, #MicrosoftBotFramework, #GoogleAssistant Differences: One major advantage Google gets over Alexa is that Google Assistant is available to almost all Android devices.
Tags: #AmazonLex, #CogintiveServices, #AzureSpeech, #Api.ai, #DialogFlow, #Tensorflow Differences: api.ai provides us with such a platform which is easy to learn and comprehensive to develop conversation actions. It is a good example of the simplistic approach to solving complex man to machine communication problem using natural language processing in proximity to machine learning. Api.ai supports context based conversations now, which reduces the overhead of handling user context in session parameters. On the other hand in Lex this has to be handled in session. Also, api.ai can be used for both voice and text based conversations (assistant actions can be easily created using api.ai).
Category: Big data and analytics: Data warehouse Description: Apache Spark-based analytics platform. Managed Hadoop service. Data orchestration, ETL, Analytics and visualization References: [AWS]:EMR, Data Pipeline, Kinesis Stream, Kinesis Firehose, Glue, QuickSight, Athena, CloudSearch [Azure]:Azure Databricks, Data Catalog Cortana Intelligence, HDInsight, Power BI, Azure Datafactory, Azure Search, Azure Data Lake Anlytics, Stream Analytics, Azure Machine Learning [Google]:Cloud DataProc, Machine Learning, Cloud Datalab Tags:#EMR, #DataPipeline, #Kinesis, #Cortana, AzureDatafactory, #AzureDataAnlytics, #CloudDataProc, #MachineLearning, #CloudDatalab Differences: All three providers offer similar building blocks; data processing, data orchestration, streaming analytics, machine learning and visualisations. AWS certainly has all the bases covered with a solid set of products that will meet most needs. Azure offers a comprehensive and impressive suite of managed analytical products. They support open source big data solutions alongside new serverless analytical products such as Data Lake. Google provide their own twist to cloud analytics with their range of services. With Dataproc and Dataflow, Google have a strong core to their proposition. Tensorflow has been getting a lot of attention recently and there will be many who will be keen to see Machine Learning come out of preview.
Category: Serverless Description: Integrate systems and run backend processes in response to events or schedules without provisioning or managing servers. References: [AWS]:AWS Lambda [Azure]:Azure Functions [Google]:Google Cloud Functions Tags:#AWSLAmbda, #AzureFunctions, #GoogleCloudFunctions Differences: Both AWS Lambda and Microsoft Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions offer dynamic, configurable triggers that you can use to invoke your functions on their platforms. AWS Lambda, Azure and Google Cloud Functions support Node.js, Python, and C#. The beauty of serverless development is that, with minor changes, the code you write for one service should be portable to another with little effort – simply modify some interfaces, handle any input/output transforms, and an AWS Lambda Node.JS function is indistinguishable from a Microsoft Azure Node.js Function. AWS Lambda provides further support for Python and Java, while Azure Functions provides support for F# and PHP. AWS Lambda is built from the AMI, which runs on Linux, while Microsoft Azure Functions run in a Windows environment. AWS Lambda uses the AWS Machine architecture to reduce the scope of containerization, letting you spin up and tear down individual pieces of functionality in your application at will.
Category:Caching Description:An in-memory–based, distributed caching service that provides a high-performance store typically used to offload non transactional work from a database. References: [AWS]:AWS ElastiCache (works as an in-memory data store and cache to support the most demanding applications requiring sub-millisecond response times.) [Azure]:Azure Cache for Redis (based on the popular software Redis. It is typically used as a cache to improve the performance and scalability of systems that rely heavily on backend data-stores.) [Google]:Memcache (In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching) Tags:#Redis, #Memcached <Differences: They all support horizontal scaling via sharding.They all improve the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrive information from fast, in-memory caches, instead of relying on slower disk-based databases.”, “Differences”: “ElastiCache supports Memcached and Redis. Memcached Cloud provides various data persistence options as well as remote backups for disaster recovery purposes. Redis offers persistence to disk, Memcache does not. This can be very helpful if you cache lots of data, since you remove the slowness around having a fully cold cache. Redis also offers several extra data structures that Memcache doesn’t— Lists, Sets, Sorted Sets, etc. Memcache only has Key/Value pairs. Memcache is multi-threaded. Redis is single-threaded and event driven. Redis is very fast, but it’ll never be multi-threaded. At hight scale, you can squeeze more connections and transactions out of Memcache. Memcache tends to be more memory efficient. This can make a big difference around the magnitude of 10s of millions or 100s of millions of keys. ElastiCache supports Memcached and Redis. Memcached Cloud provides various data persistence options as well as remote backups for disaster recovery purposes. Redis offers persistence to disk, Memcache does not. This can be very helpful if you cache lots of data, since you remove the slowness around having a fully cold cache. Redis also offers several extra data structures that Memcache doesn’t— Lists, Sets, Sorted Sets, etc. Memcache only has Key/Value pairs. Memcache is multi-threaded. Redis is single-threaded and event driven. Redis is very fast, but it’ll never be multi-threaded. At hight scale, you can squeeze more connections and transactions out of Memcache. Memcache tends to be more memory efficient. This can make a big difference around the magnitude of 10s of millions or 100s of millions of keys.
Category: Enterprise application services Description:Fully integrated Cloud service providing communications, email, document management in the cloud and available on a wide variety of devices. References: [AWS]:Amazon WorkMail, Amazon WorkDocs, Amazon Kendra (Sync and Index) [Azure]:Office 365 [Google]:G Suite Tags: #AmazonWorkDocs, #Office365, #GoogleGSuite Differences: G suite document processing applications like Google Docs are far behind Office 365 popular Word and Excel software, but G Suite User interface is intuite, simple and easy to navigate. Office 365 is too clunky. Get 20% off G-Suite Business Plan with Promo Code: PCQ49CJYK7EATNC
Category: Management Description: A unified management console that simplifies building, deploying, and operating your cloud resources. References: [AWS]:AWS Management Console, Trusted Advisor, AWS Usage and Billing Report, AWS Application Discovery Service, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, AWS Personal Health Dashboard, AWS Compute Optimizer (Identify optimal AWS Compute resources) [Azure]:Azure portal, Azure Advisor, Azure Billing API, Azure Migrate, Azure Monitor, Azure Resource Health [Google]:Google CLoud Platform, Cost Management, Security Command Center, StackDriver Tags: #AWSConsole, #AzurePortal, #GoogleCloudConsole, #TrustedAdvisor, #AzureMonitor, #SecurityCommandCenter Differences: AWS Console categorizes its Infrastructure as a Service offerings into Compute, Storage and Content Delivery Network (CDN), Database, and Networking to help businesses and individuals grow. Azure excels in the Hybrid Cloud space allowing companies to integrate onsite servers with cloud offerings. Google has a strong offering in containers, since Google developed the Kubernetes standard that AWS and Azure now offer. GCP specializes in high compute offerings like Big Data, analytics and machine learning. It also offers considerable scale and load balancing – Google knows data centers and fast response time.
Build and connect intelligent bots that interact with your users using text/SMS, Skype, Teams, Slack, Office 365 mail, Twitter, and other popular services.
Enables both Speech to Text, and Text into Speech capabilities. The Speech Services are the unification of speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech-translation into a single Azure subscription. It’s easy to speech enable your applications, tools, and devices with the Speech SDK, Speech Devices SDK, or REST APIs. Amazon Polly is a Text-to-Speech (TTS) service that uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice. With dozens of lifelike voices across a variety of languages, you can select the ideal voice and build speech-enabled applications that work in many different countries. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capability to their applications. Using the Amazon Transcribe API, you can analyze audio files stored in Amazon S3 and have the service return a text file of the transcribed speech.
Computer Vision: Extract information from images to categorize and process visual data. Amazon Rekognition is a simple and easy to use API that can quickly analyze any image or video file stored in Amazon S3. Amazon Rekognition is always learning from new data, and we are continually adding new labels and facial recognition features to the service.
Face: Detect, identy, and analyze faces in photos.
The Virtual Assistant Template brings together a number of best practices we’ve identified through the building of conversational experiences and automates integration of components that we’ve found to be highly beneficial to Bot Framework developers.
Processes and moves data between different compute and storage services, as well as on-premises data sources at specified intervals. Create, schedule, orchestrate, and manage data pipelines.
Virtual servers allow users to deploy, manage, and maintain OS and server software. Instance types provide combinations of CPU/RAM. Users pay for what they use with the flexibility to change sizes.
Allows you to automatically change the number of VM instances. You set defined metric and thresholds that determine if the platform adds or removes instances.
Redeploy and extend your VMware-based enterprise workloads to Azure with Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple. Keep using the VMware tools you already know to manage workloads on Azure without disrupting network, security, or data protection policies.
Azure Container Instances is the fastest and simplest way to run a container in Azure, without having to provision any virtual machines or adopt a higher-level orchestration service.
Deploy orchestrated containerized applications with Kubernetes. Simplify monitoring and cluster management through auto upgrades and a built-in operations console.
Fully managed service that enables developers to deploy microservices applications without managing virtual machines, storage, or networking. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and ensuring high-availability for your applications.
Integrate systems and run backend processes in response to events or schedules without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda is an event-driven, serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of the Amazon Web Services. It is a computing service that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the computing resources required by that code
Managed relational database service where resiliency, scale, and maintenance are primarily handled by the platform. Amazon Relational Database Service is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services. It is a web service running “in the cloud” designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications. Administration processes like patching the database software, backing up databases and enabling point-in-time recovery are managed automatically. Scaling storage and compute resources can be performed by a single API call as AWS does not offer an ssh connection to RDS instances.
An in-memory–based, distributed caching service that provides a high-performance store typically used to offload non transactional work from a database. Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed in-memory data store and cache service by Amazon Web Services. The service improves the performance of web applications by retrieving information from managed in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. ElastiCache supports two open-source in-memory caching engines: Memcached and Redis.
Migration of database schema and data from one database format to a specific database technology in the cloud. AWS Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database. The AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases.
Comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers. AWS X-Ray is an application performance management service that enables a developer to analyze and debug applications in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. A developer can use AWS X-Ray to visualize how a distributed application is performing during development or production, and across multiple AWS regions and accounts.
A cloud service for collaborating on code development. AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of compute services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and your on-premises servers. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for you to rapidly release new features, helps you avoid downtime during application deployment, and handles the complexity of updating your applications. AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. CodePipeline automates the build, test, and deploy phases of your release process every time there is a code change, based on the release model you define. AWS CodeCommit is a source code storage and version-control service for Amazon Web Services’ public cloud customers. CodeCommit was designed to help IT teams collaborate on software development, including continuous integration and application delivery.
Collection of tools for building, debugging, deploying, diagnosing, and managing multiplatform scalable apps and services. The AWS Developer Tools are designed to help you build software like Amazon. They facilitate practices such as continuous delivery and infrastructure as code for serverless, containers, and Amazon EC2.
Built on top of the native REST API across all cloud services, various programming language-specific wrappers provide easier ways to create solutions. The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a unified tool to manage your AWS services. With just one tool to download and configure, you can control multiple AWS services from the command line and automate them through scripts.
Configures and operates applications of all shapes and sizes, and provides templates to create and manage a collection of resources. AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet. Chef and Puppet are automation platforms that allow you to use code to automate the configurations of your servers.
Provides a way for users to automate the manual, long-running, error-prone, and frequently repeated IT tasks. AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. CloudFormation allows you to use a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts.
Provides an isolated, private environment in the cloud. Users have control over their virtual networking environment, including selection of their own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways.
Connects Azure virtual networks to other Azure virtual networks, or customer on-premises networks (Site To Site). Allows end users to connect to Azure services through VPN tunneling (Point To Site).
A service that hosts domain names, plus routes users to Internet applications, connects user requests to datacenters, manages traffic to apps, and improves app availability with automatic failover.
Application Gateway is a layer 7 load balancer. It supports SSL termination, cookie-based session affinity, and round robin for load-balancing traffic.
Azure Digital Twins is an IoT service that helps you create comprehensive models of physical environments. Create spatial intelligence graphs to model the relationships and interactions between people, places, and devices. Query data from a physical space rather than disparate sensors.
Provides analysis of cloud resource configuration and security so subscribers can ensure they’re making use of best practices and optimum configurations.
Allows users to securely control access to services and resources while offering data security and protection. Create and manage users and groups, and use permissions to allow and deny access to resources.
Role-based access control (RBAC) helps you manage who has access to Azure resources, what they can do with those resources, and what areas they have access to.
Provides managed domain services such as domain join, group policy, LDAP, and Kerberos/NTLM authentication that are fully compatible with Windows Server Active Directory.
Azure Policy is a service in Azure that you use to create, assign, and manage policies. These policies enforce different rules and effects over your resources, so those resources stay compliant with your corporate standards and service level agreements.
Azure management groups provide a level of scope above subscriptions. You organize subscriptions into containers called “management groups” and apply your governance conditions to the management groups. All subscriptions within a management group automatically inherit the conditions applied to the management group. Management groups give you enterprise-grade management at a large scale, no matter what type of subscriptions you have.
Helps you protect and safeguard your data and meet your organizational security and compliance commitments.
Key Management Service AWS KMS, CloudHSM | Key Vault
Provides security solution and works with other services by providing a way to manage, create, and control encryption keys stored in hardware security modules (HSM).
Provides inbound protection for non-HTTP/S protocols, outbound network-level protection for all ports and protocols, and application-level protection for outbound HTTP/S.
An automated security assessment service that improves the security and compliance of applications. Automatically assess applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices.
Object storage service, for use cases including cloud applications, content distribution, backup, archiving, disaster recovery, and big data analytics.
Provides a simple interface to create and configure file systems quickly, and share common files. Can be used with traditional protocols that access files over a network.
Easily join your distributed microservice architectures into a single global application using HTTP load balancing and path-based routing rules. Automate turning up new regions and scale-out with API-driven global actions, and independent fault-tolerance to your back end microservices in Azure—or anywhere.
Cloud technology to build distributed applications using out-of-the-box connectors to reduce integration challenges. Connect apps, data and devices on-premises or in the cloud.
Serverless technology for connecting apps, data and devices anywhere, whether on-premises or in the cloud for large ecosystems of SaaS and cloud-based connectors.
Azure Stack is a hybrid cloud platform that enables you to run Azure services in your company’s or service provider’s datacenter. As a developer, you can build apps on Azure Stack. You can then deploy them to either Azure Stack or Azure, or you can build truly hybrid apps that take advantage of connectivity between an Azure Stack cloud and Azure.
Cloud computing is the new big thing in Information Technology. Everyone, every business will sooner or later adopt it, because of hosting cost benefits, scalability and more.
This blog outlines the Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing, Pros and Cons of Cloud Technology, Faqs, Facts, Questions and Answers Dump about cloud computing.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Prep PWA AppCloud Practitioner Exam Prep AWS vs Azure vs Google
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is an information technology paradigm that enables ubiquitous access to shared pools of configurable system resources and higher-level services that can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the Internet. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, similar to a public utility. Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business needs change.
Cost effective & Time saving: Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters; the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, and the IT experts for managing the infrastructure.
The ability to pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs.
Powerful server capabilities and Performance: The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure datacenters, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate datacenter, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.
Powerful and scalable server capabilities: The ability to scale elastically; That means delivering the right amount of IT resources—for example, more or less computing power, storage, bandwidth—right when they’re needed, and from the right geographic location.
SaaS ( Software as a service). Software as a service is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on demand and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure, and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the application over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their phone, tablet, or PC.
PaaS ( Platform as a service). Platform as a service refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering, and managing software applications. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network, and databases needed for development.
IaaS ( Infrastructure as a service). The most basic category of cloud computing services. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure—servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systems—from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis
Serverless: Running complex Applications without a single server. Overlapping with PaaS, serverless computing focuses on building app functionality without spending time continually managing the servers and infrastructure required to do so. The cloud provider handles the setup, capacity planning, and server management for you. Serverless architectures are highly scalable and event-driven, only using resources when a specific function or trigger occurs.
Infrastructure provisioning as code, helps recreating same infrastructure by re-running the same code in a few click.
Automatic and Reliable Data backup and storage of data: Cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity easier and less expensive because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network.
Increase Productivity: On-site datacenters typically require a lot of “racking and stacking”—hardware setup, software patching, and other time-consuming IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks, so IT teams can spend time on achieving more important business goals.
Security: Many cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls that strengthen your security posture overall, helping protect your data, apps, and infrastructure from potential threats.
Speed: Most cloud computing services are provided self service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off capacity planning.
Privacy: Cloud computing poses privacy concerns because the service provider can access the data that is in the cloud at any time. It could accidentally or deliberately alter or delete information.Many cloud providers can share information with third parties if necessary for purposes of law and order without a warrant. That is permitted in their privacy policies, which users must agree to before they start using cloud services.
Security: According to the Cloud Security Alliance, the top three threats in the cloud are Insecure Interfaces and API’s, Data Loss & Leakage, and Hardware Failure—which accounted for 29%, 25% and 10% of all cloud security outages respectively. Together, these form shared technology vulnerabilities.
Ownership of Data: There is the problem of legal ownership of the data (If a user stores some data in the cloud, can the cloud provider profit from it?). Many Terms of Service agreements are silent on the question of ownership.
Limited Customization Options: Cloud computing is cheaper because of economics of scale, and—like any outsourced task—you tend to get what you get. A restaurant with a limited menu is cheaper than a personal chef who can cook anything you want.
Downtime: Technical outages are inevitable and occur sometimes when cloud service providers (CSPs) become overwhelmed in the process of serving their clients. This may result to temporary business suspension.
Security of stored data and data in transit may be a concern when storing sensitive data at a cloud storage provider[10]
Users with specific records-keeping requirements, such as public agencies that must retain electronic records according to statute, may encounter complications with using cloud computing and storage. For instance, the U.S. Department of Defense designated the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to maintain a list of records management products that meet all of the records retention, personally identifiable information (PII), and security (Information Assurance; IA) requirements
Cloud storage is a rich resource for both hackers and national security agencies. Because the cloud holds data from many different users and organizations, hackers see it as a very valuable target.
Piracy and copyright infringement may be enabled by sites that permit filesharing. For example, the CodexCloud ebook storage site has faced litigation from the owners of the intellectual property uploaded and shared there, as have the GrooveShark and YouTube sites it has been compared to.
Public clouds: A cloud is called a “public cloud” when the services are rendered over a network that is open for public use. They are owned and operated by a third-party cloud service providers, which deliver their computing resources, like servers and storage, over the Internet. Microsoft Azure is an example of a public cloud. With a public cloud, all hardware, software, and other supporting infrastructure is owned and managed by the cloud provider. You access these services and manage your account using a web browser. For infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) hold a commanding position among the many cloud companies.
Private cloud is cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third party, and hosted either internally or externally. A private cloud refers to cloud computing resources used exclusively by a single business or organization. A private cloud can be physically located on the company’s on-site datacenter. Some companies also pay third-party service providers to host their private cloud. A private cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network.
Hybrid cloud is a composition of a public cloud and a private environment, such as a private cloud or on-premise resources, that remain distinct entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. Hybrid cloud can also mean the ability to connect collocation, managed and/or dedicated services with cloud resources. Hybrid clouds combine public and private clouds, bound together by technology that allows data and applications to be shared between them. By allowing data and applications to move between private and public clouds, a hybrid cloud gives your business greater flexibility, more deployment options, and helps optimize your existing infrastructure, security, and compliance.
Community Cloud: A community cloud in computing is a collaborative effort in which infrastructure is shared between several organizations from a specific community with common concerns, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally. This is controlled and used by a group of organizations that have shared interest. The costs are spread over fewer users than a public cloud, so only some of the cost savings potential of cloud computing are realized.
Other AWS Facts and Summaries and Questions/Answers Dump
What do the top 3 public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, Google cloud do to insure customer data loss?
As cloud user, cloud customer, company storing customer data in the cloud, you probably have a lot of personal or private data hosted in various infrastructure in the cloud. Losing that data or having the data accessed by hackers or unauthorized third party can be very harmful both financially and emotionally to you or your customers. A cloud User or Customer Insurance can protect you against data lost or stolen data. Practically, the cloud computing insurance is a cyber liability policy that covers web-based services. Before looking for a customer insurance in the cloud, you need to clarify “What data should the insurance cover and under which governing laws?“, “What data can be considered a loss?” . The good news is : as cloud adoption is increasing in the insurance industry, insurers have the opportunity to better understand their operations models and to implement tailored insurance solutions for cloud.
Cloud Data loss can happen in the following forms:
First Party Losses: losses where the cloud provider incurs damages. Those types of losses include:
Destruction of Data
Denial of Service Attack (DOS)
Virus, Malware and Spyware
Human Error
Electrical Malfunctions and Power Surges in data centers
Natural Disasters
Network Failures
Cyber Extortion
Each of the above exposures to loss would result in direct damages to the insured, or first-party loss.
Third-Party Losses – damages that would occur to customers outside of the cloud provider. These types of losses include:
Breach of Privacy
Misuse of Private Personal Information
Defamation or Slander
Transmission of Malicious Content
The above exposures could result in a company being held liable for the damages caused to others (liability).
Cyber insurance is a form of insurance for businesses and individuals against internet-based risks. The most common risk that is insured against is data breaches. … It also covers losses from network security breaches, theft of intellectual property and loss of privacy.
Data Compromise coverage insures a commercial entity when there is a data breach, theft or unauthorized disclosure of personal information. … Thus Cyber Liability covers both the expenses to notify affected individuals of data breaches and the expenses to make the insured whole for their own damages incurred.
Contact an Independent Insurance Agent near you that writes Cyber Insurance and ask them to get multiple quotes for your business.
However, a more effective risk management solution might be loss control rather than financing. If you encrypt your data at rest and set up and adopt a process of automatic regular backups, and geographically distribute those backups , then you have effectively minimized the potential costs of loss.
Cyber Insurance is not yet standardized as many other forms of commercial insurance. Therefore, breadth of coverage and pricing can vary widely.
Access: As a customer, you maintain full control of your content and responsibility for configuring access to AWS services and resources. We provide an advanced set of access, encryption, and logging features to help you do this effectively (e.g., AWS Identity and Access Management, AWS Organizations and AWS CloudTrail). We provide APIs for you to configure access control permissions for any of the services you develop or deploy in an AWS environment. We do not access or use your content for any purpose without your consent. We never use your content or derive information from it for marketing or advertising.
Storage: You choose the AWS Region(s) in which your content is stored and the type of storage. You can replicate and back up your content in more than one AWS Region. We will not move or replicate your content outside of your chosen AWS Region(s) without your consent, except as legally required and as necessary to maintain the AWS services.
Security: You choose how your content is secured. We offer you strong encryption for your content in transit and at rest, and we provide you with the option to manage your own encryption keys. These features include:
Data encryption capabilities available in AWS storage and database services, such as Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Relational Database Service, and Amazon Redshift.
Flexible key management options, including AWS Key Management Service (KMS), allow customers to choose whether to have AWS manage the encryption keys or enable customers to keep complete control over their keys.
AWS customers can employ Server-Side Encryption (SSE) with Amazon S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3), SSE with AWS KMS-Managed Keys (SSE-KMS), or SSE with Customer-Provided Encryption Keys (SSE-C).
Disclosure of customer content: We do not disclose customer information unless we’re required to do so to comply with a legally valid and binding order. Unless prohibited from doing so or there is clear indication of illegal conduct in connection with the use of Amazon products or services, Amazon notifies customers before disclosing content information.
Security Assurance: We have developed a security assurance program that uses best practices for global privacy and data protection to help you operate securely within AWS, and to make the best use of our security control environment. These security protections and control processes are independently validated by multiple third-party independent assessments
Property and Casualty Insurance: Property insurance covers the physical location of the business and its contents from things like fire, theft, flood, and earthquakes—although read the terms carefully to make sure they include everything you need. Casualty insurance, on the other hand, covers the operation of the business, but the two are usually grouped together in policies.
Auto Insurance:Auto insurance protects you against financial loss if you have an accident. It is a contract between you and the insurance company.
Liability Insurance: Liability insurance is insurance that provides protection against claims resulting from injuries and damage property.
Business Insurance: Business interruption insurance can make up for lost cash flow and profits incurred because of an event that has interrupted your normal business operations.
Health and Disability Insurance: Health insurance provides health coverage for you and your employees. This insurance covers your employees for the expenses and loss of income caused by non work-related injuries, illnesses, and disabilities and death from any cause.
Life Insurance: Life and disability insurance covers your business in the event of the death or disability of key owners.
Cyber Insurance: Cover Data loss, destruction of data, privacy breach, Denial of Service Attack (DOS), Network failure, Transmission of Malicious Content, Misuse of personal or private information, etc.
Crime & Employee Dishonesty Insurance: To cover your business for fraudulent acts committed by your employees, e.g. theft or embezzlement of money, securities, and other business-owned property and for burglary, theft, and robbery of cash and other representations of money, e.g. money orders, postage stamps, travelers checks, and readily convertible securities, e.g. bearer bonds;
Mandatory Workers Compensation Insurance: To cover your employees for injuries and illnesses sustained during the course of employment. This would include medical expenses and loss of income due to a work-related disability;
Transportation/Inland & Ocean Marine Insurance: To pay for loss of damage to property you own or are responsible for while it is being transported or shipped to or from customers, manufacturers, processors, assemblers, warehouses, etc. by air, ship, or land vehicles either domestically or internationally.
Umbrella Liability Insurance: To provide an additional layer of liability insurance over your primary automobile liability, general liability, employers liability, and, if applicable, watercraft or aircraft liability policies;
Directors & Officers Liability Insurance: To defend your business and its directors or officers against allegations that they mismanaged the business in some way which caused financial loss to your clients (and/or others) and pay money damages in a court trial or settlement;
Condos Unit Owners Personal Insurance & Landlord / Rental Property Insurance: Cover expenses that come from having a loss within your property. Whether the unit owner is living in their unit or not, it is your responsibility to ensure that your personal assets and liabilities are adequately protected by your own personal insurance policy. This coverage includes all the content items that are brought into a unit or stored in a storage locker or premises, such as furnishings, electronics, clothing, etc. Most policies out there will also cover personal property while it is temporary off premises, on vacation for example.
Landlord property coverage is to protect the property that you own within your rental unit, which includes but is not limited to, appliances, window coverings, or if you rent out your unit fully furnished, then all of that property that is yours.
Rental Property insurance coverage allows you to protect you revenue source. Your property is your responsibility and if you property gets damaged by an insured peril, and your tenant can’t live there for a month or two (or more), you can purchase insurance to replace that rental income for the period of time your property is inhabitable.
Do online businesses need insurance?
All businesses need insurance. Here are some suggestions:
Property Insurance: To cover your owned, non-owned, and leased business property (contents, buildings if applicable, computers, office supplies, and any other property that you need to operate your business) for such perils as fire, windstorm, smoke damage, water damage, and theft.
EDP Insurance: To cover your computer hardware and software for such perils as mechanical breakdown and electrical injury;
Cyber Property and Liability Insurance: To cover your business for its activities on the Internet. Cyber Property coverages apply to losses sustained by your company directly. An example is damage to your company’s electronic data files caused by a hacker/security breach. Cyber Liability coverages apply to claims against your company by people who have been injured as a result of your actions or failure to act. For instance, a client sues you for negligence after his personal data, e.g credit card numbers or confidential information is stolen from your computer system and released online.
Loss of Income (Business Interruption) Insurance: To cover your business for the loss of income you would sustain because it was damaged by a covered peril under your property insurance, e.g. fire, windstorm, smoke damage, and theft;
Thinking of purchasing cyber insurance? Make sure the policy you choose covers more than paying ransomware. Paying cyber criminals should be a last resort. Your policy should include cleaning & rebuilding current systems, hiring experts, & purchasing new protections.
The purpose of cyber security is to protect all forms of digital data. Protecting personal information (SSN, credit card information, etc.), protecting proprietary information .(Facebook algorithms, Tesla vehicle designs, etc.), and other forms of digital data.
Cloud computing insurance is meant to protect a cloud provider. The implementation of a system and the preservation of important information comes with risks. If anything goes wrong, such as an outage at a critical time that results in business interruption, your client can hold you responsible and seek damages. Cloud insurance can not only provide compensation to your client as a result of a claim against you, but can also cover your legal defense and lost income.
Office 365 and G Suite give you professional email, cloud storage, mailing list and fast access from anywhere using a browser.
I use both, but G suite still has an edge over all their other competitors for me.
My problem with Office 365 is that its email interface is heavy and can be confusing. Try adding an alias to forward to your main email using Office 365 and get back to me.
G suite email interface is well, Gmail: the best email system ever created.
Allows you to access documents in the cloud with over 30GB of storage
Helps you work faster from anywhere and from any device
G Suite Pros: * All useful apps to manage your small business in one place from same provider with 24/7 support * Slick and extremely fast apps like gmail, google groups * You can set them up yourself with no knowledge of IT * Cost efficient * Easy to use as most people already use gmail and other google products.
As low as $7 per month per user
24/7 Support: If you call or email Google anytime , they will help you set it up very quickly and get you ready.
With G Suite Basic, you and the other users in your organization get:
Gmail: Send and receive mail using your professional address, as in bob@yourcompany.com
Calendar: Share calendars to easily schedule meetings and events
Docs: Collaborate in real-time on online documents, spreadsheets, and presentations
Drive: Store and back up files securely in the cloud
Hangouts: Join video meetings from their laptop or other device
Administrative controls
Your administrative or IT team can also:
Manage user accounts and security settings from a central Admin console
Control user access to features and services
Remotely manage your mobile fleet
Track usage trends via audits and reports
Receive 24/7 support from G Suite experts
Unlimited storage
With G Suite Business, each user in your organization can store unlimited Gmail messages, Google Photos, and files in Drive. Or if there are 4 or fewer users in your organization, each user gets 1 TB of storage.
Company-wide search
Users can also use Google Cloud Search to:
Search for company content across Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and their other G Suite services
Receive useful information and suggestions from assist cards
With shared drives, files belong to a team instead of an individual. If members leave, files stay where they are so the team can continue to share information and get work done. Learn more
Advanced administrator controls
Archiving with Vault
Use Vault to retain, archive, search, and export your organization’s data for eDiscovery and compliance needs. Learn more
Advanced reports
Advanced Drive audit reporting, custom alerts, and APIs. Learn more
Mobile audits and alerts, such as when a device is compromised. Learn more
Drive activity alerts
Get custom alerts on Drive activity, such as when documents are shared outside your domain. Learn more
Security keys
Deploy and monitor security keys for your organization, and purchase them at a discounted rate. Learn more
One of the biggest advantages of Office 365 is the ability to work from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. Because it’s entirely cloud-based, you can access your email, files and Office programs (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) from any location and any device.
Multiple, flexible plans tailored to businesses
Advanced Security : It is a feature that provides extra protection from sophisticated threats that may be hidden in emails and attachments. Users are also provided with additional security features such as two-factor authentication
Cons of Office 365:
Relying on network and bandwidth. If your Internet provider goes down, then you haven’t any access to your enterprise software and data. Microsoft does not control how you access the Internet and, therefore, cannot account for any failures.
The user interface for email is heavy and cumbersome.
According to Wikipedia, Corporate America is an informal (and sometimes derogatory) phrase describing the world ofcorporationsandbig businesswithin theUnited States and Canada.
A job or career in corporate America is usually the best entry to true middle class or even upper middle class for managers, but it comes with baggages.
The question is What are the top 10 biggest lessons learned from the corporate world?
1- Every single day, there is someone whose job is to figure out how to get rid of you without impacting the business. Make choice that are good for you and your family only. If you leave, no one will care. Everybody is replaceable.
2- No emotion, nobody cares for you. The occasional smiles are 95% fake. Never forget that.
3- Always figure out a way to be good and be needed, because at the second they realize they can do it without you with minimal effect to the team or business, you will be gone.
4- Always improve yourself and keep your eyes open on the market. Never get too comfortable. Be nice to recruiters, always reply nicely to their email even if you are not available. The tide can turn very quickly. Always keep a pulse on the job market. At least twice a year apply for jobs in your industry to get a sense on what your skills trade for in the open market and to sharpen your interviewing skills. It is also a great habit to be in the orbit of recruiters because they operate within a tight-knit ecosystem, network with, and know one another. If you’re not a great fit for one role, and they like you, they’ll refer you to a friend or colleague looking to fill another role as a courtesy.
5- If you are very technical , the best outcome for you is to open your own business or become an independent consultant or contractor or freelancer while working in corporate. Once your own business pick up, quit your corporate job and discover real freedom.
6- Be very wise and knowledgeable about the business, but stay humble at the same time: Be friendly without making friends. Being too cold can prevent colleagues from sharing gossips with you and those gossips can be helpful sometimes.
7- Stay away from people who complain too much, they slow productivity and can drag you with them and expose you.
8- HR is not your friend. Their jobs is to protect the big bosses and their own job. Think twice before reporting racists, sexists, bullies, …or you will be gone. If you are victim of any of that as a minority, look for a new job and report it anonymously, otherwise your career will be over. All the following characteristics are overlooked by most HR departments:
Compassion
Sympathy
Empathy
Kindness
Gratitude
Humility
Patience
Self awareness
The ability to be the “bigger person”
Sincerity
9- Become a subject matter in at least one topic or area within your department of team to make yourself indispensable. Be result oriented and not effort oriented. Result matter more than effort. Focus on getting things done instead of on working hard. They are more than often not the same thing.
10- Volunteer to headline new projects and gain visibility from leadership. It might help during tough times when cuts are needed.
11- Be kind, especially to nerds, they will probably own a company one day and will remember you. Be authentic, work hard and be wise and kind, especially to the awkward and silent ones. Introverts, extroverts, flashy dressers, frumpy dressers, are sometime gifted with supreme execution and succeed in business, which proves one thing: Success doesn’t care how you show up; just that you show up.
12- Never waste your weekend or holidays for office work. Your company is not going to take care of your family. You will regret later when the time will start taking your loved ones back, every product of nature has expiry date. This is harsh truth.
13- Emotional and professional are opposite words in corporate culture. Don’t share your emotional stories with your colleagues, surely one day, they are gonna make fun of your emotions and use it against you.
14- Keep your spirit and self respect up and never let anyone harm your image. They selected you because you were better than others and you add value to the company.
15- Never make a relationship in the office, a single mistake will destroy your personal and professional life.
Disclaimer: The content of this post doesn’t describe or target any company I worked with in particular, it is based on research and discussion with friends working with several companies within Corporate America.
VPNs are used to provide remote corporate employees, gig economy freelance workers and business travelers with access to software applications hosted on proprietary networks. To gain access to a restricted resource through a VPN, the user must be authorized to use the VPN app and provide one or more authentication factors, such as a password, security token or biometric data.
A VPN extends a private network across a public network, and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. Applications running on a computing device, e.g. a laptop, desktop, smartphone, across a VPN may therefore benefit from the functionality, security, and management of the private network. Encryption is a common though not an inherent part of a VPN connection.
To ensure security, the private network connection is established using an encrypted layered tunneling protocol and VPN users use authentication methods, including passwords or certificates, to gain access to the VPN. In other applications, Internet users may secure their connections with a VPN, to circumvent geo restrictions and censorship, or to connect to proxy servers to protect personal identity and location to stay anonymous on the Internet. However, some websites block access to known VPN technology to prevent the circumvention of their geo-restrictions, and many VPN providers have been developing strategies to get around these roadblocks.
Private browsing on incognito window or inPrivate window a privacy feature in some web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, Edge). When operating in such a mode, the browser creates a temporary session that is isolated from the browser’s main session and user data. Browsing history is not saved, and local data associated with the session, such as cookies, are cleared when the session is closed.
These modes are designed primarily to prevent data and history associated with a particular browsing session from persisting on the device, or being discovered by another user of the same device. Private browsing modes do not necessarily protect users from being tracked by other websites or their internet service provider (ISP). Furthermore, there is a possibility that identifiable traces of activity could be leaked from private browsing sessions by means of the operating system, security flaws in the browser, or via malicious browser extensions, and it has been found that certain HTML5APIs can be used to detect the presence of private browsing modes due to differences in behaviour.
The question is:
How does using a VPN or Proxy or TOR or private browsing protects your online activity?
What are the pros and cons of VPN vs Proxy?
How can VPN, Proxy, TOR, private browsing, incognito windows How does using a VPN, Proxy, TOR, private browsing, incognito windows protects your online activity? protects your online activity?
VPN masks your real IP address by hiding it with one of its servers. As a result, no third party will be able to link your online activity to your physical location. To top it off, you avoid annoying ads and stay off the marketer’s radars.
VPN encrypts your internet traffic in order to make it impossible for anybody to decode your sensitive information and steal your identity. You can also learn more what a development team tells about how they protect their users against data theft.
If your VPN doesn’t protect your online activities, it means there are some problems with the aforementioned protection measures. This could be:
VPN connection disruption. Unfortunately, a sudden disruption of your connection can deanonymize you, if at this moment your device is sending or receiving IP-related requests. In order to avoid such a situation, the kill switch option should be always ON.
DNS/IP address leakage. This problem can be caused by various reasons from configuration mistakes to a conflict between the app under discussion and some other installed software. Regardless of the reason, you will end up with otherwise perfectly working security app, which, in fact, is leaking your IP address.
Outdated protocol. In a nutshell, it is the technology that manages the сreation of your secured connection. If your current protocol becomes obsolete, the app will not work perfectly.
Free apps. This is about free software that makes money on your privacy. The actions of such applications are also considered as unethical and illegal. Stealing your private data and selling of it to third parties is one of them.
User carelessness. For instance, turn on your virtual private network when you visit any website or enter your credentials. Don’t use the app sporadically.
How is a VPN different from a proxy server?
On top of serving as a proxy server, VPN provides encryption. A proxy server only hides your IP address.
Proxies are good for the low-stakes task like: watching regionally restricted videos on YouTube, creating another Gmail account when your IP limit ran out, accessing region restricted websites, bypassing content filters, request restrictions on IP.
On the other hand, proxies are not so great for the high-stakes task. As we know, proxies only act as a middleman in our Internet traffic, they only serve a webpage which we are requesting them to serve.
Just like the proxy service, a VPN makes your traffic to have appeared from the remote IP address that is not yours. But, that’s when all the similarities end.
Unlike a proxy, VPN is set at the operating system level, it captures all the traffic coming from the device it is set up on. Whether it is your web traffic, BitTorrent client, game, or a Windows Update, it captures traffic from all the applications from your device.
Another difference between proxy and VPN is – VPN tunnels all your traffic through heavily encrypted and secure connection to the VPN server.
This makes VPN an ideal solution high-stakes tasks where security and privacy are of paramount of importance. With VPN, neither your ISP, Government, or a guy snooping over open Wi-Fi connection can access your traffic.
What are daily use of VPN for?
There are many uses of Virtual Private Network (VPN) for normal users and company employees. Here are the list of the most common usages:
Accessing Business Networks From Any Places in the World :
This is one of the best use of VPN. It is very much helpful when you are travelling and have to complete some work. You can connect any computer to your business network from anywhere and set up your work easily. Local resources need some security so they have to be kept in VPN-only to ensure their safety.
To Hide Your Browsing Data From ISP & Local Users :
All Internet Service Providers (ISP) will log the data of your IP address. If you use the VPN then they can only see the connection of your VPN. It won’t let anyone spy on your website history.
Moreover, it secures your connection when you use a public Wi-Fi network. As you may or may not know, users on these networks can spy on your browsing history, even if you are surfing HTTPS websites. Virtual Private Networks protect your privacy on public unsecured Wi-Fi connection.
To Access Geographically Blocked Sites :
Have you ever faced a problem like “This content is not available in your country”? VPNs are the best solution to bypass these restrictions.
Some videos on YouTube will also show this restriction. VPNs are a quick fix for all these restrictions.
What about TOR and VPN? What are the Pros and Cons?
The Tor network is similar to a VPN. Messages to and from your computer pass through the Tor network rather than connecting directly to resources on the Internet. But where VPNs provide privacy, Tor provides anonymity.
Tor is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. The name is derived from an acronym for the original software project name “The Onion Router”. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network consisting of more than seven thousand relays to conceal a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity to the user: this includes “visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms”.[ Tor’s intended use is to protect the personal privacy of its users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential communication by keeping their Internet activities from being monitored.
Tor does not prevent an online service from determining when it is being accessed through Tor. Tor protects a user’s privacy, but does not hide the fact that someone is using Tor. Some websites restrict allowances through Tor. For example, Wikipedia blocks attempts by Tor users to edit articles unless special permission is sought. Although a VPN is generally faster than Tor, using them together will slow down your internet connection and should be avoided. More is not necessarily better in this situation.
The deep web is the part of the web that can not be indexed by search machines: internal company login pages, or a school portal (the internal portal) private google sites or government pages.
The dark web is the more sinister form of the Deep Web. The dark web is more associated with illegal activity (i.e child pornography, drug dealing, hitmen etc). A VPN is not necessary when connecting to the DEEP WEB. Please do not confuse the DEEP WEB with the DARK WEB.
Are there any good free VPN services?
It is not recommended to use free VPN for following reasons:
1- Security: Free VPNs don’t necessarily have to ensure your privacy is protected.
2- Tracking – Free VPNs have no obligation to keep your details safe, so at any point, your details could be passed on.
3- Speed / bandwidth – Some free VPN services are capped at a lower bandwidth that is you will receive less browsing or download speed to that of paid VPN.
4- Protocols supported – A free VPN may not support all necessary protocols. PPTP, OpenVPN and L2TP are generally provided only on paid VPN services.
If you are ok with the risks of using Free VPN, here are some you can try:
2- ExpressVPN – nearly 3x NordVPN’s price but guarantees Netflix in the US. Excellent customer service and claims to not log your info.
3- Private Internet Access – a U.S. based VPN that has proven its no log policy in the court of law. This is a unique selling point that 99.99% VPNs don’t have.
4- OpenVPN provides flexible VPN solutions to secure your data communications, whether it’s for Internet privacy, remote access for employees, securing IoT, or for networking Cloud data centers.
Other Questions about VPN and security:
Why might certain web sites not load with VPN?
For security, some corporations like Banks often block IP addresses used by major VPN companies, because it is thought to improve security.
You probably need a VPN that allow you to use dedicated IP address, otherwise the server ips are constantly switching every time you reconnect to your vpn and shared ip usually raised as suspicious logins due to many people logging in from the same ip address (which make the site thinks it might be bots or mass-hacked accounts).
How is a hacker traced when server logs show his or her IP is from a VPN?
Start looking for IP address leaks. Even hackers are terrible at not leaking their IPs.
Look for times the attacker forgot to enable their VPN. It happens all the time.
Look at other things related to the attcke like domains for example. They might have registered a domain using something you can trace or they left a string in the malware that can help identify them.
Silently take control of the command and control server legally.
What is the most secure VPN protocol?
OpenVPN technology uses the highest levels (military standards) of encryption algorithms i.e. 256bit keys to secure your data transfers.
OpenVPN is also known to have the fastest speeds even in the case of long distance connections that have latency. The protocol is highly recommended for streaming, downloading files and watching live TV. In addition to speeds, the protocol is stable and known to have fewer disconnections compared to its many counterparts.
OpenVPN comes equipped with solid military grade encryption and is way better, security wise, than PPTP, L2TP/IPSec and SSTP.
What are some alternatives for VPN?
Tor network, it is anonymous, free and well, rather slow, certainly fast enough to access your private email, but not fast enough to stream a movie.
Proxies are remote computers that individuals or organizations use to restrict Internet access, filter content, and make Internet browsing more secure. It acts as a middleman between the end user and the web server, since all connection requests pass through it. It filters the request first then sends it to the web server. Once the web server responds, the proxy filters the response then sends it to the end user.
IPSec (Cisco, Netgear, etc.): secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts the packets of data sent over an Internet Protocol network.
SSL (Full) like OpenVPN
SSL (Partial) like SSL-Explorer and most appliances
SSH Tunneling is a method of transporting arbitrary networking data over an encrypted SSH connection. It can be used to add encryption to legacy applications. It also provides a way to secure the data traffic of any given application using port forwarding, basically tunneling any TCP/IP port over SSH.
You can create you own VPN as well using any encryption or simple tunneling technology.
How does private browsing or incognito window work?
When you are in private browsing mode, your browser doesn’t store any of this information at all. It functions as a completely isolated browser session.
For most web browsers, their optional private mode, often also called InPrivate or incognito, is like normal browsing except for a few things.
it uses separate temporary cookies that are deleted once the browser is closed (leaving your existing cookies unaffected)
no private activity is logged to the browser’s history
it often uses a separate temporary cache
What are the advantages of Google Chrome’s private browsing?
simultaneously log into a website using different account names
access websites without extensions (all extensions are disabled by default when in Incognito)
Shield you from being tracked by Google, Facebook and other online advertising companies
Allow you to be anonymous visitor to a website, or see how a personalized webpage will look like from a third-party perspective
Firefox private browsing or chrome incognito?
Mozilla doesn’t really have an incentive to spy on their users. It’s not really going to get them anything because they’re not a data broker and don’t sell ads. Couple this with the fact that Firefox is open-source and I would argue that Firefox is the clear winner here.
Adding a VPN to Firefox is clever because it means the privacy protection is integrated into one application rather than being spread across different services. That integration probably makes it more likely to be used by people who wouldn’t otherwise use one.
Pros and Cons of Adding VPN to browsers like Firefox and Opera:
Turning on the VPN will give users a secure connection to a trusted server when using a device connected to public Wi-Fi (and running the gamut of rogue Wi-Fi hotspots and unknown intermediaries). Many travellers use subscription VPNs when away from a home network – the Mozilla Private Network is just a simpler, zero-cost alternative.
However, like Opera’s offering, it’s not a true VPN – that is, it only encrypts traffic while using one browser, Firefox. Traffic from all other applications on the same computer won’t be secured in the same way.
As with any VPN, it won’t keep you completely anonymous. Websites you visit will see a Cloudflare IP address instead of your own, but you will still get advertising cookies and if you log in to a website your identity will be known to that site.
Hadoop is an open-source software framework for storing data and running applications on clusters of commodity hardware. It provides massive storage for any kind of data, enormous processing power and the ability to handle virtually limitless concurrent tasks or jobs. Apache Hadoop is used mainly for Data Analysis.
The question is Which programming language is good to drive Hadoop and Spark?
The programming model for developing hadoop based applications is the map reduce. In other words, MapReduce is the processing layer of Hadoop. MapReduce programming model is designed for processing large volumes of data in parallel by dividing the work into a set of independent tasks. Hadoop MapReduce is a software framework for easily writing an application that processes the vast amount of structured and unstructured data stored in the Hadoop Distributed FileSystem (HDFS). The biggest advantage of map reduce is to make data processing on multiple computing nodes easy. Under the Map reduce model, data processing primitives are called Mapper and Reducers.
Spark is written in Scala and Hadoop is written in Java.
The key difference between Hadoop MapReduce and Spark lies in the approach to processing: Spark can do it in-memory, while Hadoop MapReduce has to read from and write to a disk. As a result, the speed of processing differs significantly – Spark may be up to 100 times faster.
In-memory processing is faster when compared to Hadoop, as there is no time spent in moving data/processes in and out of the disk. Spark is 100 times faster than MapReduce as everything is done here in memory.
Spark’s hardware is more expensive than Hadoop MapReduce because it’s hardware needs a lot of RAM.
Hadoop runs on Linux, it means that you must have knowldge of linux.
Java is important for hadoop because:
There are some advanced features that are only available via the Java API.
The ability to go deep into the Hadoop coding and figure out what’s going wrong.
In both these situations, Java becomes very important. As a developer, you can enjoy many advanced features of Spark and Hadoop if you start with their native languages (Java and Scala).
What Python Offers for Hadoop and Spark?
Simple syntax– Python offers simple syntax which shows it is more user friendly than other two languages.
Easy to learn – Python syntax are like English languages. So, it much more easier to learn it and master it.
Large community support – Unlike Scala, Python has huge community (active), which we will help you to solve your queries.
Offers Libraries, frameworks and packages – Python has huge number of Scientific packages, libraries and framework, which are helping you to work in any environment of Hadoop and Spark.
Python Compatibility with Hadoop – A package called PyDoop offers access to the HDFS API for Hadoop and hence it allows to write Hadoop MapReduce program and application.
Hadoop is based off of Java (then so e.g. non-Hadoop yet still a Big-Data technology like the ElasticSearch engine, too – even though it processes JSON REST requests)
Spark is created off of Scala although pySpark (the lovechild of Python and Spark technologies of course) has gained a lot of momentum as of late.
If you are planning for Hadoop Data Analyst, Python is preferable given that it has many libraries to perform advanced analytics and also you can use Spark to perform advanced analytics and implement machine learning techniques using pyspark API.
The key Value pair is the record entity that MapReduce job receives for execution. In MapReduce process, before passing the data to the mapper, data should be first converted into key-value pairs as mapper only understands key-value pairs of data. key-value pairs in Hadoop MapReduce is generated as follows:
1- The meetup app is the best. You can join as a member or as an organizer or both. I run multiple meetup groups and organize drop in soccer/football games. I post and also allow members to post all kind of games and people join and play together. It is a lot of fun. Check out my Show Up And Play meetups app at https://meetup.com/ShowUpAndPlaySports
Same as kijiji: You can find teams looking for players or players looking for teams on this section. You can also post your own ad and you will get a lot of answers.
One can send messages and media individually as well as in groups through WhatsApp. Yes, I know you all are familiar with these things and even better than me. If you really wish to send you messages to a large number of people having a common identity, we make use of groups. We create groups so that every message is delivered with great accuracy. Additionally, these groups created will help business owners and organizations to promote and set up their business.
Moreover, all the WhatsApp group resembles our social connection. It has now become an ineluctable part of our personal lives. Spreading information to a big crowd has now become an easy job with aid of WhatsApp groups. You can easily make a personal connection with your old school and college mates. Also, Whatsapp groups help people to get connected with relatives living on the other part of the world.
Search online for WhatsApp group for soccer in your city for example. Unfortunately most WhatsApp groups are private to avoid being spammed and the best way is to know someone part of a specific WhatsApp group and request to be added. For example, to join Calgary and Edmonton Soccer WhatsApp group, you must contact the Admin at 4zero3695SevenThree0Four to be added.
Below are the Top 10 legal side business that can make you $1000-$2000 a week. This list is based on my own experience and research. I have tried most of them and it takes dedication and passion to get there. Do your due diligence and make sure you have enough passion and patience to make it work.
Become an amateur team sports referee and officiate about 20 to 30 games per week. I did it myself and it works. You make extra cash and stay in shape and meet a lot of people( hot girls playing soccer or basketball included).
To become a soccer referee, you just need to take a 2 days certification that will cost you about $100 depending on your state.
Amateur soccer Referees are paid up to $50 per game and games are played everyday after 05pm and on week ends.
2- Buy and sell popular or efficient cars (Japanese makes like Corolla, Camry, Honda, etc…) on Craigslist , kijiji, facebook marketplace or any local popular online used item market site.
4- Organize sports tournaments (soccer, basketball, hockey): Rent good and inexpensive fields, convince friends to create teams, run a great campaign and organize amateur sport tournaments monthly and you can easily make $5000 after expenses if you do it right. This is not easy though, you must know local players and team captains and convince them to join.
5- Become a freelancer writerIf you’re creative about how you write (hint: use speech to text and edit down into prose) you can get your hourly > $40/hour even at rates like $1/100 words.
6- Learn to play poker either online or in-person. Online, go for low-stakes and grind out your cash. Live, go for higher stakes and hunt down atrocious players (see my answer to How much can a competitive online poker player make? for more)
7- Become a tutor that focuses on students that are under-performing in the subjects you’re best at.
8- Do contract sales for companies that pay you recurring revenue. Over time, if you take care of your accounts, you won’t even need to close new ones if the retention rate is high.
This blog is geared towards young adults, particularly young first and second generation immigrants like me who don’t have any real estate and assets inherited from their parents here in Canada and USA. In this blog, I will help answer the following questions below based on my own experience and extensive research:
Work Hard first and foremost and do well at your job. If you are not working hard at your job, you will lose it and any advice below won't matter.
Live a healthy lifestyle. Your health is your most important asset: Any advice below will be useless if you don't eat healthy, exercise and have a stress free life. Get medical insurance and get a health check up done once every year
Live within your mean; within your budget; Don't spend more than you earn.
Use your credit cards,but always pay them off at the end of the month.
Never miss a credit card payment: It will affect your credit negatively and cost you money.
Don't buy a car unless you really really need one. If you do need a car, don't buy old cars; You will end up spending more in the long run. Buy new cars at bargain price.
Take public transit or bike to work: You will save money and exercise and read a lot in the process.
Rent empty rooms in your apartment or house, and use that rental income to pay off your mortgage.
Get a side job in an area you are passionate about: If you like team sports, you can become a referee or coach and make extra money. You can help people fix their web site if you are tech savvy; You can buy and sell used items on facebook marketplace or kijiji or craigslist for a profit; you can be a tutor on week ends or evenings, etc…
After paying all your student loans and more importantly your credit cards debts, save money every single month automatically in your TFSA, RRSP , Roth IRA, 401K accounts.
Negotiate everything involving money coming in and out of your pocket. There are no rules set in stone about interest rates or pay grade; Negotiate, Research, Negotiate again until you get the best value for anything you are buying. Don't be a jerk though and don't come across as cheap: Learn when to stop and accept and appreciate a good value.
Work hard. The harder you work, the more likely you are to become financially independent.
Diversify your income. You should never rely on one source of income, you should try and diversify your income streams. On top of your monthly salary at your main job, try to get rental income by renting empty rooms in your house or apartment. Get a side job in an area you have some expertise. Example: Tutoring, Team sport referee, Dance instructor, Handyman, Cleaner, salesman, etc…
Cancel recurring paying for things you don't need (Netflix, Spotify, cable, etc…) ; They add up.
As soon as you get paid, transfer at least $100 automatically to your TFSA, or Roth IRA Account every month. Select an aggressive portfolio and forget it. You will likely get a big return after 10 years.
If you can afford a 5% down payment for a house, buy one and if you are still single, rent the empty rooms and make sure that your rental income can cover at least half of your mortgage payment.
If you have time to research about stocks market, do your due diligence and buy some good stocks.Don't invest more than $10000 on stocks from your own pocket. Invest in stocks as if it is lost money and you might be lucky down the road.
Start saving money monthly in your RRSP, 401K and RESP accounts if you have kids.
Invest in your physical, mental and emotional health: Yes I am repeating myself. If you are not healthy, any other advice is useless and you might not even be around to enjoy the benefits of your investments.
Easy to say, but hard to do: Never buy depreciating assets on credit. Cars, RVs, appliances, clothes, trips, leasing, etc. You won't get rich that way.
If you’ve ever thought about buying a house, you’ve probably heard it: Don’t take out a mortgage until you’ve saved up at least 20 percent for a down payment. Otherwise, you’ll be forced to pay notorious private mortgage insurance.
Save 10 percent of your income.
Don't rent or throw away money. Buy a house and be the landlord.
Investing before spending rather than investing after spending.
Pay all your bills and dues in time so as to never pay them with heavy interest or penalty!
Don’t invest in anything that you don’t understand. Yourself. Not because someone sold it to you or because others are doing it.
Don’t focus on the short-term, allow yourself to be unduly influenced by the financial news media, or let news about the market or the economy affect your long-term investing strategy.
Save and Invest early and aggressively in your 20's. Time and a higher risk tolerance are extraordinarily valuable and everyone can make this call when they are younger—or do so for their children/family. This also sort of falls under the “rule” of paying yourself first. This is key to maximizing wealth.
Read , read, read and be curious. This will help you find and execute ideas to make some money on the side.
Increase your income streams: On top of your day job, try freelancing on the side for a few extra bucks. Identify where you can provide your freelancing services (Referee in team sports, Handyman, Tutor, Buy and Sell used items for a profit, art, etc..). The more sources you have, the better.
Start saving as early as you can. The earlier you start, the better.
Make your money work. Start a business, make investments, do something that makes you more money from what you have.
Make money from your existing assets (rent rooms in yours house, Uber or deliver stuffs with your car or truck, etc..)
Never spend money on depreciating commodities that doesn't affect your safety. What you can do with a used $200 phone, doesn’t have to be bought at $1000 just because it is hip.
Don't jeopardize your safety. If you buy old cars that break down regularly and put you at risk on highway, all the advice above won't matter.
Whatever you are buying, put at least 20% down to avoid paying extra insurance fees and be stuck with a high interest rate for years.
Buy in decent neighbourhood. It usually means better tenants who will be more likely to pay their rents and not damage the property.
Buy a mix of multi family and single family homes. It usually results in better tenants and higher equity growth over time.
Invest on home inspection: Make sure to use an agent who is able to point out potential problems. Get a home inspection and don't buy a property that requires extensive repair. Especially on your first one and when you don't have a ton of disposable income.
Build: Contact builder who build properties and buy from them, allowing you to get great discount and customize the house for extra rooms and developed basement.
Become Part of a Bigger Deal: By partnering up with others interested in investing and pooling your resources to make a larger deal happen. Do some research online on how you can do this for either a commercial or residential property, which in some cases, requires an investment as small as $1000. The good thing about these deals is that you can hedge your bets by placing multiple investments into various properties.
Real Estate Investment Trust: Also known as a REIT, you can invest in a publicly traded trust that uses the capital of its investors to acquire and operate properties. You can find REITs in the major Wall Street exchanges and it requires companies to shell out 90% of their taxable profits through dividends to investors in order to retain their position as an REIT.
Rent A Portion Of Your Existing Home via Airbnb or VRBO: I prefer those options because you it is short term and you can always stop renting when you have family visiting. This gives you a lot of flexibility.
John Doe 1 Buys 1 house cash putting 20K down and invest 80K
Gets $800 per month from the $80K savings easy life and always has plenty of cash
$96,000 in rental income sells his one house for $200,000 and nets $100,000, so his total gain was $196,000, not bad. His $100,000 investment has nearly tripled!
John Doe 2 Borrows and Buys 4 houses with 100K putting down 20K for each
Gets $200 per house per month but spends it all towards the principal of the loan, so gets $0 per month Must keep his full time job and has a struggle keeping up with expenses
around $24,000 in rental income sells his 4 rentals for $200,000 each netting $100,000 each for a gain of $400,000, so his total gain is $424,000, so his investment has more than quadrupled!
Rushing to accept any financing offer because of the excitement to own your first house: Not good. Get various and competitive financing offer from different institutions and negotiate to get the lowest possible interest rate.
Don't just focus on the aesthetic part of the house; Most first houses are never your dream house: Focus on features that will make the house easily and quickly sellable (Number of rooms, size of rooms, garage, easy to maintain, location, etc..).
Don't buy an above average size and price house for your first house, go to the lower end and get a size that is proportional to your family size.
Using a family or friend for a realtor: Don't do it. This is your first most important investment and don't mix it with feelings and emotions.
Location, location, location: Buy where you can easily access public transit so you don't have to spend all your savings on driving to work. In the same token, buying closer to public transit will help you get renters easily if you have empty rooms available.
Inspection, inspection, inspection: Get the best home inspector available. Some of them are really bad. Look for home inspectors reviews before hiring them. If the home inspection misses important defective stuffs like dry rot on the siding, you will end up spending thousands of dollars to fix them.
As a buyer, if you have enough money for a 20% down payment and closing costs and has something left over for cash reserves, 20% is fine. But if you carry any consumer debt with rates higher than that of a mortgage, it is far better to pay those more expensive items off with available cash than to put it into a home down payment.
When you get a conventional mortgage with a down payment of less than 20 percent, you have to get private mortgage insurance, or PMI. The monthly cost of PMI varies, depending on your credit score, the size of the down payment and the loan amount.
3- What is RRSP: An RRSP is a retirement savings plan that you establish, that we register, and to which you or your spouse or common-law partner contribute. Deductible RRSP contributions can be used to reduce your tax. Any income you earn in the RRSP is usually exempt from tax as long as the funds remain in the plan; you generally have to pay tax when you receive payments from the plan. (Applies to USCanadaonly)
4- What is TFSA: The Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA) program began in 2009. It is a way for individuals who are 18 and older and who have a valid social insurance number to set money aside tax-free throughout their lifetime. Contributions to a TFSA are not deductible for income tax purposes. Any amount contributed as well as any income earned in the account (for example, investment income and capital gains) is generally tax-free, even when it is withdrawn. Administrative or other fees in relation to TFSA and any interest or money borrowed to contribute to a TFSA are not deductible. (Applies to Canada only)
5- What is RESP: A registered education savings plan (RESP) is a contract between an individual (the subscriber) and a person or organization (the promoter). Under the contract, the subscriber names one or more beneficiaries (the future student(s)) and agrees to make contributions for them, and the promoter agrees to pay educational assistance payments (EAPs) to the beneficiaries. (Applies to Canada only)
6- What is Roth IRA? A Roth IRA is an IRA that, except as explained below, is subject to the rules that apply to a traditional IRA. (Applies to USA only)
Free and Effective Internet Marketing or Online Advertising in USA and Canada
Online advertising is the process of promoting a business or brand and its products or services over the internet using tools that help drive traffic, leads, and sales. Internet Marketing, also called online marketing or Internet advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers.
Online Advertising is also known as Digital Marketing, Web Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Digital Advertising, etc…
What is the secret for Free and Effective Internet Marketing or Online Advertising in USA and Canada?
What and when to sell free of charge on kijiji in Canada and Craigslist in USA?
What and when to sell free of charge on Facebook Marketplace in USA and Canada?
What and when to sell free of charge instagram, reddit, Linkedin, WhatsApp?
How to sell new or used items online fast and at no cost?
The cost of Internet Marketing can be overwhelming for every day people who want to sell new or used items, but there are ways to do it at no cost and be effective.
There are various platforms and tools available for Free and effective Internet Marketing, but those platforms evolve and some fall behind as technology and users evolve.
The prerequisite for an efficient internet marketing campaign is the quality of the ad. No Tools or website will help you sell if your ad doesn’t have the following basic qualities:
Clear Pictures or Videos of your products
Clear and concise title
Clear and short description
Cost
Location
Category
Hashtags
Honesty
Once those prerequisites are satisfied, you need to know your target users and the best tools to use and I will help with some pointers in this blog.
The efficiency of your internet marketing also depends on the products or services you are selling.
Below are the tools and websites to use for an efficient internet marketing free of charge:
In October 2016, Facebook announced a new Marketplace, citing the growth of organized “buy and sell” Facebook Groups, and gave the new version a higher prominence in the main Facebook app, taking the navigation position previously held by Facebook Messenger
Facebook and Google ad platforms use machine learning and artificial intelligence to find people more prone to making the advertiser’s desired action. To achieve this, they analyze the user’s information, like their interests, demographics, and other aspects to learn and detect the best audience for their brand.
Facebook Market place is your best best to sell the following products quickly and at no advertising cost:
Household items
Garage sale
Art and crafts
Electronics and Computers
Furniture
Kids and baby toys
Clothing
Accommodation (Room, house rental)
Auto parts
Sport Equipment
To be efficient, you must join the local facebook groups for your neighbourhood. Post your items to Facebook marketplace and share it to groups in your neighbourhood.Don’t share your ads to vague groups or city wide groups unless it is a very rare and unique item. If you share it to city wide groups, you will waste a lot of time talking to interested users who will not show up because of the distance: So it is very important to stick to groups in your neighbourhood only.
Facebook has superior technology and artificial intelligence to show your ads to targeted users who need your products and you only create your ad once and you can post, repost, share and re-share the same ad to various target groups very easily.
Kijiji and Craigslist used to be the best place to sell anything in USA and Canada, but they have been overtaken by facebook superior technology and artificial intelligence. Kijiji gives priority to paid ads and your ad can fall far below in a few minutes after posting it.
When i post the same ad on facebook marketplace and kijiji at the same time, I receive better response on facebook for a ration of 10 to 1.
Kijiji and Craigslist remain the best place for the following buy and sell products and services type of ads:
Cars, Autos Sales
local contractors (Carpenters, Basement developers, Plumbers, Electricians, etc..)
local non corporate Jobs and Services
Local Trades jobs and services
Free and Effective Contractor Ad on kijiji or craigslist
WhatsApp groups are very efficient and will soon become the best place to buy and sell ads and share info for free. If you are not part of a whatsApp group, i strongly suggest you join one that is closer to you and your interests. The best thing about WhatsApp group is trust. Members are usually friends or family who have met each other at least once.
WhatsApp group users share interest and people who join WhatsApp group are really motivated about the group, otherwise they will remove themselves to avoid annoying notifications on their phones.
When you are part of a whatsApp group, you always read the message posted on the group, because it pops up on your phone directly like a text message.
If you are part of a large WhatsApp group, post your items for sell there if the groups allows it and you will likely gets serious inquiries immediately. It is very important to avoid spamming. Check with the group admin privately if it is ok to post a sale ad.
What to post on WhatsApp groups?
Local jobs and services
Announcement
Events
Charity post
Offering your service
Free and Efficient Buy and sell Ad on WhatsApp Groups
Whatever you are posting online, use hashtags (Example: #HairExtension) to be found for free. Even if you don’t have a lot of followers and friends, you can post your items of your twitter, linkedin, facebook, instagram feed and use hashtag to be found by thousands of people.
Reddit is an American social newsaggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Registered members submit content to the site such as links, text posts, and images, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called “subreddits”, which cover a variety of topics including news, science, movies, video games, music, books, fitness, food, and image-sharing.
If you are developing a product (web app, tool, prototype, etc,) and want to have a feel for how it will be received, you can post it on Reddit as long as you are not spamming.
Reddit users are very clever and harsh and will bash whatever you post in most cases, but you can use the negative feedbacks to improve your product and make it better.
Free and Effective Internet Marketing or Online Advertising in USA and Canada
What to post or promote on Reddit?
Web App
Prototype of a product or service asking for feedback
If you are looking for candidates for a job in the corporate world, if you are looking for a job in the corporate world, linkedin is your best bet if you add proper hashtags on your posts.
Linkedin is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs.
According to wikipedia, Twitter is a microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, this limit was doubled to 280 for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface, through Short Message Service (SMS) or its mobile-device application software (“app”).
You can post ads on twitter when you want to use a large audience. Even if you don’t have a large follower base, a proper hashtag of your tweets can help your post been re-tweeted and re-shared to a large audience. Efficient ads on twitter must send users to a website for actions.
What to sell on twitter for free ?
Promote a web site or blog
Promote an event
Promote a product or service from a website to a large audience
Google My Business is an Internet-based service for business owners and operated by Google. The network launched in June 2014 as a way of giving business owners more control of what shows in the search results when someone searches a given business name. Google allows business owners to verify their own business data via creating a new profile or claiming an existing auto-generated profile. The Google My Business listing appears in the Google Maps section of Google as well as the “Local Pack” for qualifying search queries.
Google My Business is Free and any small business should have it. Google has full control of the digital search market and having an account with Google My Business will give your company a boost for people looking for your products and services in your area.
Free and Effective Online Marketing with Google My Business
Any small business or company with a specific location or address should have a Google My Business account to stay relevant and be found and no cost by consumers.
Google My Business allows business owners to supply information that can show up in a Google search, such as open hours, address, phone number, and photos.
Google My Business allows businesses to create a website at no cost.
Google My Business allow customers to review businesses and business owners can respond to reviews.
Google My Business allows business owners to post updates about announcements or sales. Business owners are able to upload pictures and videos to a company’s Google My Business page.
Posts from Google My Business show up in Google search results.
Definition 1:Solution architecture is a practice of defining and describing an architecture of a system delivered in context of a specific solution and as such it may encompass description of an entire system or only its specific parts. Definition of a solution architecture is typically led by a solution architect.
Definition 2:The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate examination is intended for individuals who perform a solutions architect role and have one or more years of hands-on experience designing available, cost-efficient, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed systems on AWS.
AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam Facts and Summaries
This exam validates an examinee’s ability to effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to architect and deploy secure and robust applications on AWS technologies. It validates an examinee’s ability to:
Define a solution using architectural design principles based on customer requirements.
Provide implementation guidance based on best practices to the organization throughout the lifecycle of the project.
There are two types of questions on the examination:
Multiple-choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors).
Multiple-response: Has two correct responses out of five options.
Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or incorrect answers, are response options that an examinee with incomplete knowledge or skill would likely choose. However, they are generally plausible responses that fit in the content area defined by the test objective. Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing.
If you are running an application in a production environment and must add a new EBS volume with data from a snapshot, what could you do to avoid degraded performance during the volume’s first use? Initialize the data by reading each storage block on the volume. Volumes created from an EBS snapshot must be initialized. Initializing occurs the first time a storage block on the volume is read, and the performance impact can be impacted by up to 50%. You can avoid this impact in production environments by pre-warming the volume by reading all of the blocks.
If you are running a legacy application that has hard-coded static IP addresses and it is running on an EC2 instance; what is the best failover solution that allows you to keep the same IP address on a new instance? Elastic IP addresses (EIPs) are designed to be attached/detached and moved from one EC2 instance to another. They are a great solution for keeping a static IP address and moving it to a new instance if the current instance fails. This will reduce or eliminate any downtime uses may experience.
Which feature of Intel processors help to encrypt data without significant impact on performance? AES-NI
You can mount to EFS from which two of the following?
On-prem servers running Linux
EC2 instances running Linux
EFS is not compatible with Windows operating systems.
When a file(s) is encrypted and the stored data is not in transit it’s known as encryption at rest. What is an example of encryption at rest?
When would vertical scaling be necessary? When an application is built entirely into one source code, otherwise known as a monolithic application.
Fault-Tolerance allows for continuous operation throughout a failure, which can lead to a low Recovery Time Objective. RPO vs. RTO
High-Availability means automating tasks so that an instance will quickly recover, which can lead to a low Recovery Time Objective. RPO vs. RTO
Frequent backups reduce the time between the last backup and recovery point, otherwise known as the Recovery Point Objective. RPO vs. RTO
Which represents the difference between Fault-Tolerance and High-Availability? High-Availability means the system will quickly recover from a failure event, and Fault-Tolerance means the system will maintain operations during a failure.
From a security perspective, what is a principal?An anonymous user falls under the definition of a principal. A principal can be an anonymous user acting on a system.
An authenticated user falls under the definition of a principal. A principal can be an authenticated user acting on a system.
What are two types of session data saving for an Application Session State?Stateless and Stateful
23. It is the customer’s responsibility to patch the operating system on an EC2 instance.
24. In designing an environment, what four main points should a Solutions Architect keep in mind? Cost-efficient, secure, application session state, undifferentiated heavy lifting: These four main points should be the framework when designing an environment.
25. In the context of disaster recovery, what does RPO stand for? RPO is the abbreviation for Recovery Point Objective.
26.What are the benefits of horizontal scaling?
Vertical scaling can be costly while horizontal scaling is cheaper.
Horizontal scaling suffers from none of the size limitations of vertical scaling.
Having horizontal scaling means you can easily route traffic to another instance of a server.
Q0: A company is developing a highly available web application using stateless web servers. Which services are suitable for storing session state data? (Select TWO.)
Q1: A Solutions Architect is designing a critical business application with a relational database that runs on an EC2 instance. It requires a single EBS volume that can support up to 16,000 IOPS. Which Amazon EBS volume type can meet the performance requirements of this application?
A. EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD
B. EBS Throughput Optimized HDD
C. EBS General Purpose SSD
D. EBS Cold HDD
A. EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD provides sustained performance for mission-critical low-latency workloads. EBS General Purpose SSD can provide bursts of performance up to 3,000 IOPS and have a maximum baseline performance of 10,000 IOPS for volume sizes greater than 3.3 TB. The 2 HDD options are lower cost, high throughput volumes.
Q2: An application running on EC2 instances processes sensitive information stored on Amazon S3. The information is accessed over the Internet. The security team is concerned that the Internet connectivity to Amazon S3 is a security risk. Which solution will resolve the security concern?
A. Access the data through an Internet Gateway.
B. Access the data through a VPN connection.
C. Access the data through a NAT Gateway.
D.Access the data through a VPC endpoint for Amazon S3
D. VPC endpoints for Amazon S3 provide secure connections to S3 buckets that do not require a gateway or NAT instances. NAT Gateways and Internet Gateways still route traffic over the Internet to the public endpoint for Amazon S3. There is no way to connect to Amazon S3 via VPN.
Q3: An organization is building an Amazon Redshift cluster in their shared services VPC. The cluster will host sensitive data. How can the organization control which networks can access the cluster?
A. Run the cluster in a different VPC and connect through VPC peering.
B. Create a database user inside the Amazon Redshift cluster only for users on the network.
C. Define a cluster security group for the cluster that allows access from the allowed networks.
D. Only allow access to networks that connect with the shared services network via VPN.
C A security group can grant access to traffic from the allowed networks via the CIDR range for each network. VPC peering and VPN are connectivity services and cannot control traffic for security. Amazon Redshift user accounts address authentication and authorization at the user level and have no control over network traffic.
Q4: A web application allows customers to upload orders to an S3 bucket. The resulting Amazon S3 events trigger a Lambda function that inserts a message to an SQS queue. A single EC2 instance reads messages from the queue, processes them, and stores them in an DynamoDB table partitioned by unique order ID. Next month traffic is expected to increase by a factor of 10 and a Solutions Architect is reviewing the architecture for possible scaling problems. Which component is MOST likely to need re-architecting to be able to scale to accommodate the new traffic?
A. Lambda function
B. SQS queue
C. EC2 instance
D. DynamoDB table
C. A single EC2 instance will not scale and is a single point of failure in the architecture. A much better solution would be to have EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group across 2 availability zones read messages from the queue. The other responses are all managed services that can be configured to scale or will scale automatically.
Q5: An application requires a highly available relational database with an initial storage capacity of 8 TB. The database will grow by 8 GB every day. To support expected traffic, at least eight read replicas will be required to handle database reads. Which option will meet these requirements?
A. DynamoDB
B. Amazon S3
C. Amazon Aurora
D. Amazon Redshift
C. Amazon Aurora is a relational database that will automatically scale to accommodate data growth. Amazon Redshift does not support read replicas and will not automatically scale. DynamoDB is a NoSQL service, not a relational database. Amazon S3 is object storage, not a relational database.
C. Divide your files system into multiple smaller file systems.
D. Provision higher IOPs for your EFS.
B. Amazon EFS now allows you to instantly provision the throughput required for your applications independent of the amount of data stored in your file system. This allows you to optimize throughput for your application’s performance needs.
Q7: If you are designing an application that requires fast (10 – 25Gbps), low-latency connections between EC2 instances, what EC2 feature should you use?
A. Snapshots
B. Instance store volumes
C. Placement groups
D. IOPS provisioned instances.
C. Placement groups are a clustering of EC2 instances in one Availability Zone with fast (up to 25Gbps) connections between them. This feature is used for applications that need extremely low-latency connections between instances.
Q8: A Solution Architect is designing an online shopping application running in a VPC on EC2 instances behind an ELB Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. The application tier must read and write data to a customer managed database cluster. There should be no access to the database from the Internet, but the cluster must be able to obtain software patches from the Internet.
Which VPC design meets these requirements?
A. Public subnets for both the application tier and the database cluster
B. Public subnets for the application tier, and private subnets for the database cluster
C. Public subnets for the application tier and NAT Gateway, and private subnets for the database cluster
D. Public subnets for the application tier, and private subnets for the database cluster and NAT Gateway
Answer: C. The online application must be in public subnets to allow access from clients' browsers. The database cluster must be in private subnets to meet the requirement that there be no access from the Internet. A NAT Gateway is required to give the database cluster the ability to download patches from the Internet. NAT Gateways must be deployed in public subnets.
Q9: What command should you run on a running instance if you want to view its user data (that is used at launch)?
A. curl http://254.169.254.169/latest/user-data
B. curl http://localhost/latest/meta-data/bootstrap
C. curl http://localhost/latest/user-data
D. curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data
Answer: D. Retrieve Instance User Data To retrieve user data from within a running instance, use the following URI: http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data
Q10: A company is developing a highly available web application using stateless web servers. Which services are suitable for storing session state data? (Select TWO.)
A. CloudWatch
B. DynamoDB
C. Elastic Load Balancing
D. ElastiCache
E. Storage Gateway
Answer: B. and D. Both DynamoDB and ElastiCache provide high performance storage of key-value pairs. CloudWatch and ELB are not storage services. Storage Gateway is a storage service, but it is a hybrid Storage service that enables on-premises applications to use cloud storage.
A stateful web service will keep track of the “state” of a client's connection and data over several requests. So for example, the client might login, select a users account data, update their address, attach a photo, and change the status flag, then disconnect.
In a stateless web service, the server doesn't keep any information from one request to the next. The client needs to do it's work in a series of simple transactions, and the client has to keep track of what happens between requests. So in the above example, the client needs to do each operation separately: connect and update the address, disconnect. Connect and attach the photo, disconnect. Connect and change the status flag, disconnect.
A stateless web service is much simpler to implement, and can handle greater volume of clients.
Q11: From a security perspective, what is a principal?
A. An identity
B. An anonymous user
C. An authenticated user
D. A resource
E.
Answer: B. and C.
An anonymous user falls under the definition of a principal. A principal can be an anonymous user acting on a system. An authenticated user falls under the definition of a principal. A principal can be an authenticated user acting on a system.
Q12: What are the characteristics of a tiered application?
A. All three application layers are on the same instance
B. The presentation tier is on an isolated instance than the logic layer
C. None of the tiers can be cloned
D. The logic layer is on an isolated instance than the data layer
E. Additional machines can be added to help the application by implementing horizontal scaling
F. Incapable of horizontal scaling
Answer: B. D. and E.
In a tiered application, the presentation layer is separate from the logic layer; the logic layer is separate from the data layer. Since parts of the application are isolated, they can scale horizontally.
What are the 5 pillars of a well architected framework: 1. Operational Excellence The operational excellence pillar includes the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Operational Excellence Pillar whitepaper.
2. Security The security pillar includes the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Security Pillar whitepaper.
3. Reliability The reliability pillar includes the ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Reliability Pillar whitepaper.
4. Performance Efficiency The performance efficiency pillar includes the ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Performance Efficiency Pillar whitepaper.
5. Cost Optimization The cost optimization pillar includes the ability to avoid or eliminate unneeded cost or suboptimal resources. You can find prescriptive guidance on implementation in the Cost Optimization Pillar whitepaper. The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides architectural best practices across the five pillars for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. The framework provides a set of questions that allows you to review an existing or proposed architecture. It also provides a set of AWS best practices for each pillar. Using the Framework in your architecture helps you produce stable and efficient systems, which allows you to focus on functional requirements.
Other AWS Facts and Summaries and Questions/Answers Dump
The reality, of course, today is that if you come up with a great idea you don’t get to go quickly to a successful product. There’s a lot of undifferentiated heavy lifting that stands between your idea and that success. The kinds of things that I’m talking about when I say undifferentiated heavy lifting are things like these: figuring out which servers to buy, how many of them to buy, what time line to buy them.
Eventually you end up with heterogeneous hardware and you have to match that. You have to think about backup scenarios if you lose your data center or lose connectivity to a data center. Eventually you have to move facilities. There’s negotiations to be done. It’s a very complex set of activities that really is a big driver of ultimate success.
But they are undifferentiated from, it’s not the heart of, your idea. We call this muck. And it gets worse because what really happens is you don’t have to do this one time. You have to drive this loop. After you get your first version of your idea out into the marketplace, you’ve done all that undifferentiated heavy lifting, you find out that you have to cycle back. Change your idea. The winners are the ones that can cycle this loop the fastest.
On every cycle of this loop you have this undifferentiated heavy lifting, or muck, that you have to contend with. I believe that for most companies, and it’s certainly true at Amazon, that 70% of your time, energy, and dollars go into the undifferentiated heavy lifting and only 30% of your energy, time, and dollars gets to go into the core kernel of your idea.
I think what people are excited about is that they’re going to get a chance they see a future where they may be able to invert those two. Where they may be able to spend 70% of their time, energy and dollars on the differentiated part of what they’re doing.
Definition 1: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
Definition 2: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) forms a central part of Amazon.com’s cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), by allowing users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications.
AWS Ec2 Facts and summaries
Can users SSH to EC2 instances using their AWS user name and password?
No. User security credentials created with IAM are not supported for direct authentication to customer EC2 instances. Managing EC2 SSH credentials is the customer’s responsibility within the EC2 console.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
What is the difference between using the local instance store and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for the root device?
When you launch your Amazon EC2 instances you have the ability to store your root device data on Amazon EBS or the local instance store. By using Amazon EBS, data on the root device will persist independently from the lifetime of the instance. This enables you to stop and restart the instance at a subsequent time, which is similar to shutting down your laptop and restarting it when you need it again.
Alternatively, the local instance store only persists during the life of the instance. This is an inexpensive way to launch instances where data is not stored to the root device. For example, some customers use this option to run large web sites where each instance is a clone to handle web traffic.
How many instances can I run in Amazon EC2?
You are limited to running up to a total of 20 On-Demand instances across the instance family, purchasing 20 Reserved Instances, and requesting Spot Instances per your dynamic Spot limit per region.
How quickly can I scale my capacity both up and down?
Amazon EC2 provides a truly elastic computing environment. Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. When you need more instances, you simply call RunInstances, and Amazon EC2 will typically set up your new instances in a matter of minutes. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.
When dealing with session state in EC2-based applications using Elastic load balancers which option is generally thought of as the best practice for managing user sessions?
Having the ELB distribute traffic to all EC2 instances and then having the instance check a caching solution like ElastiCache running Redis or Memcached for session information
What is one key difference between an Amazon EBS-backed and an instance-store backed instance?
Amazon EBS-backed instances can be stopped and restarted without losing data
How is the AWS Ec2 service different than a plain hosting service?
Traditional hosting services generally provide a pre-configured resource for a fixed amount of time and at a predetermined cost. Amazon EC2 differs fundamentally in the flexibility, control and significant cost savings it offers developers, allowing them to treat Amazon EC2 as their own personal data center with the benefit of Amazon.com’s robust infrastructure.
When computing requirements unexpectedly change (up or down), Amazon EC2 can instantly respond, meaning that developers have the ability to control how many resources are in use at any given point in time. In contrast, traditional hosting services generally provide a fixed number of resources for a fixed amount of time, meaning that users have a limited ability to easily respond when their usage is rapidly changing, unpredictable, or is known to experience large peaks at various intervals.
Secondly, many hosting services don’t provide full control over the compute resources being provided. Using Amazon EC2, developers can choose not only to initiate or shut down instances at any time, they can completely customize the configuration of their instances to suit their needs – and change it at any time. Most hosting services cater more towards groups of users with similar system requirements, and so offer limited ability to change these.
Finally, with Amazon EC2 developers enjoy the benefit of paying only for their actual resource consumption – and at very low rates. Most hosting services require users to pay a fixed, up-front fee irrespective of their actual computing power used, and so users risk overbuying resources to compensate for the inability to quickly scale up resources within a short time frame.
What load balancing options does the Elastic Load Balancing service offer?
Elastic Load Balancing offers two types of load balancers that both feature high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security. These include the Classic Load Balancer that routes traffic based on either application or network level information, and the Application Load Balancer that routes traffic based on advanced application level information that includes the content of the request.
When should I use the Classic Load Balancer and when should I use the Application Load Balancer?
The Classic Load Balancer is ideal for simple load balancing of traffic across multiple EC2 instances, while the Application Load Balancer is ideal for applications needing advanced routing capabilities, microservices, and container-based architectures. Please visit Elastic Load Balancing for more information.
Can I get a history of all EC2 API calls made on my account for security analysis and operational troubleshooting purposes?
Yes. To receive a history of all EC2 API calls (including VPC and EBS) made on your account, you simply turn on CloudTrail in the AWS Management Console. For more information, visit the CloudTrail home page.
Can I access the metrics data for a terminated Amazon EC2 instance or a deleted Elastic Load Balancer?
Yes. Amazon CloudWatch stores metrics for terminated Amazon EC2 instances or deleted Elastic Load Balancers for 2 weeks.
Q0:
When dealing with session state in EC2-based applications using Elastic load balancers which option is generally thought of as the best practice for managing user sessions?
A. Having the ELB distribute traffic to all EC2 instances and then having the instance check a caching solution like ElastiCache running Redis or Memcached for session information
B. Permanently assigning users to specific instances and always routing their traffic to those instances
C. Using Application-generated cookies to tie a user session to a particular instance for the cookie duration
D. Using Elastic Load Balancer generated cookies to tie a user session to a particular instance
A.
Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached is a Memcached-compatible in-memory key-value store service that can be used as a cache or a data store. It delivers the performance, ease-of-use, and simplicity of Memcached. ElastiCache for Memcached is fully managed, scalable, and secure – making it an ideal candidate for use cases where frequently accessed data must be in-memory. It is a popular choice for use cases such as Web, Mobile Apps, Gaming, Ad-Tech, and E-Commerce.
Q2: You are attempting to SSH into an EC2 instance that is located in a public subnet. However, you are currently receiving a timeout error trying to connect. What could be a possible cause of this connection issue?
A. The security group associated with the EC2 instance has an inbound rule that allows SSH traffic, but does not have an outbound rule that allows SSH traffic.
B. The security group associated with the EC2 instance has an inbound rule that allows SSH traffic AND has an outbound rule that explicitly denies SSH traffic.
C. The security group associated with the EC2 instance has an inbound rule that allows SSH traffic AND the associated NACL has both an inbound and outbound rule that allows SSH traffic.
D. The security group associated with the EC2 instance does not have an inbound rule that allows SSH traffic AND the associated NACL does not have an outbound rule that allows SSH traffic.
D. Security groups are stateful, so you do NOT have to have an explicit outbound rule for return requests. However, NACLs are stateless so you MUST have an explicit outbound rule configured for return request.
Q4: What is one key difference between an Amazon EBS-backed and an instance-store backed instance?
A. Autoscaling requires using Amazon EBS-backed instances
B. Virtual Private Cloud requires EBS backed instances
C. Amazon EBS-backed instances can be stopped and restarted without losing data
D. Instance-store backed instances can be stopped and restarted without losing data
C. Instance-store backed images use “ephemeral” storage (temporary). The storage is only available during the life of an instance. Rebooting an instance will allow ephemeral data stay persistent. However, stopping and starting an instance will remove all ephemeral storage.
Q15: After having created a new Linux instance on Amazon EC2, and downloaded the .pem file (called Toto.pem) you try and SSH into your IP address (54.1.132.33) using the following command.
ssh -i my_key.pem ec2-user@52.2.222.22
However you receive the following error.
@@@@@@@@ WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
What is the most probable reason for this and how can you fix it?
A. You do not have root access on your terminal and need to use the sudo option for this to work.
B. You do not have enough permissions to perform the operation.
C. Your key file is encrypted. You need to use the -u option for unencrypted not the -i option.
D. Your key file must not be publicly viewable for SSH to work. You need to modify your .pem file to limit permissions.
D. You need to run something like: chmod 400 my_key.pem
Q5: You have an EBS root device on /dev/sda1 on one of your EC2 instances. You are having trouble with this particular instance and you need to either Stop/Start, Reboot or Terminate the instance but you do NOT want to lose any data that you have stored on /dev/sda1. However, you are unsure if changing the instance state in any of the aforementioned ways will cause you to lose data stored on the EBS volume. Which of the below statements best describes the effect each change of instance state would have on the data you have stored on /dev/sda1?
A. Whether you stop/start, reboot or terminate the instance it does not matter because data on an EBS volume is not ephemeral and the data will not be lost regardless of what method is used.
B. If you stop/start the instance the data will not be lost. However if you either terminate or reboot the instance the data will be lost.
C. Whether you stop/start, reboot or terminate the instance it does not matter because data on an EBS volume is ephemeral and it will be lost no matter what method is used.
D. The data will be lost if you terminate the instance, however the data will remain on /dev/sda1 if you reboot or stop/start the instance because data on an EBS volume is not ephemeral.
D. The question states that an EBS-backed root device is mounted at /dev/sda1, and EBS volumes maintain information regardless of the instance state. If it was instance store, this would be a different answer.
Q6: EC2 instances are launched from Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). A given public AMI:
A. Can only be used to launch EC2 instances in the same AWS availability zone as the AMI is stored
B. Can only be used to launch EC2 instances in the same country as the AMI is stored
C. Can only be used to launch EC2 instances in the same AWS region as the AMI is stored
D. Can be used to launch EC2 instances in any AWS region
C. AMIs are only available in the region they are created. Even in the case of the AWS-provided AMIs, AWS has actually copied the AMIs for you to different regions. You cannot access an AMI from one region in another region. However, you can copy an AMI from one region to another
Q8: You are in charge of deploying an application that will be hosted on an EC2 Instance and sit behind an Elastic Load balancer. You have been requested to monitor the incoming connections to the Elastic Load Balancer. Which of the below options can suffice this requirement?
A. Use AWS CloudTrail with your load balancer
B. Enable access logs on the load balancer
C. Use a CloudWatch Logs Agent
D. Create a custom metric CloudWatch lter on your load balancer
Answer – B
Elastic Load Balancing provides access logs that capture detailed information about requests sent to your load balancer. Each log contains information such as the time the request was received, the client's IP address, latencies, request paths, and server responses. You can use these access logs to analyze traffic patterns and troubleshoot issues.
Reference: Access Logs for Your Application Load Balancer
IAM is a framework of policies and technologies for ensuring that the proper people in an enterprise have the appropriate access to technology resources. IdM systems fall under the overarching umbrella of IT security and Data Management .
Definition 2:
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources. You use IAM to control who is authenticated (signed in) and authorized (has permissions) to use resources.
AWS IAM Facts and summaries
You can use AWS IAM to securely control individual and group access to your AWS resources. You can create and manage user identities (“IAM users”) and grant permissions for those IAM users to access your resources. You can also grant permissions for users outside of AWS ( federated users).
How do users call AWS services?
Users can make requests to AWS services using security credentials. Explicit permissions govern a user’s ability to call AWS services. By default, users have no ability to call service APIs on behalf of the account.
What kinds of security credentials can IAM users have?
IAM users can have any combination of credentials that AWS supports, such as an AWS access key, X.509 certificate, SSH key, password for web app logins, or an MFA device.
What is the access level for newly created regular users in AWS?
Default deny to all resources and actions
By default, all new AWS users lack ANY access to AWS resources with a default deny. That default deny doesn’t prevent an explicit allow to grant them access. Keep in mind that EXPLICT denys override explicit allows.
What is identity federation?
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) supports identity federation for delegated access to the AWS Management Console or AWS APIs. With identity federation, external identities are granted secure access to resources in your AWS account without having to create IAM users. These external identities can come from your corporate identity provider (such as Microsoft Active Directory or from the AWS Directory Service) or from a web identity provider (such as Amazon Cognito, Login with Amazon, Facebook, Google, or any OpenID Connect-compatible provider).
Does AWS IAM support SAML?
Yes, AWS supports the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0.
What SAML profiles does AWS support?
The AWS single sign-on (SSO) endpoint supports the IdP-initiated HTTP-POST binding WebSSO SAML Profile. This enables a federated user to sign in to the AWS Management Console using a SAML assertion. A SAML assertion can also be used to request temporary security credentials using the AssumeRoleWithSAML API. For more information, see About SAML 2.0-Based Federation.
Can a temporary security credential be revoked prior to its expiration?
No. When requesting temporary credentials, we recommend the following:
When creating temporary security credentials, set the expiration to a value that is appropriate for your application.
Because root account permissions cannot be restricted, use an IAM user and not the root account for creating temporary security credentials. You can revoke permissions of the IAM user that issued the original call to request it. This action almost immediately revokes privileges for all temporary security credentials issued by that IAM user
Can I reactivate or extend the expiration of temporary security credentials?
No. It is a good practice to actively check the expiration and request a new temporary security credential before the old one expires. This rotation process is automatically managed for you when temporary security credentials are used in roles for EC2 instances.
What does a policy look like?
The following policy grants access to add, update, and delete objects from a specific folder, example_folder, in a specific bucket, example_bucket.
What is the IAM policy simulator?
The IAM policy simulator is a tool to help you understand, test, and validate the effects of your access control policies.
What can the policy simulator be used for?
You can use the policy simulator in several ways. You can test policy changes to ensure they have the desired effect before committing them to production. You can validate existing policies attached to users, groups, and roles to verify and troubleshoot permissions. You can also use the policy simulator to understand how IAM policies and resource-based policies work together to grant or deny access to AWS resources.
Is there an authentication API to verify IAM user sign-ins?
No. There is no programmatic way to verify user sign-ins.
Can users SSH to EC2 instances using their AWS user name and password?
No. User security credentials created with IAM are not supported for direct authentication to customer EC2 instances. Managing EC2 SSH credentials is the customer’s responsibility within the EC2 console.
Are IAM actions logged for auditing purposes?
Yes. You can log IAM actions, STS actions, and AWS Management Console sign-ins by activating AWS CloudTrail. To learn more about AWS logging, see AWS CloudTrail.
What is AWS MFA?
AWS multi-factor authentication (AWS MFA) provides an extra level of security that you can apply to your AWS environment. You can enable AWS MFA for your AWS account and for individual AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users you create under your account.
What problems does IAM solve?
IAM makes it easy to provide multiple users secure access to your AWS resources. IAM enables you to:
Manage IAM users and their access: You can create users in AWS’s identity management system, assign users individual security credentials (such as access keys, passwords, multi-factor authentication devices), or request temporary security credentials to provide users access to AWS services and resources. You can specify permissions to control which operations a user can perform.
Manage access for federated users: You can request security credentials with configurable expirations for users who you manage in your corporate directory, allowing you to provide your employees and applications secure access to resources in your AWS account without creating an IAM user account for them. You specify the permissions for these security credentials to control which operations a user can perform.
What is an IAM role?
An IAM role is an IAM entity that defines a set of permissions for making AWS service requests. IAM roles are not associated with a specific user or group. Instead, trusted entities assume roles, such as IAM users, applications, or AWS services such as EC2.
What problems do IAM roles solve?
IAM roles allow you to delegate access with defined permissions to trusted entities without having to share long-term access keys. You can use IAM roles to delegate access to IAM users managed within your account, to IAM users under a different AWS account, or to an AWS service such as EC2.
Q0: What are the main benefits of IAM groups? (Select two)
A. The ability to create custom permission policies.
B. Assigning IAM permission policies to more than one user at a time.
C. Easier user/policy management.
D. Allowing EC2 instances to gain access to S3.
B. and C.
An IAM group is a collection of IAM users. Groups let you specify permissions for multiple users, which can make it easier to manage the permissions for those users. For example, you could have a group called Admins and give that group the types of permissions that administrators typically need. Any user in that group automatically has the permissions that are assigned to the group. If a new user joins your organization and needs administrator privileges, you can assign the appropriate permissions by adding the user to that group. Similarly, if a person changes jobs in your organization, instead of editing that user's permissions, you can remove him or her from the old groups and add him or her to the appropriate new groups.Reference: IAM Groups
Q1: You would like to use STS to allow end users to authenticate from third-party providers such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. What is this type of authentication called?
A. Web Identity Federation
B. Enterprise Identity Federation
C. Cross-Account Access
D. Commercial Federation
A.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) supports identity federation for delegated access to the AWS Management Console or AWS APIs. With identity federation, external identities are granted secure access to resources in your AWS account without having to create IAM users. These external identities can come from your corporate identity provider (such as Microsoft Active Directory or from the AWS Directory Service) or from a web identity provider (such as Amazon Cognito, Login with Amazon, Facebook, Google, or any OpenID Connect-compatible provider).
Q4: Your mobile application includes a photo-sharing service that is expecting tens of thousands of users at launch. You will leverage Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage of the user Images, and you must decide how to authenticate and authorize your users for access to these images. You also need to manage the storage of these images. Which two of the following approaches should you use? Choose two answers from the options below
A. Create an Amazon S3 bucket per user, and use your application to generate the S3 URL for the appropriate content.
B. Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user accounts as your application-level user database, and offload the burden of authentication from your application code.
C. Authenticate your users at the application level, and use AWS Security Token Service (STS)to grant token-based authorization to S3 objects.
D. Authenticate your users at the application level, and send an SMS token message to the user. Create an Amazon S3 bucket with the same name as the SMS message token, and move the user’s objects to that bucket.
Answer- C
The AWS Security Token Service (STS) is a web service that enables you to request temporary, limited-privilege credentials for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users or for users that you authenticate (federated users). The token can then be used to grant access to the objects in S3.
You can then provides access to the objects based on the key values generated via the user id.
Q5: You’ve developed a Lambda function and are now in the process of debugging it. You add the necessary print statements in the code to assist in the debugging. You go to Cloudwatch logs , but you see no logs for the lambda function. Which of the following could be the underlying issue for this?
A. You’ve not enabled versioning for the Lambda function
B. The IAM Role assigned to the Lambda function does not have the necessary permission to create Logs
C. There is not enough memory assigned to the function
D. There is not enough time assigned to the function
Answer: B
“If your Lambda function code is executing, but you don't see any log data being generated after several minutes, this could mean your execution role for the Lambda function did not grant permissions to write log data to CloudWatch Logs. For information about how to make sure that you have set up the execution role correctly to grant these permissions, see Manage Permissions: Using an IAM Role (Execution Role)”.
Q6: Your application must write to an SQS queue. Your corporate security policies require that AWS credentials are always encrypted and are rotated at least once a week.
How can you securely provide credentials that allow your application to write to the queue?
A. Have the application fetch an access key from an Amazon S3 bucket at run time.
B. Launch the application’s Amazon EC2 instance with an IAM role.
C. Encrypt an access key in the application source code.
D. Enroll the instance in an Active Directory domain and use AD authentication.
Answer: B.
IAM roles are based on temporary security tokens, so they are rotated automatically. Keys in the source code cannot be rotated (and are a very bad idea). It’s impossible to retrieve credentials from an S3 bucket if you don’t already have credentials for that bucket. Active Directory authorization will not grant access to AWS resources.
Reference: AWS IAM FAQs
Q65: A corporate web application is deployed within an Amazon VPC, and is connected to the corporate data center via IPSec VPN. The application must authenticate against the on-premise LDAP server. Once authenticated, logged-in users can only access an S3 keyspace specific to the user. Which of the solutions below meet these requirements? Choose two answers How would you authenticate to the application given these details? (Choose 2)
A. The application authenticates against LDAP, and retrieves the name of an IAM role associated with the user. The application then calls the IAM Security Token Service to assume that IAM Role. The application can use the temporary credentials to access the S3 keyspace.
B. Develop an identity broker which authenticates against LDAP, and then calls IAM Security Token Service to get IAM federated user credentials. The application calls the identity broker to get IAM federated user credentials with access to the appropriate S3 keyspace
C. Develop an identity broker which authenticates against IAM Security Token Service to assume an IAM Role to get temporary AWS security credentials. The application calls the identity broker to get AWS temporary security credentials with access to the app
D. The application authenticates against LDAP. The application then calls the IAM Security Service to login to IAM using the LDAP credentials. The application can use the IAM temporary credentials to access the appropriate S3 bucket.
Answer: A. and B.
The question clearly says “authenticate against LDAP”. Temporary credentials come from STS. Federated user credentials come from the identity broker.
Reference: IAM faqs
Q7:
A corporate web application is deployed within an Amazon VPC, and is connected to the corporate data center via IPSec VPN. The application must authenticate against the on-premise LDAP server. Once authenticated, logged-in users can only access an S3 keyspace specific to the user. Which of the solutions below meet these requirements? Choose two answers
How would you authenticate to the application given these details? (Choose 2)
A. The application authenticates against LDAP, and retrieves the name of an IAM role associated with the user. The application then calls the IAM Security Token Service to assume that IAM Role. The application can use the temporary credentials to access the S3 keyspace.
B. Develop an identity broker which authenticates against LDAP, and then calls IAM Security Token Service to get IAM federated user credentials. The application calls the identity broker to get IAM federated user credentials with access to the appropriate S3 keyspace
C. Develop an identity broker which authenticates against IAM Security Token Service to assume an IAM Role to get temporary AWS security credentials. The application calls the identity broker to get AWS temporary security credentials with access to the app
D. The application authenticates against LDAP. The application then calls the IAM Security Service to login to IAM using the LDAP credentials. The application can use the IAM temporary credentials to access the appropriate S3 bucket.
Answer: A. and B.
The question clearly says “authenticate against LDAP”. Temporary credentials come from STS. Federated user credentials come from the identity broker.
Reference: AWA STS Faqs
Definition 1:Serverless computing is a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of capacity. It can be a form of utility computing. Definition 2: AWS Serverless is the native architecture of the cloud that enables you to shift more of your operational responsibilities to AWS, increasing your agility and innovation. Serverless allows you to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers. It eliminates infrastructure management tasks such as server or cluster provisioning, patching, operating system maintenance, and capacity provisioning.
AWS Serverless Facts and summaries
The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) is a model to define serverless applications. AWS SAM is natively supported by AWS CloudFormation and provides a simplified way of defining the Amazon API Gateway APIs, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon DynamoDB tables needed by your serverless application.
You can use AWS CodePipeline with the AWS Serverless Application Model to automate building, testing, and deploying serverless applications. AWS CodeBuild integrates with CodePipeline to provide automated builds. You can use AWS CodeDeploy to gradually roll out and test new Lambda function versions.
You can monitor and troubleshoot the performance of your serverless applications and AWS Lambda functions with AWS services and third-party tools. Amazon CloudWatch helps you see real-time reporting metrics and logs for your serverless applications. You can use AWS X-Ray to debug and trace your serverless applications and AWS Lambda.
The AWS Serverless Application Repository is a managed repository for serverless applications. It enables teams, organizations, and individual developers to store and share reusable applications, and easily assemble and deploy serverless architectures in powerful new ways. Using the Serverless Application Repository, you don’t need to clone, build, package, or publish source code to AWS before deploying it. Instead, you can use pre-built applications from the Serverless Application Repository in your serverless architectures, helping you and your teams reduce duplicated work, ensure organizational best practices, and get to market faster.
Anyone with an AWS account can publish a serverless application to the Serverless Application Repository. Applications can be privately shared with specific AWS accounts. Applications that are shared publicly include a link to the application’s source code so others can view what the application does and how it works.
What kinds of applications are available in the AWS Serverless Application Repository? The AWS Serverless Application Repository includes applications for Alexa Skills, chatbots, data processing, IoT, real time stream processing, web and mobile back-ends, social media trend analysis, image resizing, and more from publishers on AWS.
The AWS Serverless Application Repository enables developers to publish serverless applications developed in a GitHub repository. Using AWS CodePipeline to link a GitHub source with the AWS Serverless Application Repository can make the publishing process even easier, and the process can be set up in minutes.
What two arguments does a Python Lambda handler function require?
Event, Context
A Lambda deployment package contains Function code and libraries not included within the runtime environment
When referencing the remaining time left for a Lambda function to run within the function’s code you would use The context object.
Long-running memory-intensive workloads is LEAST suited to AWS Lambda
The maximum execution duration of your Lambda functions is Fifteen Minutes
Logs for Lambda functions are Stored in AWS CloudWatch
Docker Container Images are constructed using instructions in a file called Dockerfile
The ECS Task Agent Is responsible for starting and stopping tasks. It runs inside the EC2 instance and reports on information like running tasks and resource utilization
AWS ECR Stores Container Images.
Elastic Beanstalk is used to Deploy and scale web applications and services developed with a supported platform
When deploying a simple Python web application with Elastic Beanstalk which of the following AWS resources will be created and managed for you by Elastic Beanstalk?
An Elastic Load Balancer, an S3 Bucket, an Ec2 instance.
When using Elastic Beanstalk you can deploy your web applications by:
Configuring a git repository with Elastic Beanstalk so that changes will be detected and your application will be updated.
Uploading code files to the Elastic Beanstalk service
Q00: You have created a serverless application which converts text in to speech using a combination of S3, API Gateway, Lambda, Polly, DynamoDB and SNS. Your users complain that only some text is being converted, whereas longer amounts of text does not get converted. What could be the cause of this problem?
A. Polly has built in censorship, so if you try and send it text that is deemed offensive, it will not generate an MP3.
B. You’ve placed your DynamoDB table in a single availability zone, which is currently down, causing an outage.
C. Your lambda function needs a longer execution time. You should check how long is needed in the fringe cases and increase the timeout inside the function to slightly longer than that.
D. AWS X-ray service is interfering with the application and should be disabled.
Q3: You have launched a new web application on AWS using API Gateway, Lambda and S3. Someone post a thread to reddit about your application and it starts to go viral.
Your start receiving 100000 requests every second and you notice that most requests are similar.
Your web application begins to struggle. What can you do to optimize performance of your application?
A. Enable API Gateway Accelerator
B. Enable API Gateway caching to cache frequent requests.
C. Change your route53 allias record to point to AWS Neptune and then configure Neptune to filter your API requests to genuine requests only.
D. Migrate your API Gateway to an Network Load Balancer and enable session stickiness for all sessions.
Q4: Which of the following services does X-ray integrate with? (Choose 3)
A. Elastic Load Balancer
B. Lambda
C. S3
D. API Gateway
Answer: A. B. and D.
AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With X-Ray, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors.
You can use X-Ray with applications running on EC2, ECS, Lambda, and Elastic Beanstalk. In addition, the X-Ray SDK automatically captures metadata for API calls made to AWS services using the AWS SDK. In addition, the X-Ray SDK provides add-ons for MySQL and PostgreSQL drivers.
Q5: You are a developer for a busy real estate company and you want to enable other real estate agents to the
ability to show properties on your books, but skinned so that it looks like their own website. You decide the most efficient way to do this is to
expose your API to the public. The project works well, however one of your competitors starts abusing this, sending your API tens of thousands
of requests per second. This generates a HTTP 429 error. Each agent connects to your API using individual API Keys. What actions can you take to stop this behaviour?
A. Use AWS Shield Advanced API protection to block the requests.
B. Deploy multiple API Gateways and give the agent access to another API Gateway.
C. Place an AWS Web Application Firewall in front of API gateway and filter requests.
D. Throttle the agents API access using the individual API Keys
Answer: D.
Throttling ensures that API traffic is controlled to help your backend services maintain performance and availability.
How can I protect my backend systems and applications from traffic spikes?
Amazon API Gateway provides throttling at multiple levels including global and by service call. Throttling limits can be set for standard rates and bursts. For example, API owners can set a rate limit of 1,000 requests per second for a specific method in their REST APIs, and also configure Amazon API Gateway to handle a burst of 2,000 requests per second for a few seconds. Amazon API Gateway tracks the number of requests per second. Any requests over the limit will receive a 429 HTTP response. The client SDKs generated by Amazon API Gateway retry calls automatically when met with this response.
Q6: You are developing a new application using serverless infrastructure and are using services such as S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFront, CloudFormation and Polly.
You deploy your application to production and your end users begin complaining about receiving a HTTP 429 error. What could be the cause of the error?
A. You enabled API throttling for a rate limit of 1000 requests per second while in development and now that you have deployed to production your API Gateway is being throttled.
B. Your cloudFormation stack is not valid and is failling to deploy properly which is causing a HTTP 429 error.
C. Your lambda function does not have sufficient permissions to read to DynamoDB and this is generating a HTTP 429 error.
D. You have an S3 bucket policy which is preventing lambda from being able to write tyo your bucket, generating a HTTP 429 error.
Answer: A.
Amazon API Gateway provides throttling at multiple levels including global and by service call. Throttling limits can be set for standard rates and bursts. For example, API owners can set a rate limit of 1,000 requests per second for a specific method in their REST APIs, and also configure Amazon API Gateway to handle a burst of 2,000 requests per second for a few seconds. Amazon API Gateway tracks the number of requests per second. Any requests over the limit will receive a 429 HTTP response. The client SDKs generated by Amazon API Gateway retry calls automatically when met with this response.
Q7: What is the format of structured notification messages sent by Amazon SNS?
A. An XML object containing MessageId, UnsubscribeURL, Subject, Message and other
values
B. An JSON object containing MessageId, DuplicateFlag, Message and other values
C. An XML object containing MessageId, DuplicateFlag, Message and other values
D. An JSON object containing MessageId, unsubscribeURL, Subject, Message and other
values
Answer: D.
The notification message sent by Amazon SNS for deliveries over HTTP, HTTPS, Email-JSON and SQS transport protocols will consist of a simple JSON object, which will include the following information: MessageId: A Universally Unique Identifier, unique for each notification published.Reference: Format of structured notification messages sent by Amazon SNS
Definition 1: The AWS Developer is responsible for designing, deploying, and developing cloud applications on AWS platform
Definition 2: The AWS Developer Tools is a set of services designed to enable developers and IT operations professionals practicing DevOps to rapidly and safely deliver software.
Download AWS Certified Developer Associate Mock Exam Pro App for:
AWS Developer and Deployment Theory Facts and summaries
Continuous Integration is about integrating or merging the code changes frequently, at least once per day. It enables multiple devs to work on the same application.
Continuous delivery is all about automating the build, test, and deployment functions.
Continuous Deployment fully automates the entire release process, code is deployed into Production as soon as it has successfully passed through the release pipeline.
AWS CodePipeline is a continuous integration/Continuous delivery service:
It automates your end-to-end software release process based on user defines workflow
It can be configured to automatically trigger your pipeline as soon as a change is detected in your source code repository
It integrates with other services from AWS like CodeBuild and CodeDeploy, as well as third party custom plug-ins.
AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service. It can build source code, run tests and produce software packages based on commands that you define yourself.
Dy default the buildspec.yml defines the build commands and settings used by CodeBuild to run your build.
AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed automated deployment service and can be used as part of a Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment process.
There are 2 types of deployment approach:
In-place or Rolling update- you stop the application on each host and deploy the latest code. EC2 and on premise systems only. To roll back, you must re-deploy the previous version of the application.
Blue/Green : New instances are provisioned and the new application is deployed to these new instances. Traffic is routed to the new instances according to your own schedule. Supported for EC2, on-premise systems and Lambda functions. Rollback is easy, just route the traffic back to the original instances. Blue is active deployment, green is new release.
Docker allows you to package your software into Containers which you can run in Elastic Container Service (ECS)
A docker Container includes everything the software needs to run including code, libraries, runtime and environment variables etc..
A special file called Dockerfile is used to specify the instructions needed to assemble your Docker image.
Once built, Docker images can be stored in Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and ECS can then use the image to launch Docker Containers.
AWS CodeCommit is based on Git. It provides centralized repositories for all your code, binaries, images, and libraries.
CodeCommit tracks and manages code changes. It maintains version history.
CodeCommit manages updates from multiple sources and enables collaboration.
To support CORS, API resource needs to implement an OPTIONS method that can respond to the OPTIONS preflight request with following headers:
Access-Control-Allow-Headers
Access-Control-Allow-Origin
Access-Control-Allow-Methods
You have a legacy application that works via XML messages. You need to place the application behind the API gateway in order for customers to make API calls. Which of the following would you need to configure? You will need to work with the Request and Response Data mapping.
Your application currently points to several Lambda functions in AWS. A change is being made to one of the Lambda functions. You need to ensure that application traffic is shifted slowly from one Lambda function to the other. Which of the following steps would you carry out?
Create an ALIAS with the –routing-config parameter
Update the ALIAS with the –routing-config parameter
By default, an alias points to a single Lambda function version. When the alias is updated to point to a different function version, incoming request traffic in turn instantly points to the updated version. This exposes that alias to any potential instabilities introduced by the new version. To minimize this impact, you can implement the routing-config parameter of the Lambda alias that allows you to point to two different versions of the Lambda function and dictate what percentage of incoming traffic is sent to each version.
AWS CodeDeploy: The AppSpec file defines all the parameters needed for the deployment e.g. location of application files and pre/post deployment validation tests to run.
For Ec2 / On Premise systems, the appspec.yml file must be placed in the root directory of your revision (the same folder that contains your application code). Written in YAML.
For Lambda and ECS deployment, the AppSpec file can be YAML or JSON
Visual workflows are automatically created when working with which Step Functions
API Gateway stages store configuration for deployment. An API Gateway Stage refers to A snapshot of your API
AWS SWF Services SWF guarantees delivery order of messages/tasks
Blue/Green Deployments with CodeDeploy on AWS Lambda can happen in multiple ways. Which of these is a potential option? Linear, All at once, Canary
X-Ray Filter Expressions allow you to search through request information using characteristics like URL Paths, Trace ID, Annotations
S3 has eventual consistency for overwrite PUTS and DELETES.
What can you do to ensure the most recent version of your Lambda functions is in CodeDeploy?
Specify the version to be deployed in AppSpec file.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codedeploy/latest/userguide/application-specification-files.htmlAppSpec Files on an Amazon ECS Compute Platform
If your application uses the Amazon ECS compute platform, the AppSpec file can be formatted with either YAML or JSON. It can also be typed directly into an editor in the console. The AppSpec file is used to specify:
The name of the Amazon ECS service and the container name and port used to direct traffic to the new task set. The functions to be used as validation tests. You can run validation Lambda functions after deployment lifecycle events. For more information, see AppSpec 'hooks' Section for an Amazon ECS Deployment, AppSpec File Structure for Amazon ECS Deployments , and AppSpec File Example for an Amazon ECS Deployment .
Q2: Which of the following practices allows multiple developers working on the same application to merge code changes frequently, without impacting each other and enables the identification of bugs early on in the release process?
Q5: You want to receive an email whenever a user pushes code to CodeCommit repository, how can you configure this?
A. Create a new SNS topic and configure it to poll for CodeCommit eveents. Ask all users to subscribe to the topic to receive notifications
B. Configure a CloudWatch Events rule to send a message to SES which will trigger an email to be sent whenever a user pushes code to the repository.
C. Configure Notifications in the console, this will create a CloudWatch events rule to send a notification to a SNS topic which will trigger an email to be sent to the user.
D. Configure a CloudWatch Events rule to send a message to SQS which will trigger an email to be sent whenever a user pushes code to the repository.
Q8: You are deploying a number of EC2 and RDS instances using CloudFormation. Which section of the CloudFormation template
would you use to define these?
A. Transforms
B. Outputs
C. Resources
D. Instances
Answer: C.
The Resources section defines your resources you are provisioning. Outputs is used to output user defines data relating to the resources you have built and can also used as input to another CloudFormation stack. Transforms is used to reference code located in S3.
Q9: Which AWS service can be used to fully automate your entire release process?
A. CodeDeploy
B. CodePipeline
C. CodeCommit
D. CodeBuild
Answer: B.
AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates
Q10: You want to use the output of your CloudFormation stack as input to another CloudFormation stack. Which sections of the CloudFormation template would you use to help you configure this?
A. Outputs
B. Transforms
C. Resources
D. Exports
Answer: A.
Outputs is used to output user defines data relating to the resources you have built and can also used as input to another CloudFormation stack.
Q11: You have some code located in an S3 bucket that you want to reference in your CloudFormation template. Which section of the template can you use to define this?
A. Inputs
B. Resources
C. Transforms
D. Files
Answer: C.
Transforms is used to reference code located in S3 and also specifying the use of the Serverless Application Model (SAM)
for Lambda deployments.
Transform:
Name: 'AWS::Include'
Parameters:
Location: 's3://MyAmazonS3BucketName/MyFileName.yaml'
Q12: You are deploying an application to a number of Ec2 instances using CodeDeploy. What is the name of the file
used to specify source files and lifecycle hooks?
Q13: Which of the following approaches allows you to re-use pieces of CloudFormation code in multiple templates, for common use cases like provisioning a load balancer or web server?
A. Share the code using an EBS volume
B. Copy and paste the code into the template each time you need to use it
C. Use a cloudformation nested stack
D. Store the code you want to re-use in an AMI and reference the AMI from within your CloudFormation template.
Q15:You need to setup a RESTful API service in AWS that would be serviced via the following url https://democompany.com/customers Which of the following combination of services can be used for development and hosting of the RESTful service? Choose 2 answers from the options below
Q16: As a developer, you have created a Lambda function that is used to work with a bucket in Amazon S3. The Lambda function is not working as expected. You need to debug the issue and understand what’s the underlying issue. How can you accomplish this in an easily understandable way?
A. Use AWS Cloudwatch metrics
B. Put logging statements in your code
C. Set the Lambda function debugging level to verbose
D. Use AWS Cloudtrail logs
Answer: B
You can insert logging statements into your code to help you validate that your code is working as expected. Lambda automatically integrates with Amazon CloudWatch Logs and pushes all logs from your code to a CloudWatch Logs group associated with a Lambda function (/aws/lambda/).
Reference: Using Amazon CloudWatch
Q17: You have a lambda function that is processed asynchronously. You need a way to check and debug issues if the function fails? How could you accomplish this?
A. Use AWS Cloudwatch metrics
B. Assign a dead letter queue
C. Congure SNS notications
D. Use AWS Cloudtrail logs
Answer: B
Any Lambda function invoked asynchronously is retried twice before the event is discarded. If the retries fail and you're unsure why, use Dead Letter Queues (DLQ) to direct unprocessed events to an Amazon SQS queue or an Amazon SNS topic to analyze the failure.
Reference: AWS Lambda Function Dead Letter Queues
Q18: You are developing an application that is going to make use of Amazon Kinesis. Due to the high throughput , you decide to have multiple shards for the streams. Which of the following is TRUE when it comes to processing data across multiple shards?
A. You cannot guarantee the order of data across multiple shards. Its possible only within a shard
B. Order of data is possible across all shards in a streams
C. Order of data is not possible at all in Kinesis streams
D. You need to use Kinesis firehose to guarantee the order of data
Answer: A
Kinesis Data Streams lets you order records and read and replay records in the same order to many Kinesis Data Streams applications. To enable write ordering, Kinesis Data Streams expects you to call the PutRecord API to write serially to a shard while using the sequenceNumberForOrdering parameter. Setting this parameter guarantees strictly increasing sequence numbers for puts from the same client and to the same partition key.
Option A is correct as it cannot guarantee the ordering of records across multiple shards.
Reference: How to perform ordered data replication between applications by using Amazon DynamoDB Streams
Q19: You’ve developed a Lambda function and are now in the process of debugging it. You add the necessary print statements in the code to assist in the debugging. You go to Cloudwatch logs , but you see no logs for the lambda function. Which of the following could be the underlying issue for this?
A. You’ve not enabled versioning for the Lambda function
B. The IAM Role assigned to the Lambda function does not have the necessary permission to create Logs
C. There is not enough memory assigned to the function
D. There is not enough time assigned to the function
Answer: B
“If your Lambda function code is executing, but you don't see any log data being generated after several minutes, this could mean your execution role for the Lambda function did not grant permissions to write log data to CloudWatch Logs. For information about how to make sure that you have set up the execution role correctly to grant these permissions, see Manage Permissions: Using an IAM Role (Execution Role)”.
Q20: Your application is developed to pick up metrics from several servers and push them off to Cloudwatch. At times , the application gets client 429 errors. Which of the following can be done from the programming side to resolve such errors?
A. Use the AWS CLI instead of the SDK to push the metrics
B. Ensure that all metrics have a timestamp before sending them across
C. Use exponential backoff in your request
D. Enable encryption for the requests
Answer: C.
The main reason for such errors is that throttling is occurring when many requests are sent via API calls. The best way to mitigate this is to stagger the rate at which you make the API calls.
In addition to simple retries, each AWS SDK implements exponential backoff algorithm for better flow control. The idea behind exponential backoff is to use progressively longer waits between retries for consecutive error responses. You should implement a maximum delay interval, as well as a maximum number of retries. The maximum delay interval and maximum number of retries are not necessarily fixed values and should be set based on the operation being performed, as well as other local factors, such as network latency.
Reference: Error Retries and Exponential Backoff in AWS
Q21: You have been instructed to use the CodePipeline service for the CI/CD automation in your company. Due to security reasons , the resources that would be part of the deployment are placed in another account. Which of the following steps need to be carried out to accomplish this deployment? Choose 2 answers from the options given below
A. Dene a customer master key in KMS
B. Create a reference Code Pipeline instance in the other account
C. Add a cross account role
D. Embed the access keys in the codepipeline process
Answer: A. and C.
You might want to create a pipeline that uses resources created or managed by another AWS account. For example, you might want to use one account for your pipeline and another for your AWS CodeDeploy resources. To do so, you must create a AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key to use, add the key to the pipeline, and set up account policies and roles to enable cross-account access.
Reference: Create a Pipeline in CodePipeline That Uses Resources from Another AWS Account
Q22: You are planning on deploying an application to the worker role in Elastic Beanstalk. Moreover, this worker application is going to run the periodic tasks. Which of the following is a must have as part of the deployment?
A. An appspec.yaml file
B. A cron.yaml file
C. A cron.cong file
D. An appspec.json file
Answer: B.
Create an Application Source Bundle
When you use the AWS Elastic Beanstalk console to deploy a new application or an application version, you'll need to upload a source bundle. Your source bundle must meet the following requirements:
Consist of a single ZIP file or WAR file (you can include multiple WAR files inside your ZIP file)
Not exceed 512 MB
Not include a parent folder or top-level directory (subdirectories are fine)
If you want to deploy a worker application that processes periodic background tasks, your application source bundle must also include a cron.yaml file. For more information, see Periodic Tasks.
Q23: An application needs to make use of an SQS queue for working with messages. An SQS queue has been created with the default settings. The application needs 60 seconds to process each message. Which of the following step need to be carried out by the application.
A. Change the VisibilityTimeout for each message and then delete the message after processing is completed
B. Delete the message and change the visibility timeout.
C. Process the message , change the visibility timeout. Delete the message
D. Process the message and delete the message
Answer: A
If the SQS queue is created with the default settings , then the default visibility timeout is 30 seconds. And since the application needs more time for processing , you first need to change the timeout and delete the message after it is processed.
Reference: Amazon SQS Visibility Timeout
Q24: AWS CodeDeploy deployment fails to start & generate following error code, ”HEALTH_CONSTRAINTS_INVALID”, Which of the following can be used to eliminate this error?
A. Make sure the minimum number of healthy instances is equal to the total number of instances in the deployment group.
B. Increase the number of healthy instances required during deployment
C. Reduce number of healthy instances required during deployment
D. Make sure the number of healthy instances is equal to the specified minimum number of healthy instances.
Answer: C
AWS CodeDeploy generates ”HEALTH_CONSTRAINTS_INVALID” error, when a minimum number of healthy instances defined in deployment group are not available during deployment. To mitigate this error, make sure required number of healthy instances are available during deployments.
Reference: Error Codes for AWS CodeDeploy
B. A specific snapshot of all of your API’s settings, resources, and methods
C. A specific snapshot of your API’s resources
D. A specific snapshot of your API’s resources and methods
Answer: D.
AWS API Gateway Deployments are a snapshot of all the resources and methods of your API and their configuration.
Reference: Deploying a REST API in Amazon API Gateway
Q29: A SWF workflow task or task execution can live up to how long?
A. 1 Year
B. 14 days
C. 24 hours
D. 3 days
Answer: A. 1 Year
Each workflow execution can run for a maximum of 1 year. Each workflow execution history can grow up to 25,000 events. If your use case requires you to go beyond these limits, you can use features Amazon SWF provides to continue executions and structure your applications using child workflow executions.
Reference: Amazon SWF FAQs
Q30: With AWS Step Functions, all the work in your state machine is done by tasks. These tasks performs work by using what types of things? (Choose the best 3 answers)
A. An AWS Lambda Function Integration
B. Passing parameters to API actions of other services
A. A decider program that is written in the language of the developer’s choice
B. A visual workflow created in the SWF visual workflow editor
C. A JSON-defined state machine that contains states within it to select the next step to take
D. SWF outsources all decisions to human deciders through the AWS Mechanical Turk service.
Answer: A.
SWF allows the developer to write their own application logic to make decisions and determine how to evaluate incoming data.
Q: What programming conveniences does Amazon SWF provide to write applications? Like other AWS services, Amazon SWF provides a core SDK for the web service APIs. Additionally, Amazon SWF offers an SDK called the AWS Flow Framework that enables you to develop Amazon SWF-based applications quickly and easily. AWS Flow Framework abstracts the details of task-level coordination with familiar programming constructs. While running your program, the framework makes calls to Amazon SWF, tracks your program’s execution state using the execution history kept by Amazon SWF, and invokes the relevant portions of your code at the right times. By offering an intuitive programming framework to access Amazon SWF, AWS Flow Framework enables developers to write entire applications as asynchronous interactions structured in a workflow. For more details, please see What is the AWS Flow Framework?
Reference:
Q34: CodePipeline pipelines are workflows that deal with stages, actions, transitions, and artifacts. Which of the following statements is true about these concepts?
A. Stages contain at least two actions
B. Artifacts are never modified or iterated on when used inside of CodePipeline
C. Stages contain at least one action
D. Actions will have a deployment artifact as either an input an output or both
Q35: When deploying a simple Python web application with Elastic Beanstalk which of the following AWS resources will be created and managed for you by Elastic Beanstalk?
A. An Elastic Load Balancer
B. An S3 Bucket
C. A Lambda Function
D. An EC2 instance
Answer: A. B. and D.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk uses proven AWS features and services, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon S3, and Amazon SNS, to create an environment that runs your application. The current version of AWS Elastic Beanstalk uses the Amazon Linux AMI or the Windows Server 2012 R2 AMI.
Reference: AWS Elastic Beanstalk FAQs
A. Deploy and scale web applications and services developed with a supported platform
B. Deploy and scale serverless applications
C. Deploy and scale applications based purely on EC2 instances
D. Manage the deployment of all AWS infrastructure resources of your AWS applications
Answer: A.
Who should use AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
Those who want to deploy and manage their applications within minutes in the AWS Cloud. You don’t need experience with cloud computing to get started. AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker web applications.
Reference:
Q41: How does using ElastiCache help to improve database performance?
A. It can store petabytes of data
B. It provides faster internet speeds
C. It can store the results of frequent or highly-taxing queries
D. It uses read replicas
Answer: C.
With ElastiCache, customers get all of the benefits of a high-performance, in-memory cache with less of the administrative burden involved in launching and managing a distributed cache. The service makes setup, scaling, and cluster failure handling much simpler than in a self-managed cache deployment.
Reference: Amazon ElastiCache
Q42: Which of the following best describes the Lazy Loading caching strategy?
A. Every time the underlying database is written to or updated the cache is updated with the new information.
B. Every miss to the cache is counted and when a specific number is reached a full copy of the database is migrated to the cache
C. A specific amount of time is set before the data in the cache is marked as expired. After expiration, a request for expired data will be made through to the backing database.
D. Data is added to the cache when a cache miss occurs (when there is no data in the cache and the request must go to the database for that data)
Answer: D.
Amazon ElastiCache is an in-memory key/value store that sits between your application and the data store (database) that it accesses. Whenever your application requests data, it first makes the request to the ElastiCache cache. If the data exists in the cache and is current, ElastiCache returns the data to your application. If the data does not exist in the cache, or the data in the cache has expired, your application requests the data from your data store which returns the data to your application. Your application then writes the data received from the store to the cache so it can be more quickly retrieved next time it is requested.
Reference: Lazy Loading
Q45: You have just set up a push notification service to send a message to an app installed on a device with the Apple Push Notification Service. It seems to work fine. You now want to send a message to an app installed on devices for multiple platforms, those being the Apple Push Notification Service(APNS) and Google Cloud Messaging for Android (GCM). What do you need to do first for this to be successful?
A. Request Credentials from Mobile Platforms, so that each device has the correct access control policies to access the SNS publisher
B. Create a Platform Application Object which will connect all of the mobile devices with your app to the correct SNS topic.
C. Request a Token from Mobile Platforms, so that each device has the correct access control policies to access the SNS publisher.
D. Get a set of credentials in order to be able to connect to the push notification service you are trying to setup.
Answer: D.
To use Amazon SNS mobile push notifications, you need to establish a connection with a supported push notification service. This connection is established using a set of credentials.
Reference: Add Device Tokens or Registration IDs
Q46: SNS message can be sent to different kinds of endpoints. Which of these is NOT currently a supported endpoint?
A. Slack Messages
B. SMS (text message)
C. HTTP/HTTPS
D. AWS Lambda
Answer: A.
Slack messages are not directly integrated with SNS, though theoretically, you could write a service to push messages to slack from SNS.
Reference:
Q47: Company B provides an online image recognition service and utilizes SQS to decouple system components for scalability. The SQS consumers poll the imaging queue as often as possible to keep end-to-end throughput as high as possible. However, Company B is realizing that polling in tight loops is burning CPU cycles and increasing costs with empty responses. How can Company B reduce the number empty responses?
A. Set the imaging queue VisibilityTimeout attribute to 20 seconds
B. Set the imaging queue MessageRetentionPeriod attribute to 20 seconds
C. Set the imaging queue ReceiveMessageWaitTimeSeconds Attribute to 20 seconds
D. Set the DelaySeconds parameter of a message to 20 seconds
Answer: C.
Enabling long polling reduces the amount of false and empty responses from SQS service. It also reduces the number of calls that need to be made to a queue by staying connected to the queue until all messages have been received or until timeout. In order to enable long polling the ReceiveMessageWaitTimeSeconds attribute needs to be set to a number greater than 0. If it is set to 0 then short polling is enabled.
Reference: Amazon SQS Long Polling
Q48: Which of the following statements about SQS standard queues are true?
A. Message order can be indeterminate – you’re not guaranteed to get messages in the same order they were sent in
B. Messages will be delivered exactly once and messages will be delivered in First in, First out order
C. Messages will be delivered exactly once and message delivery order is indeterminate
D. Messages can be delivered one or more times
Answer: A. and D.
A standard queue makes a best effort to preserve the order of messages, but more than one copy of a message might be delivered out of order. If your system requires that order be preserved, we recommend using a FIFO (First-In-First-Out) queue or adding sequencing information in each message so you can reorder the messages when they're received.
Reference: Amazon SQS Standard Queues
Q49: Which of the following is true if long polling is enabled?
A. If long polling is enabled, then each poll only polls a subset of SQS servers; in order for all messages to be received, polling must continuously occur
B. The reader will listen to the queue until timeout
C. Increases costs because each request lasts longer
D. The reader will listen to the queue until a message is available or until timeout
Q50: When dealing with session state in EC2-based applications using Elastic load balancers which option is generally thought of as the best practice for managing user sessions?
A. Having the ELB distribute traffic to all EC2 instances and then having the instance check a caching solution like ElastiCache running Redis or Memcached for session information
B. Permanently assigning users to specific instances and always routing their traffic to those instances
C. Using Application-generated cookies to tie a user session to a particular instance for the cookie duration
D. Using Elastic Load Balancer generated cookies to tie a user session to a particular instance
Q52: Your application must write to an SQS queue. Your corporate security policies require that AWS credentials are always encrypted and are rotated at least once a week.
How can you securely provide credentials that allow your application to write to the queue?
A. Have the application fetch an access key from an Amazon S3 bucket at run time.
B. Launch the application’s Amazon EC2 instance with an IAM role.
C. Encrypt an access key in the application source code.
D. Enroll the instance in an Active Directory domain and use AD authentication.
Answer: B.
IAM roles are based on temporary security tokens, so they are rotated automatically. Keys in the source code cannot be rotated (and are a very bad idea). It’s impossible to retrieve credentials from an S3 bucket if you don’t already have credentials for that bucket. Active Directory authorization will not grant access to AWS resources.
Reference: AWS IAM FAQs
Q53: Your web application reads an item from your DynamoDB table, changes an attribute, and then writes the item back to the table. You need to ensure that one process doesn’t overwrite a simultaneous change from another process.
How can you ensure concurrency?
A. Implement optimistic concurrency by using a conditional write.
B. Implement pessimistic concurrency by using a conditional write.
C. Implement optimistic concurrency by locking the item upon read.
D. Implement pessimistic concurrency by locking the item upon read.
Answer: A.
Optimistic concurrency depends on checking a value upon save to ensure that it has not changed. Pessimistic concurrency prevents a value from changing by locking the item or row in the database. DynamoDB does not support item locking, and conditional writes are perfect for implementing optimistic concurrency.
Reference: Optimistic Locking With Version Number
Answer: C.
The intrinsic function Fn::FindInMap returns the value corresponding to keys in a two-level map that is declared in the Mappings section.
You can use the Fn::FindInMap function to return a named value based on a specified key. The following example template contains an Amazon EC2 resource whose ImageId property is assigned by the FindInMap function. The FindInMap function specifies key as the region where the stack is created (using the AWS::Region pseudo parameter) and HVM64 as the name of the value to map to.
Reference:
Q56: Your application triggers events that must be delivered to all your partners. The exact partner list is constantly changing: some partners run a highly available endpoint, and other partners’ endpoints are online only a few hours each night. Your application is mission-critical, and communication with your partners must not introduce delay in its operation. A delay in delivering the event to one partner cannot delay delivery to other partners.
What is an appropriate way to code this?
A. Implement an Amazon SWF task to deliver the message to each partner. Initiate an Amazon SWF workflow execution.
B. Send the event as an Amazon SNS message. Instruct your partners to create an HTTP. Subscribe their HTTP endpoint to the Amazon SNS topic.
C. Create one SQS queue per partner. Iterate through the queues and write the event to each one. Partners retrieve messages from their queue.
D. Send the event as an Amazon SNS message. Create one SQS queue per partner that subscribes to the Amazon SNS topic. Partners retrieve messages from their queue.
Answer: D.
There are two challenges here: the command must be “fanned out” to a variable pool of partners, and your app must be decoupled from the partners because they are not highly available.
Sending the command as an SNS message achieves the fan-out via its publication/subscribe model, and using an SQS queue for each partner decouples your app from the partners. Writing the message to each queue directly would cause more latency for your app and would require your app to monitor which partners were active. It would be difficult to write an Amazon SWF workflow for a rapidly changing set of partners.
Q57: You have a three-tier web application (web, app, and data) in a single Amazon VPC. The web and app tiers each span two Availability Zones, are in separate subnets, and sit behind ELB Classic Load Balancers. The data tier is a Multi-AZ Amazon RDS MySQL database instance in database subnets.
When you call the database tier from your app tier instances, you receive a timeout error. What could be causing this?
A. The IAM role associated with the app tier instances does not have rights to the MySQL database.
B. The security group for the Amazon RDS instance does not allow traffic on port 3306 from the app
instances.
C. The Amazon RDS database instance does not have a public IP address.
D. There is no route defined between the app tier and the database tier in the Amazon VPC.
Answer: B.
Security groups block all network traffic by default, so if a group is not correctly configured, it can lead to a timeout error. MySQL security, not IAM, controls MySQL security. All subnets in an Amazon VPC have routes to all other subnets. Internal traffic within an Amazon VPC does not require public IP addresses.
Q58: What type of block cipher does Amazon S3 offer for server side encryption?
A. RC5
B. Blowfish
C. Triple DES
D. Advanced Encryption Standard
Answer: D
Amazon S3 server-side encryption uses one of the strongest block ciphers available, 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256), to encrypt your data.
Q59: You have written an application that uses the Elastic Load Balancing service to spread
traffic to several web servers Your users complain that they are sometimes forced to login
again in the middle of using your application, after they have already togged in. This is not
behaviour you have designed. What is a possible solution to prevent this happening?
A. Use instance memory to save session state.
B. Use instance storage to save session state.
C. Use EBS to save session state
D. Use ElastiCache to save session state.
E. Use Glacier to save session slate.
Answer: D.
You can cache a variety of objects using the service, from the content in persistent data stores (such as Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, or self-managed databases hosted on EC2) to dynamically generated web pages (with Nginx for example), or transient session data that may not require a persistent backing store. You can also use it to implement high-frequency counters to deploy admission control in high volume web applications.
Q60: You are writing to a DynamoDB table and receive the following exception:”
ProvisionedThroughputExceededException”. though according to your Cloudwatch metrics
for the table, you are not exceeding your provisioned throughput. What could be an
explanation for this?
A. You haven’t provisioned enough DynamoDB storage instances
B. You’re exceeding your capacity on a particular Range Key
C. You’re exceeding your capacity on a particular Hash Key
D. You’re exceeding your capacity on a particular Sort Key
E. You haven’t configured DynamoDB Auto Scaling triggers
Answer: C.
The primary key that uniquely identifies each item in a DynamoDB table can be simple (a partition key only) or composite (a partition key combined with a sort key).
Generally speaking, you should design your application for uniform activity across all logical partition keys in the Table and its secondary indexes.
You can determine the access patterns that your application requires, and estimate the total read capacity units and write capacity units that each table and secondary Index requires.
As traffic starts to flow, DynamoDB automatically supports your access patterns using the throughput you have provisioned, as long as the traffic against a given partition key does not exceed 3000 read capacity units or 1000 write capacity units.
Q61: Which DynamoDB limits can be raised by contacting AWS support?
A. The number of hash keys per account
B. The maximum storage used per account
C. The number of tables per account
D. The number of local secondary indexes per account
E. The number of provisioned throughput units per account
Answer: C. and E.
For any AWS account, there is an initial limit of 256 tables per region.
AWS places some default limits on the throughput you can provision.
These are the limits unless you request a higher amount.
To request a service limit increase see https://aws.amazon.com/support.Reference: Limits in DynamoDB
Q62: AWS CodeBuild allows you to compile your source code, run unit tests, and produce deployment artifacts by:
A. Allowing you to provide an Amazon Machine Image to take these actions within
B. Allowing you to select an Amazon Machine Image and provide a User Data bootstrapping script to prepare an instance to take these actions within
C. Allowing you to provide a container image to take these actions within
D. Allowing you to select from pre-configured environments to take these actions within
Answer: C. and D.
You can provide your own custom container image to build your deployment artifacts.
You never actually pass a specific AMI to CodeBuild. Though you can provide a custom docker image which you could basically 'bootstrap' for the purposes of your build.
Reference: AWS CodeBuild Faqs
Q63: Which of the following will not cause a CloudFormation stack deployment to rollback?
A. The template contains invalid JSON syntax
B. An AMI specified in the template exists in a different region than the one in which the stack is being deployed.
C. A subnet specified in the template does not exist
D. The template specifies an instance-store backed AMI and an incompatible EC2 instance type.
Answer: A.
Invalid JSON syntax will cause an error message during template validation. Until the syntax is fixed, the template will not be able to deploy resources, so there will not be a need to or opportunity to rollback.
Reference: AWS CloudFormatio Faqs
Q64: Your team is using CodeDeploy to deploy an application which uses secure parameters that are stored in the AWS System Mangers Parameter Store. What two options below must be completed so CodeDeploy can deploy the application?
A. Use ssm get-parameters with –with-decryption option
B. Add permissions using AWS access keys
C. Add permissions using AWS IAM role
D. Use ssm get-parameters with –with-no-decryption option
Q65: A corporate web application is deployed within an Amazon VPC, and is connected to the corporate data center via IPSec VPN. The application must authenticate against the on-premise LDAP server. Once authenticated, logged-in users can only access an S3 keyspace specific to the user. Which of the solutions below meet these requirements? Choose two answers How would you authenticate to the application given these details? (Choose 2)
A. The application authenticates against LDAP, and retrieves the name of an IAM role associated with the user. The application then calls the IAM Security Token Service to assume that IAM Role. The application can use the temporary credentials to access the S3 keyspace.
B. Develop an identity broker which authenticates against LDAP, and then calls IAM Security Token Service to get IAM federated user credentials. The application calls the identity broker to get IAM federated user credentials with access to the appropriate S3 keyspace
C. Develop an identity broker which authenticates against IAM Security Token Service to assume an IAM Role to get temporary AWS security credentials. The application calls the identity broker to get AWS temporary security credentials with access to the app
D. The application authenticates against LDAP. The application then calls the IAM Security Service to login to IAM using the LDAP credentials. The application can use the IAM temporary credentials to access the appropriate S3 bucket.
Answer: A. and B.
The question clearly says “authenticate against LDAP”. Temporary credentials come from STS. Federated user credentials come from the identity broker.
Reference: IAM faqs
Q66:
A corporate web application is deployed within an Amazon VPC, and is connected to the corporate data center via IPSec VPN. The application must authenticate against the on-premise LDAP server. Once authenticated, logged-in users can only access an S3 keyspace specific to the user. Which of the solutions below meet these requirements? Choose two answers
How would you authenticate to the application given these details? (Choose 2)
A. The application authenticates against LDAP, and retrieves the name of an IAM role associated with the user. The application then calls the IAM Security Token Service to assume that IAM Role. The application can use the temporary credentials to access the S3 keyspace.
B. Develop an identity broker which authenticates against LDAP, and then calls IAM Security Token Service to get IAM federated user credentials. The application calls the identity broker to get IAM federated user credentials with access to the appropriate S3 keyspace
C. Develop an identity broker which authenticates against IAM Security Token Service to assume an IAM Role to get temporary AWS security credentials. The application calls the identity broker to get AWS temporary security credentials with access to the app
D. The application authenticates against LDAP. The application then calls the IAM Security Service to login to IAM using the LDAP credentials. The application can use the IAM temporary credentials to access the appropriate S3 bucket.
Answer: A. and B.
The question clearly says “authenticate against LDAP”. Temporary credentials come from STS. Federated user credentials come from the identity broker.
Reference: AWA STS Faqs
Q67: When users are signing in to your application using Cognito, what do you need to do to make sure if the user has compromised credentials, they must enter a new password?
A. Create a user pool in Cognito
B. Block use for “Compromised credential” in the Basic security section
C. Block use for “Compromised credential” in the Advanced security section
D. Use secure remote password
Answer: A. and C.
Amazon Cognito can detect if a user’s credentials (user name and password) have been compromised elsewhere. This can happen when users reuse credentials at more than one site, or when they use passwords that are easy to guess.
From the Advanced security page in the Amazon Cognito console, you can choose whether to allow, or block the user if compromised credentials are detected. Blocking requires users to choose another password. Choosing Allow publishes all attempted uses of compromised credentials to Amazon CloudWatch. For more information, see Viewing Advanced Security Metrics.
You can also choose whether Amazon Cognito checks for compromised credentials during sign-in, sign-up, and password changes.
Note Currently, Amazon Cognito doesn't check for compromised credentials for sign-in operations with Secure Remote Password (SRP) flow, which doesn't send the password during sign-in. Sign-ins that use the AdminInitiateAuth API with ADMIN_NO_SRP_AUTH flow and the InitiateAuth API with USER_PASSWORD_AUTH flow are checked for compromised credentials.
Q68: You work in a large enterprise that is currently evaluating options to migrate your 27 GB Subversion code base. Which of the following options is the best choice for your organization?
A. AWS CodeHost
B. AWS CodeCommit
C. AWS CodeStart
D. None of these
Answer: D.
None of these. While CodeCommit is a good option for git reponsitories it is not able to host Subversion source control.
Q69: You are on a development team and you need to migrate your Spring Application over to AWS. Your team is looking to build, modify, and test new versions of the application. What AWS services could help you migrate your app?
A. Elastic Beanstalk
B. SQS
C. Ec2
D. AWS CodeDeploy
Answer: A. C. and D.
Amazon EC2 can be used to deploy various applications to your AWS Infrastructure.
AWS CodeDeploy is a deployment service that automates application deployments to Amazon EC2 instances, on-premises instances, or serverless Lambda functions.
Q70:
You are a developer responsible for managing a high volume API running in your company’s datacenter. You have been asked to implement a similar API, but one that has potentially higher volume. And you must do it in the most cost effective way, using as few services and components as possible. The API stores and fetches data from a key value store. Which services could you utilize in AWS?
A. DynamoDB
B. Lambda
C. API Gateway
D. EC2
Answer: A. and C.
NoSQL databases like DynamoDB are designed for key value usage. DynamoDB can also handle incredible volumes and is cost effective. AWS API Gateway makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs.
Q72:
AWS X-Ray was recently implemented inside of a service that you work on. Several weeks later, after a new marketing push, that service started seeing a large spike in traffic and you’ve been tasked with investigating a few issues that have started coming up but when you review the X-Ray data you can’t find enough information to draw conclusions so you decide to:
A. Start passing in the X-Amzn-Trace-Id: True HTTP header from your upstream requests
B. Refactor the service to include additional calls to the X-Ray API using an AWS SDK
C. Update the sampling algorithm to increase the sample rate and instrument X-Ray to collect more pertinent information
D. Update your application to use the custom API Gateway TRACE method to send in data
Answer: C.
This is a good way to solve the problem – by customizing the sampling so that you can get more relevant information.
Q75: Which of the following is the right sequence that gets called in CodeDeploy when you use Lambda hooks in an EC2/On-Premise Deployment?
A. Before Install-AfterInstall-Validate Service-Application Start
B. Before Install-After-Install-Application Stop-Application Start
C. Before Install-Application Stop-Validate Service-Application Start
D. Application Stop-Before Install-After Install-Application Start
Answer: D.
In an in-place deployment, including the rollback of an in-place deployment, event hooks are run in the following order:
Note An AWS Lambda hook is one Lambda function specified with a string on a new line after the name of the lifecycle event. Each hook is executed once per deployment. Following are descriptions of the lifecycle events where you can run a hook during an Amazon ECS deployment.
BeforeInstall – Use to run tasks before the replacement task set is created. One target group is associated with the original task set. If an optional test listener is specified, it is associated with the original task set. A rollback is not possible at this point. AfterInstall – Use to run tasks after the replacement task set is created and one of the target groups is associated with it. If an optional test listener is specified, it is associated with the original task set. The results of a hook function at this lifecycle event can trigger a rollback. AfterAllowTestTraffic – Use to run tasks after the test listener serves traffic to the replacement task set. The results of a hook function at this point can trigger a rollback. BeforeAllowTraffic – Use to run tasks after the second target group is associated with the replacement task set, but before traffic is shifted to the replacement task set. The results of a hook function at this lifecycle event can trigger a rollback. AfterAllowTraffic – Use to run tasks after the second target group serves traffic to the replacement task set. The results of a hook function at this lifecycle event can trigger a rollback. Run Order of Hooks in an Amazon ECS Deployment
In an Amazon ECS deployment, event hooks run in the following order:
For in-place deployments, the six hooks related to blocking and allowing traffic apply only if you specify a Classic Load Balancer, Application Load Balancer, or Network Load Balancer from Elastic Load Balancing in the deployment group.Note The Start, DownloadBundle, Install, and End events in the deployment cannot be scripted, which is why they appear in gray in this diagram. However, you can edit the 'files' section of the AppSpec file to specify what's installed during the Install event.
Q76:
Describe the process of registering a mobile device with SNS push notification service using GCM.
A. Receive Registration ID and token for each mobile device. Then, register the mobile application with Amazon SNS, and pass the GCM token credentials to Amazon SNS
B. Pass device token to SNS to create mobile subscription endpoint for each mobile device, then request the device token from each mobile device. SNS then communicates on your behalf to the GCM service
C. None of these are correct
D. Submit GCM notification credentials to Amazon SNS, then receive the Registration ID for each mobile device. After that, pass the device token to SNS, and SNS then creates a mobile subscription endpoint for each device and communicates with the GCM service on your behalf
Answer: D.
When you first register an app and mobile device with a notification service, such as Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) and Google Cloud Messaging for Android (GCM), device tokens or registration IDs are returned from the notification service. When you add the device tokens or registration IDs to Amazon SNS, they are used with the PlatformApplicationArn API to create an endpoint for the app and device. When Amazon SNS creates the endpoint, an EndpointArn is returned. The EndpointArn is how Amazon SNS knows which app and mobile device to send the notification message to.
Q77:
You run an ad-supported photo sharing website using S3 to serve photos to visitors of your site. At some point you find out that other sites have been linking to the photos on your site, causing loss to your business. What is an effective method to mitigate this?
A. Store photos on an EBS volume of the web server.
B. Block the IPs of the offending websites in Security Groups.
C. Remove public read access and use signed URLs with expiry dates.
D. Use CloudFront distributions for static content.
Answer: C.
This solves the issue, but does require you to modify your website. Your website already uses S3, so it doesn't require a lot of changes. See the docs for details: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ShareObjectPreSignedURL.html
CloudFront on its own doesn't prevent unauthorized access and requires you to add a whole new layer to your stack (which may make sense anyway). You can serve private content, but you'd have to use signed URLs or similar mechanism. Here are the docs: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/PrivateContent.html
Q78: How can you control access to the API Gateway in your environment?
A. Cognito User Pools
B. Lambda Authorizers
C. API Methods
D. API Stages
Answer: A. and B.
Access to a REST API Using Amazon Cognito User Pools as Authorizer
As an alternative to using IAM roles and policies or Lambda authorizers (formerly known as custom authorizers), you can use an Amazon Cognito user pool to control who can access your API in Amazon API Gateway.
To use an Amazon Cognito user pool with your API, you must first create an authorizer of the COGNITO_USER_POOLS type and then configure an API method to use that authorizer. After the API is deployed, the client must first sign the user in to the user pool, obtain an identity or access token for the user, and then call the API method with one of the tokens, which are typically set to the request's Authorization header. The API call succeeds only if the required token is supplied and the supplied token is valid, otherwise, the client isn't authorized to make the call because the client did not have credentials that could be authorized.
The identity token is used to authorize API calls based on identity claims of the signed-in user. The access token is used to authorize API calls based on the custom scopes of specified access-protected resources. For more information, see Using Tokens with User Pools and Resource Server and Custom Scopes.
Q80: Company B provides an online image recognition service and utilizes SQS to decouple system components for scalability. The SQS consumers poll the imaging queue as often as possible to keep end-to-end throughput as high as possible. However, Company B is realizing that polling in tight loops is burning CPU cycles and increasing costs with empty responses. How can Company B reduce the number of empty responses?
A. Set the imaging queue MessageRetentionPeriod attribute to 20 seconds.
B. Set the imaging queue ReceiveMessageWaitTimeSeconds attribute to 20 seconds.
C. Set the imaging queue VisibilityTimeout attribute to 20 seconds.
D. Set the DelaySeconds parameter of a message to 20 seconds.
Answer: B.
ReceiveMessageWaitTimeSeconds, when set to greater than zero, enables long polling. Long polling allows the Amazon SQS service to wait until a message is available in the queue before sending a response. Short polling continuously pools a queue and can have false positives. Enabling long polling reduces the number of poll requests, false positives, and empty responses.
Reference: AWS SQS Long Polling
81: You’re using CloudFormation templates to build out staging environments. What section of the CloudFormation would you edit in order to allow the user to specify the PEM key-name at start time?
A. Resources Section
B. Parameters Section
C. Mappings Section
D. Declaration Section
Answer:B.
Parameters property type in CloudFormation allows you to accept user input when starting the CloudFormation template. It allows you to reference the user input as variable throughout your CloudFormation template. Other examples might include asking the user starting the template to provide Domain admin passwords, instance size, pem key, region, and other dynamic options.
Q82: You are writing an AWS CloudFormation template and you want to assign values to properties that will not be available until runtime. You know that you can use intrinsic functions to do this but are unsure as to which part of the template they can be used in. Which of the following is correct in describing how you can currently use intrinsic functions in an AWS CloudFormation template?
A. You can use intrinsic functions in any part of a template, except AWSTemplateFormatVersion and Description
B. You can use intrinsic functions in any part of a template.
C. You can use intrinsic functions only in the resource properties part of a template.
D. You can only use intrinsic functions in specific parts of a template. You can use intrinsic functions in resource properties, metadata attributes, and update policy attributes.
Answer: D.
You can use intrinsic functions only in specific parts of a template. Currently, you can use intrinsic functions in resource properties, outputs, metadata attributes, and update policy attributes. You can also use intrinsic functions to conditionally create stack resources.Reference: AWS Intrinsic Functions
Definition 1:Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed proprietary NoSQL database service that supports key-value and document data structures and is offered by Amazon.com as part of the Amazon Web Services portfolio. DynamoDB exposes a similar data model to and derives its name from Dynamo, but has a different underlying implementation. Dynamo had a multi-master design requiring the client to resolve version conflicts and DynamoDB uses synchronous replication across multiple datacenters for high durability and availability.
Definition 2:DynamoDB is a fast and flexible non-relational database service for any scale. DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases to AWS so that they don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, throughput capacity planning, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling.
AWS DynamoDB Facts and Summaries
Amazon DynamoDB is a low-latency NoSQL database.
DynamoDB consists of Tables, Items, and Attributes
DynamoDb supports both document and key-value data models
DynamoDB Supported documents formats are JSON, HTML, XML
DynamoDB has 2 types of Primary Keys: Partition Key and combination of Partition Key + Sort Key (Composite Key)
DynamoDB has 2 consistency models: Strongly Consistent / Eventually Consistent
DynamoDB Access is controlled using IAM policies.
DynamoDB has fine grained access control using IAM Condition parameter dynamodb:LeadingKeys to allow users to access only the items where the partition key vakue matches their user ID.
DynamoDB Indexes enable fast queries on specific data columns
DynamoDB indexes give you a different view of your data based on alternative Partition / Sort Keys.
DynamoDB Local Secondary indexes must be created when you create your table, they have same partition Key as your table, and they have a different Sort Key.
DynamoDB Global Secondary Index Can be created at any time: at table creation or after. They have a different partition Key as your table and a different sort key as your table.
A DynamoDB query operation finds items in a table using only the primary Key attribute: You provide the Primary Key name and a distinct value to search for.
A DynamoDB Scan operation examines every item in the table. By default, it return data attributes.
DynamoDB Query operation is generally more efficient than a Scan.
With DynamoDB, you can reduce the impact of a query or scan by setting a smaller page size which uses fewer read operations.
To optimize DynamoDB performance, isolate scan operations to specific tables and segregate them from your mission-critical traffic.
To optimize DynamoDB performance, try Parallel scans rather than the default sequential scan.
To optimize DynamoDB performance: Avoid using scan operations if you can: design tables in a way that you can use Query, Get, or BatchGetItems APIs.
When you scan your table in Amazon DynamoDB, you should follow the DynamoDB best practices for avoiding sudden bursts of read activity.
DynamoDb Provisioned Throughput is measured in Capacity Units.
1 Write Capacity Unit = 1 x 1KB Write per second.
1 Read Capacity Unit = 1 x 4KB Strongly Consistent Read Or 2 x 4KB Eventually Consistent Reads per second. Eventual consistent reads give us the maximum performance with the read operation.
What is the maximum throughput that can be provisioned for a single DynamoDB table?
DynamoDB is designed to scale without limits. However, if you want to exceed throughput rates of 10,000 write capacity units or 10,000 read capacity units for an individual table, you must Ccontact AWS to increase it.
If you want to provision more than 20,000 write capacity units or 20,000 read capacity units from a single subscriber account, you must first contact AWS to request a limit increase.
Dynamo Db Performance: DAX is a DynamoDB-compatible caching service that enables you to benefit from fast in-memory performance for demanding applications.
As an in-memory cache, DAX reduces the response times of eventually-consistent read workloads by an order of magnitude, from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds
DAX improves response times for Eventually Consistent reads only.
With DAX, you point your API calls to the DAX cluster instead of your table.
If the item you are querying is on the cache, DAX will return it; otherwise, it will perform and Eventually Consistent GetItem operation to your DynamoDB table.
DAX reduces operational and application complexity by providing a managed service that is API compatible with Amazon DynamoDB, and thus requires only minimal functional changes to use with an existing application.
DAX is not suitable for write-intensive applications or applications that require Strongly Consistent reads.
For read-heavy or bursty workloads, DAX provides increased throughput and potential operational cost savings by reducing the need to over-provision read capacity units. This is especially beneficial for applications that require repeated reads for individual keys.
Dynamo Db Performance: ElastiCache
In-memory cache sits between your application and database
2 different caching strategies: Lazy loading and Write Through: Lazy loading only caches the data when it is requested
Elasticache Node failures are not fatal, just lots of cache misses
Avoid stale data by implementing a TTL.
Write-Through strategy writes data into cache whenever there is a change to the database. Data is never stale
Write-Through penalty: Each write involves a write to the cache. Elasticache node failure means that data is missing until added or updated in the database.
Elasticache is wasted resources if most of the data is never used.
Time To Live (TTL) for DynamoDB allows you to define when items in a table expire so that they can be automatically deleted from the database. TTL is provided at no extra cost as a way to reduce storage usage and reduce the cost of storing irrelevant data without using provisioned throughput. With TTL enabled on a table, you can set a timestamp for deletion on a per-item basis, allowing you to limit storage usage to only those records that are relevant.
DynamoDB Security: DynamoDB uses the CMK to generate and encrypt a unique data key for the table, known as the table key. With DynamoDB, AWS Owned, or AWS Managed CMK can be used to generate & encrypt keys. AWS Owned CMK is free of charge while AWS Managed CMK is chargeable. Customer managed CMK’s are not supported with encryption at rest.
Amazon DynamoDB offers fully managed encryption at rest. DynamoDB encryption at rest provides enhanced security by encrypting your data at rest using an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) managed encryption key for DynamoDB. This functionality eliminates the operational burden and complexity involved in protecting sensitive data.
DynamoDB is a alternative solution which can be used for storage of session management. The latency of access to data is less , hence this can be used as a data store for session management
DynamoDB Streams Use Cases and Design Patterns:
How do you set up a relationship across multiple tables in which, based on the value of an item from one table, you update the item in a second table?
How do you trigger an event based on a particular transaction?
How do you audit or archive transactions?
How do you replicate data across multiple tables (similar to that of materialized views/streams/replication in relational data stores)?
As a NoSQL database, DynamoDB is not designed to support transactions. Although client-side libraries are available to mimic the transaction capabilities, they are not scalable and cost-effective. For example, the Java Transaction Library for DynamoDB creates 7N+4 additional writes for every write operation. This is partly because the library holds metadata to manage the transactions to ensure that it’s consistent and can be rolled back before commit.
You can use DynamoDB Streams to address all these use cases. DynamoDB Streams is a powerful service that you can combine with other AWS services to solve many similar problems. When enabled, DynamoDB Streams captures a time-ordered sequence of item-level modifications in a DynamoDB table and durably stores the information for up to 24 hours. Applications can access a series of stream records, which contain an item change, from a DynamoDB stream in near real time.
AWS maintains separate endpoints for DynamoDB and DynamoDB Streams. To work with database tables and indexes, your application must access a DynamoDB endpoint. To read and process DynamoDB Streams records, your application must access a DynamoDB Streams endpoint in the same Region
20 global secondary indexes are allowed per table? (by default)
What is one key difference between a global secondary index and a local secondary index? A local secondary index must have the same partition key as the main table
How many tables can an AWS account have per region? 256
How many secondary indexes (global and local combined) are allowed per table? (by default): 25 You can define up to 5 local secondary indexes and 20 global secondary indexes per table (by default) – for a total of 25.
How can you increase your DynamoDB table limit in a region? By contacting AWS and requesting a limit increase
For any AWS account, there is an initial limit of 256 tables per region.
The minimum length of a partition key value is 1 byte. The maximum length is 2048 bytes.
The minimum length of a sort key value is 1 byte. The maximum length is 1024 bytes.
For tables with local secondary indexes, there is a 10 GB size limit per partition key value. A table with local secondary indexes can store any number of items, as long as the total size for any one partition key value does not exceed 10 GB.
The following diagram shows a local secondary index named LastPostIndex. Note that the partition key is the same as that of the Thread table, but the sort key is LastPostDateTime. AWS DynamoDB secondary indexes example
Q0: What should the Developer enable on the DynamoDB table to optimize performance and minimize costs?
A. Amazon DynamoDB auto scaling
B. Amazon DynamoDB cross-region replication
C. Amazon DynamoDB Streams
D. Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator
D. DAX is a DynamoDB-compatible caching service that enables you to benefit from fast in-memory performance for demanding applications. DAX addresses three core scenarios:
As an in-memory cache, DAX reduces the response times of eventually-consistent read workloads by an order of magnitude, from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds.
DAX reduces operational and application complexity by providing a managed service that is API-compatible with Amazon DynamoDB, and thus requires only minimal functional changes to use with an existing application.
For read-heavy or bursty workloads, DAX provides increased throughput and potential operational cost savings by reducing the need to over-provision read capacity units. This is especially beneficial for applications that require repeated reads for individual keys.
Q2: A security system monitors 600 cameras, saving image metadata every 1 minute to an Amazon DynamoDb table. Each sample involves 1kb of data, and the data writes are evenly distributed over time. How much write throughput is required for the target table?
A. 6000
B. 10
C. 3600
D. 600
B. When you mention the write capacity of a table in Dynamo DB, you mention it as the number of 1KB writes per second. So in the above question, since the write is happening every minute, we need to divide the value of 600 by 60, to get the number of KB writes per second. This gives a value of 10.
You can specify the Write capacity in the Capacity tab of the DynamoDB table.
Q3: You are developing an application that will interact with a DynamoDB table. The table is going to take in a lot of read and write operations. Which of the following would be the ideal partition key for the DynamoDB table to ensure ideal performance?
A. CustomerID
B. CustomerName
C. Location
D. Age
Answer- A
Use high-cardinality attributes. These are attributes that have distinct values for each item, like e-mailid, employee_no, customerid, sessionid, orderid, and so on..
Use composite attributes. Try to combine more than one attribute to form a unique key.
Reference: Choosing the right DynamoDB Partition Key
Q4: A DynamoDB table is set with a Read Throughput capacity of 5 RCU. Which of the following read configuration will provide us the maximum read throughput?
A. Read capacity set to 5 for 4KB reads of data at strong consistency
B. Read capacity set to 5 for 4KB reads of data at eventual consistency
C. Read capacity set to 15 for 1KB reads of data at strong consistency
D. Read capacity set to 5 for 1KB reads of data at eventual consistency
Answer: B.
The calculation of throughput capacity for option B would be:
Read capacity(5) * Amount of data(4) = 20.
Since its required at eventual consistency , we can double the read throughput to 20*2=40
Q5: Your team is developing a solution that will make use of DynamoDB tables. Due to the nature of the application, the data is needed across a couple of regions across the world. Which of the following would help reduce the latency of requests to DynamoDB from different regions?
A. Enable Multi-AZ for the DynamoDB table
B. Enable global tables for DynamoDB
C. Enable Indexes for the table
D. Increase the read and write throughput for the tablez
Answer: B
Amazon DynamoDB global tables provide a fully managed solution for deploying a multi-region, multimaster database, without having to build and maintain your own replication solution. When you create a global table, you specify the AWS regions where you want the table to be available. DynamoDB performs all of the necessary tasks to create identical tables in these regions, and propagate ongoing data changes to all of them.
Reference: Global Tables
Q6: An application is currently accessing a DynamoDB table. Currently the tables queries are performing well. Changes have been made to the application and now the performance of the application is starting to degrade. After looking at the changes , you see that the queries are making use of an attribute which is not the partition key? Which of the following would be the adequate change to make to resolve the issue?
A. Add an index for the DynamoDB table
B. Change all the queries to ensure they use the partition key
C. Enable global tables for DynamoDB
D. Change the read capacity on the table
Answer: A
Amazon DynamoDB provides fast access to items in a table by specifying primary key values. However, many applications might benefit from having one or more secondary (or alternate) keys available, to allow efficient access to data with attributes other than the primary key. To address this, you can create one or more secondary indexes on a table, and issue Query or Scan requests against these indexes.
A secondary index is a data structure that contains a subset of attributes from a table, along with an alternate key to support Query operations. You can retrieve data from the index using a Query, in much the same way as you use Query with a table. A table can have multiple secondary indexes, which gives your applications access to many different query patterns.
Q7: Company B has created an e-commerce site using DynamoDB and is designing a products table that includes items purchased and the users who purchased the item.
When creating a primary key on a table which of the following would be the best attribute for the partition key? Select the BEST possible answer.
A. None of these are correct.
B. user_id where there are many users to few products
C. category_id where there are few categories to many products
D. product_id where there are few products to many users
Answer: B.
When designing tables it is important for the data to be distributed evenly across the entire table. It is best practice for performance to set your primary key where there are many primary keys to few rows. An example would be many users to few products. An example of bad design would be a primary key of product_id where there are few products but many users.
When designing tables it is important for the data to be distributed evenly across the entire table. It is best practice for performance to set your primary key where there are many primary keys to few rows. An example would be many users to few products. An example of bad design would be a primary key of product_id where there are few products but many users.
Reference: Partition Keys and Sort Keys
Q8: Which API call can be used to retrieve up to 100 items at a time or 16 MB of data from a DynamoDB table?
A. BatchItem
B. GetItem
C. BatchGetItem
D. ChunkGetItem
Answer: C. BatchGetItem
The BatchGetItem operation returns the attributes of one or more items from one or more tables. You identify requested items by primary key.
A single operation can retrieve up to 16 MB of data, which can contain as many as 100 items. BatchGetItem will return a partial result if the response size limit is exceeded, the table's provisioned throughput is exceeded, or an internal processing failure occurs. If a partial result is returned, the operation returns a value for UnprocessedKeys. You can use this value to retry the operation starting with the next item to get.Reference: API-Specific Limits
Q9: Which DynamoDB limits can be raised by contacting AWS support?
A. The number of hash keys per account
B. The maximum storage used per account
C. The number of tables per account
D. The number of local secondary indexes per account
E. The number of provisioned throughput units per account
Answer: C. and E.
For any AWS account, there is an initial limit of 256 tables per region.
AWS places some default limits on the throughput you can provision.
These are the limits unless you request a higher amount.
To request a service limit increase see https://aws.amazon.com/support.
Q10: Which approach below provides the least impact to provisioned throughput on the “Product”
table?
A. Create an “Images” DynamoDB table to store the Image with a foreign key constraint to
the “Product” table
B. Add an image data type to the “Product” table to store the images in binary format
C. Serialize the image and store it in multiple DynamoDB tables
D. Store the images in Amazon S3 and add an S3 URL pointer to the “Product” table item
for each image
Answer: D.
Amazon DynamoDB currently limits the size of each item that you store in a table (see Limits in DynamoDB). If your application needs to store more data in an item than the DynamoDB size limit permits, you can try compressing one or more large attributes, or you can store them as an object in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and store the Amazon S3 object identifier in your DynamoDB item.
Compressing large attribute values can let them fit within item limits in DynamoDB and reduce your storage costs. Compression algorithms such as GZIP or LZO produce binary output that you can then store in a Binary attribute type.
Reference: Best Practices for Storing Large Items and Attributes
Q11: You’re creating a forum DynamoDB database for hosting forums. Your “thread” table contains the forum name and each “forum name” can have one or more “subjects”. What primary key type would you give the thread table in order to allow more than one subject to be tied to the forum primary key name?
A. Hash
B. Range and Hash
C. Primary and Range
D. Hash and Range
Answer: D.
Each forum name can have one or more subjects. In this case, ForumName is the hash attribute and Subject is the range attribute.
Definition 1: Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a “simple storage service” offered by Amazon Web Services that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its global e-commerce network.
Definition 2: Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
AWS S3 Facts and summaries
S3 is a universal namespace, meaning each S3 bucket you create must have a unique name that is not being used by anyone else in the world.
S3 is object based: i.e allows you to upload files.
Files can be from 0 Bytes to 5 TB
What is the maximum length, in bytes, of a DynamoDB range primary key attribute value?
The maximum length of a DynamoDB range primary key attribute value is 2048 bytes (NOT 256 bytes).
S3 has unlimited storage.
Files are stored in Buckets.
Read after write consistency for PUTS of new Objects
Eventual Consistency for overwrite PUTS and DELETES (can take some time to propagate)
S3 Standard (durable, immediately available, frequently accesses)
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering (S3 Intelligent-Tiering): It works by storing objects in two access tiers: one tier that is optimized for frequent access and another lower-cost tier that is optimized for infrequent access.
S3 – One Zone-Infrequent Access – S3 One Zone IA: Same ad IA. However, data is stored in a single Availability Zone only
S3 – Reduced Redundancy Storage (data that is easily reproducible, such as thumbnails, etc.)
Glacier – Archived data, where you can wait 3-5 hours before accessing
You can have a bucket that has different objects stored in S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, and S3 One Zone-IA.
The default URL for S3 hosted websites lists the bucket name first followed by s3-website-region.amazonaws.com . Example: enoumen.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com
Core fundamentals of an S3 object
Key (name)
Value (data)
Version (ID)
Metadata
Sub-resources (used to manage bucket-specific configuration)
Bucket Policies, ACLs,
CORS
Transfer Acceleration
Object-based storage only for files
Not suitable to install OS on.
Successful uploads will generate a HTTP 200 status code.
S3 Security – Summary
By default, all newly created buckets are PRIVATE.
You can set up access control to your buckets using:
Bucket Policies – Applied at the bucket level
Access Control Lists – Applied at an object level.
S3 buckets can be configured to create access logs, which log all requests made to the S3 bucket. These logs can be written to another bucket.
S3 Encryption
Encryption In-Transit (SSL/TLS)
Encryption At Rest:
Server side Encryption (SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, SSE-C)
Client Side Encryption
Remember that we can use a Bucket policy to prevent unencrypted files from being uploaded by creating a policy which only allows requests which include the x-amz-server-side-encryption parameter in the request header.
S3 CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing):
CORS defines a way for client web applications that are loaded in one domain to interact with resources in a different domain.
Used to enable cross origin access for your AWS resources, e.g. S3 hosted website accessing javascript or image files located in another bucket. By default, resources in one bucket cannot access resources located in another. To allow this we need to configure CORS on the bucket being accessed and enable access for the origin (bucket) attempting to access.
Always use the S3 website URL, not the regular bucket URL. E.g.: https://s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/acloudguru
S3 CloudFront:
Edge locations are not just READ only – you can WRITE to them too (i.e put an object on to them.)
Objects are cached for the life of the TTL (Time to Live)
You can clear cached objects, but you will be charged. (Invalidation)
S3 Performance optimization – 2 main approaches to Performance Optimization for S3:
GET-Intensive Workloads – Use Cloudfront
Mixed Workload – Avoid sequencial key names for your S3 objects. Instead, add a random prefix like a hex hash to the key name to prevent multiple objects from being stored on the same partition.
The best way to handle large objects uploads to the S3 service is to use the Multipart upload API. The Multipart upload API enables you to upload large objects in parts.
You can enable versioning on a bucket, even if that bucket already has objects in it. The already existing objects, though, will show their versions as null. All new objects will have version IDs.
Bucket names cannot start with a . or – characters. S3 bucket names can contain both the . and – characters. There can only be one . or one – between labels. E.G mybucket-com mybucket.com are valid names but mybucket–com and mybucket..com are not valid bucket names.
What is the maximum number of S3 buckets allowed per AWS account (by default)? 100
You successfully upload an item to the us-east-1 region. You then immediately make another API call and attempt to read the object. What will happen? All AWS regions now have read-after-write consistency for PUT operations of new objects. Read-after-write consistency allows you to retrieve objects immediately after creation in Amazon S3. Other actions still follow the eventual consistency model (where you will sometimes get stale results if you have recently made changes)
S3 bucket policies require a Principal be defined. Review the access policy elements here
What checksums does Amazon S3 employ to detect data corruption?
Amazon S3 uses a combination of Content-MD5 checksums and cyclic redundancy checks (CRCs) to detect data corruption. Amazon S3 performs these checksums on data at rest and repairs any corruption using redundant data. In addition, the service calculates checksums on all network traffic to detect corruption of data packets when storing or retrieving data.
Q0: You’ve written an application that uploads objects onto an S3 bucket. The size of the object varies between 200 – 500 MB. You’ve seen that the application sometimes takes a longer than expected time to upload the object. You want to improve the performance of the application. Which of the following would you consider?
A. Create multiple threads and upload the objects in the multiple threads
B. Write the items in batches for better performance
C. Use the Multipart upload API
D. Enable versioning on the Bucket
C. All other options are invalid since the best way to handle large object uploads to the S3 service is to use the Multipart upload API. The Multipart upload API enables you to upload large objects in parts. You can use this API to upload new large objects or make a copy of an existing object. Multipart uploading is a three-step process: You initiate the upload, you upload the object parts, and after you have uploaded all the parts, you complete the multipart upload. Upon receiving the complete multipart upload request, Amazon S3 constructs the object from the uploaded parts, and you can then access the object just as you would any other object in your bucket.
Q2: You are using AWS SAM templates to deploy a serverless application. Which of the following resource will embed application from Amazon S3 buckets?
A. AWS::Serverless::Api
B. AWS::Serverless::Application
C. AWS::Serverless::Layerversion
D. AWS::Serverless::Function
Answer – B
AWS::Serverless::Application resource in AWS SAm template is used to embed application frm Amazon S3 buckets.
Reference: Declaring Serverless Resources
Q3: A static web site has been hosted on a bucket and is now being accessed by users. One of the web pages javascript section has been changed to access data which is hosted in another S3 bucket. Now that same web page is no longer loading in the browser. Which of the following can help alleviate the error?
A. Enable versioning for the underlying S3 bucket.
B. Enable Replication so that the objects get replicated to the other bucket
C. Enable CORS for the bucket
D. Change the Bucket policy for the bucket to allow access from the other bucket
Answer – C
Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) defines a way for client web applications that are loaded in one domain to interact with resources in a different domain. With CORS support, you can build rich client-side web applications with Amazon S3 and selectively allow cross-origin access to your Amazon S3 resources.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing: Use-case Scenarios The following are example scenarios for using CORS:
Scenario 1: Suppose that you are hosting a website in an Amazon S3 bucket named website as described in Hosting a Static Website on Amazon S3. Your users load the website endpoint http://website.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com. Now you want to use JavaScript on the webpages that are stored in this bucket to be able to make authenticated GET and PUT requests against the same bucket by using the Amazon S3 API endpoint for the bucket, website.s3.amazonaws.com. A browser would normally block JavaScript from allowing those requests, but with CORS you can congure your bucket to explicitly enable cross-origin requests from website.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com.
Scenario 2: Suppose that you want to host a web font from your S3 bucket. Again, browsers require a CORS check (also called a preight check) for loading web fonts. You would congure the bucket that is hosting the web font to allow any origin to make these requests.
Q4: Your mobile application includes a photo-sharing service that is expecting tens of thousands of users at launch. You will leverage Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage of the user Images, and you must decide how to authenticate and authorize your users for access to these images. You also need to manage the storage of these images. Which two of the following approaches should you use? Choose two answers from the options below
A. Create an Amazon S3 bucket per user, and use your application to generate the S3 URL for the appropriate content.
B. Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user accounts as your application-level user database, and offload the burden of authentication from your application code.
C. Authenticate your users at the application level, and use AWS Security Token Service (STS)to grant token-based authorization to S3 objects.
D. Authenticate your users at the application level, and send an SMS token message to the user. Create an Amazon S3 bucket with the same name as the SMS message token, and move the user’s objects to that bucket.
Answer- C
The AWS Security Token Service (STS) is a web service that enables you to request temporary, limited-privilege credentials for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users or for users that you authenticate (federated users). The token can then be used to grant access to the objects in S3.
You can then provides access to the objects based on the key values generated via the user id.
Q5: Both ACLs and Bucket Policies can be used to grant access to S3 buckets. Which of the following statements is true about ACLs and Bucket policies?
A. Bucket Policies are Written in JSON and ACLs are written in XML
B. ACLs can be attached to S3 objects or S3 Buckets
C. Bucket Policies and ACLs are written in JSON
D. Bucket policies are only attached to s3 buckets, ACLs are only attached to s3 objects
Answer: A. and B.
Only Bucket Policies are written in JSON, ACLs are written in XML.
While Bucket policies are indeed only attached to S3 buckets, ACLs can be attached to S3 Buckets OR S3 Objects.
Reference:
Q6: What are good options to improve S3 performance when you have significantly high numbers of GET requests?
A. Introduce random prefixes to S3 objects
B. Introduce random suffixes to S3 objects
C. Setup CloudFront for S3 objects
D. Migrate commonly used objects to Amazon Glacier
Answer: C
CloudFront caching is an excellent way to avoid putting extra strain on the S3 service and to improve the response times of reqeusts by caching data closer to users at CloudFront locations.
S3 Transfer Acceleration optimizes the TCP protocol and adds additional intelligence between the client and the S3 bucket, making S3 Transfer Acceleration a better choice if a higher throughput is desired. If you have objects that are smaller than 1GB or if the data set is less than 1GB in size, you should consider using Amazon CloudFront's PUT/POST commands for optimal performance.
Reference: Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration
Q7: If an application is storing hourly log files from thousands of instances from a high traffic
web site, which naming scheme would give optimal performance on S3?
A. Sequential
B. HH-DD-MM-YYYY-log_instanceID
C. YYYY-MM-DD-HH-log_instanceID
D. instanceID_log-HH-DD-MM-YYYY
E. instanceID_log-YYYY-MM-DD-HH
Answer: A. B. C. D. and E.
Amazon S3 now provides increased performance to support at least 3,500 requests per second to add data and 5,500 requests per second to retrieve data, which can save significant processing time for no additional charge. Each S3 prefix can support these request rates, making it simple to increase performance significantly.
This S3 request rate performance increase removes any previous guidance to randomize object prefixes to achieve faster performance. That means you can now use logical or sequential naming patterns in S3 object naming without any performance implications.
Q9: You created three S3 buckets – “mywebsite.com”, “downloads.mywebsite.com”, and “www.mywebsite.com”. You uploaded your files and enabled static website hosting. You specified both of the default documents under the “enable static website hosting” header. You also set the “Make Public” permission for the objects in each of the three buckets. You create the Route 53 Aliases for the three buckets. You are going to have your end users test your websites by browsing to http://mydomain.com/error.html, http://downloads.mydomain.com/index.html, and http://www.mydomain.com. What problems will your testers encounter?
A. http://mydomain.com/error.html will not work because you did not set a value for the error.html file
B. There will be no problems, all three sites should work.
C. http://www.mywebsite.com will not work because the URL does not include a file name at the end of it.
D. http://downloads.mywebsite.com/index.html will not work because the “downloads” prefix is not a supported prefix for S3 websites using Route 53 aliases
Answer: B.
It used to be that the only allowed domain prefix when creating Route 53 Aliases for S3 static websites was the “www” prefix. However, this is no longer the case. You can now use other subdomain.
What is the AWS Certified Developer Associate Exam?
This AWS Certified Developer-Associate Examination is intended for individuals who perform a
Developer role. It validates an examinee’s ability to:
Demonstrate an understanding of core AWS services, uses, and basic AWS architecture best practices.
Demonstrate proficiency in developing, deploying, and debugging cloud-based applications using AWS.
There are no prerequisites for taking the Developer-Associate examination, but here are the recommended AWS Knowledge:
One or more years of hands-on experience developing and maintaining an AWS based application
In-depth knowledge of at least one high-level programming language
Understanding of core AWS services, uses, and basic AWS architecture best practices
Proficiency in developing, deploying, and debugging cloud-based applications using AWS
Ability to use the AWS service APIs, AWS CLI, and SDKs to write applications
Ability to identify key features of AWS services
Understanding of the AWS shared responsibility model
Understanding of application lifecycle management
Ability to use a CI/CD pipeline to deploy applications on AWS
Ability to use or interact with AWS services
Ability to apply a basic understanding of cloud-native applications to write code
Ability to write code using AWS security best practices (e.g., not using secret and access keys in the code, instead using IAM roles)
Ability to author, maintain, and debug code modules on AWS
Proficiency writing code for serverless applications
Understanding of the use of containers in the development process
To succeed with the real exam, do not memorize the answers below. It is very important that you understand why a question is right or wrong and the concepts behind it by carefully reading the reference documents in the answers.
AWS Certified Developer – Associate Practice Questions And Answers Dump
Q0: Your application reads commands from an SQS queue and sends them to web services hosted by your
partners. When a partner’s endpoint goes down, your application continually returns their commands to the queue. The repeated attempts to deliver these commands use up resources. Commands that can’t be delivered must not be lost.
How can you accommodate the partners’ broken web services without wasting your resources?
A. Create a delay queue and set DelaySeconds to 30 seconds
B. Requeue the message with a VisibilityTimeout of 30 seconds.
C. Create a dead letter queue and set the Maximum Receives to 3.
D. Requeue the message with a DelaySeconds of 30 seconds.
C. After a message is taken from the queue and returned for the maximum number of retries, it is
automatically sent to a dead letter queue, if one has been configured. It stays there until you retrieve it for forensic purposes.
Q1: A developer is writing an application that will store data in a DynamoDB table. The ratio of reads operations to write operations will be 1000 to 1, with the same data being accessed frequently.
What should the Developer enable on the DynamoDB table to optimize performance and minimize costs?
A. Amazon DynamoDB auto scaling
B. Amazon DynamoDB cross-region replication
C. Amazon DynamoDB Streams
D. Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator
D. The AWS Documentation mentions the following:
DAX is a DynamoDB-compatible caching service that enables you to benefit from fast in-memory performance for demanding applications. DAX addresses three core scenarios
As an in-memory cache, DAX reduces the response times of eventually-consistent read workloads by an order of magnitude, from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds.
DAX reduces operational and application complexity by providing a managed service that is API-compatible with Amazon DynamoDB, and thus requires only minimal functional changes to use with an existing application.
For read-heavy or bursty workloads, DAX provides increased throughput and potential operational cost savings by reducing the need to over-provision read capacity units. This is especially beneficial for applications that require repeated reads for individual keys.
Q2: You are creating a DynamoDB table with the following attributes:
PurchaseOrderNumber (partition key)
CustomerID
PurchaseDate
TotalPurchaseValue
One of your applications must retrieve items from the table to calculate the total value of purchases for a
particular customer over a date range. What secondary index do you need to add to the table?
A. Local secondary index with a partition key of CustomerID and sort key of PurchaseDate; project the
TotalPurchaseValue attribute
B. Local secondary index with a partition key of PurchaseDate and sort key of CustomerID; project the
TotalPurchaseValue attribute
C. Global secondary index with a partition key of CustomerID and sort key of PurchaseDate; project the
TotalPurchaseValue attribute
D. Global secondary index with a partition key of PurchaseDate and sort key of CustomerID; project the
TotalPurchaseValue attribute
C. The query is for a particular CustomerID, so a Global Secondary Index is needed for a different partition
key. To retrieve only the desired date range, the PurchaseDate must be the sort key. Projecting the
TotalPurchaseValue into the index provides all the data needed to satisfy the use case.
Global secondary index — an index with a hash and range key that can be different from those on the table. A global secondary index is considered “global” because queries on the index can span all of the data in a table, across all partitions.
Local secondary index — an index that has the same hash key as the table, but a different range key. A local secondary index is “local” in the sense that every partition of a local secondary index is scoped to a table partition that has the same hash key.
Local Secondary Indexes still rely on the original Hash Key. When you supply a table with hash+range, think about the LSI as hash+range1, hash+range2.. hash+range6. You get 5 more range attributes to query on. Also, there is only one provisioned throughput.
Global Secondary Indexes defines a new paradigm – different hash/range keys per index.
This breaks the original usage of one hash key per table. This is also why when defining GSI you are required to add a provisioned throughput per index and pay for it.
Local Secondary Indexes can only be created when you are creating the table, there is no way to add Local Secondary Index to an existing table, also once you create the index you cannot delete it.
Global Secondary Indexes can be created when you create the table and added to an existing table, deleting an existing Global Secondary Index is also allowed.
Throughput :
Local Secondary Indexes consume throughput from the table. When you query records via the local index, the operation consumes read capacity units from the table. When you perform a write operation (create, update, delete) in a table that has a local index, there will be two write operations, one for the table another for the index. Both operations will consume write capacity units from the table.
Global Secondary Indexes have their own provisioned throughput, when you query the index the operation will consume read capacity from the index, when you perform a write operation (create, update, delete) in a table that has a global index, there will be two write operations, one for the table another for the index*.
Q7: You are attempting to SSH into an EC2 instance that is located in a public subnet. However, you are currently receiving a timeout error trying to connect. What could be a possible cause of this connection issue?
A. The security group associated with the EC2 instance has an inbound rule that allows SSH traffic, but does not have an outbound rule that allows SSH traffic.
B. The security group associated with the EC2 instance has an inbound rule that allows SSH traffic AND has an outbound rule that explicitly denies SSH traffic.
C. The security group associated with the EC2 instance has an inbound rule that allows SSH traffic AND the associated NACL has both an inbound and outbound rule that allows SSH traffic.
D. The security group associated with the EC2 instance does not have an inbound rule that allows SSH traffic AND the associated NACL does not have an outbound rule that allows SSH traffic.
D. Security groups are stateful, so you do NOT have to have an explicit outbound rule for return requests. However, NACLs are stateless so you MUST have an explicit outbound rule configured for return request.
Q8: You have instances inside private subnets and a properly configured bastion host instance in a public subnet. None of the instances in the private subnets have a public or Elastic IP address. How can you connect an instance in the private subnet to the open internet to download system updates?
A. Create and assign EIP to each instance
B. Create and attach a second IGW to the VPC.
C. Create and utilize a NAT Gateway
D. Connect to a VPN
C. You can use a network address translation (NAT) gateway in a public subnet in your VPC to enable instances in the private subnet to initiate outbound traffic to the Internet, but prevent the instances from receiving inbound traffic initiated by someone on the Internet.
Q9: What feature of VPC networking should you utilize if you want to create “elasticity” in your application’s architecture?
A. Security Groups
B. Route Tables
C. Elastic Load Balancer
D. Auto Scaling
D. Auto scaling is designed specifically with elasticity in mind. Auto scaling allows for the increase and decrease of compute power based on demand, thus creating elasticity in the architecture.
Q11: You’re writing a script with an AWS SDK that uses the AWS API Actions and want to create AMIs for non-EBS backed AMIs for you. Which API call should occurs in the final process of creating an AMI?
A. RegisterImage
B. CreateImage
C. ami-register-image
D. ami-create-image
A. It is actually – RegisterImage. All AWS API Actions will follow the capitalization like this and don't have hyphens in them.
Q12: When dealing with session state in EC2-based applications using Elastic load balancers which option is generally thought of as the best practice for managing user sessions?
A. Having the ELB distribute traffic to all EC2 instances and then having the instance check a caching solution like ElastiCache running Redis or Memcached for session information
B. Permenantly assigning users to specific instances and always routing their traffic to those instances
C. Using Application-generated cookies to tie a user session to a particular instance for the cookie duration
D. Using Elastic Load Balancer generated cookies to tie a user session to a particular instance
Q14: What is one key difference between an Amazon EBS-backed and an instance-store backed instance?
A. Autoscaling requires using Amazon EBS-backed instances
B. Virtual Private Cloud requires EBS backed instances
C. Amazon EBS-backed instances can be stopped and restarted without losing data
D. Instance-store backed instances can be stopped and restarted without losing data
C. Instance-store backed images use “ephemeral” storage (temporary). The storage is only available during the life of an instance. Rebooting an instance will allow ephemeral data stay persistent. However, stopping and starting an instance will remove all ephemeral storage.
Q15: After having created a new Linux instance on Amazon EC2, and downloaded the .pem file (called Toto.pem) you try and SSH into your IP address (54.1.132.33) using the following command.
ssh -i my_key.pem ec2-user@52.2.222.22
However you receive the following error.
@@@@@@@@ WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
What is the most probable reason for this and how can you fix it?
A. You do not have root access on your terminal and need to use the sudo option for this to work.
B. You do not have enough permissions to perform the operation.
C. Your key file is encrypted. You need to use the -u option for unencrypted not the -i option.
D. Your key file must not be publicly viewable for SSH to work. You need to modify your .pem file to limit permissions.
D. You need to run something like: chmod 400 my_key.pem
Q16: You have an EBS root device on /dev/sda1 on one of your EC2 instances. You are having trouble with this particular instance and you need to either Stop/Start, Reboot or Terminate the instance but you do NOT want to lose any data that you have stored on /dev/sda1. However, you are unsure if changing the instance state in any of the aforementioned ways will cause you to lose data stored on the EBS volume. Which of the below statements best describes the effect each change of instance state would have on the data you have stored on /dev/sda1?
A. Whether you stop/start, reboot or terminate the instance it does not matter because data on an EBS volume is not ephemeral and the data will not be lost regardless of what method is used.
B. If you stop/start the instance the data will not be lost. However if you either terminate or reboot the instance the data will be lost.
C. Whether you stop/start, reboot or terminate the instance it does not matter because data on an EBS volume is ephemeral and it will be lost no matter what method is used.
D. The data will be lost if you terminate the instance, however the data will remain on /dev/sda1 if you reboot or stop/start the instance because data on an EBS volume is not ephemeral.
D. The question states that an EBS-backed root device is mounted at /dev/sda1, and EBS volumes maintain information regardless of the instance state. If it was instance store, this would be a different answer.
Q17: EC2 instances are launched from Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). A given public AMI:
A. Can only be used to launch EC2 instances in the same AWS availability zone as the AMI is stored
B. Can only be used to launch EC2 instances in the same country as the AMI is stored
C. Can only be used to launch EC2 instances in the same AWS region as the AMI is stored
D. Can be used to launch EC2 instances in any AWS region
C. AMIs are only available in the region they are created. Even in the case of the AWS-provided AMIs, AWS has actually copied the AMIs for you to different regions. You cannot access an AMI from one region in another region. However, you can copy an AMI from one region to another
A. The ability to create custom permission policies.
B. Assigning IAM permission policies to more than one user at a time.
C. Easier user/policy management.
D. Allowing EC2 instances to gain access to S3.
B. and C.
A. is incorrect: This is a benefit of IAM generally or a benefit of IAM policies. But IAM groups don't create policies, they have policies attached to them.
Q22: What should the Developer enable on the DynamoDB table to optimize performance and minimize costs?
A. Amazon DynamoDB auto scaling
B. Amazon DynamoDB cross-region replication
C. Amazon DynamoDB Streams
D. Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator
D. DAX is a DynamoDB-compatible caching service that enables you to benefit from fast in-memory performance for demanding applications. DAX addresses three core scenarios:
As an in-memory cache, DAX reduces the response times of eventually-consistent read workloads by an order of magnitude, from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds.
DAX reduces operational and application complexity by providing a managed service that is API-compatible with Amazon DynamoDB, and thus requires only minimal functional changes to use with an existing application.
For read-heavy or bursty workloads, DAX provides increased throughput and potential operational cost savings by reducing the need to over-provision read capacity units. This is especially beneficial for applications that require repeated reads for individual keys.
Q23: A Developer has been asked to create an AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment for a production web application which needs to handle thousands of requests. Currently the dev environment is running on a t1 micro instance. How can the Developer change the EC2 instance type to m4.large?
A. Use CloudFormation to migrate the Amazon EC2 instance type of the environment from t1 micro to m4.large.
B. Create a saved configuration file in Amazon S3 with the instance type as m4.large and use the same during environment creation.
C. Change the instance type to m4.large in the configuration details page of the Create New Environment page.
D. Change the instance type value for the environment to m4.large by using update autoscaling group CLI command.
B. The Elastic Beanstalk console and EB CLI set configuration options when you create an environment. You can also set configuration options in saved configurations and configuration files. If the same option is set in multiple locations, the value used is determined by the order of precedence.
Configuration option settings can be composed in text format and saved prior to environment creation, applied during environment creation using any supported client, and added, modified or removed after environment creation.
During environment creation, configuration options are applied from multiple sources with the following precedence, from highest to lowest:
Settings applied directly to the environment – Settings specified during a create environment or update environment operation on the Elastic Beanstalk API by any client, including the AWS Management Console, EB CLI, AWS CLI, and SDKs. The AWS Management Console and EB CLI also applyrecommended values for some options that apply at this level unless overridden.
Saved Configurations–
Settings for any options that are not applied directly to the
environment are loaded from a saved configuration, if specified.
Configuration Files (.ebextensions)– Settings for any options that are not applied directly to the
environment, and also not specified in a saved configuration, are loaded from configuration files in the .ebextensions folder at the root of the application source bundle.
Configuration files are executed in alphabetical order. For example,.ebextensions/01run.configis executed before.ebextensions/02do.config.
Default Values– If a configuration option has a default value, it only applies when the option is not set at any of the above levels.
If the same configuration option is defined in more than one location, the setting with the highest precedence is applied. When a setting is applied from a saved configuration or settings applied directly to the environment, the setting is stored as part of the environment's configuration. These settings can be removed with the AWS CLI or with the EB CLI
. Settings in configuration files are not applied
directly to the environment and cannot be removed without modifying the configuration files and deploying a new application version.If a setting applied with one of the other methods is removed, the same setting will be loaded from configuration files in the source bundle.
Q26: Which read request in DynamoDB returns a response with the most up-to-date data, reflecting the updates from all prior write operations that were successful?
A. Eventual Consistent Reads
B. Conditional reads for Consistency
C. Strongly Consistent Reads
D. Not possible
C. This is provided very clearly in the AWS documentation as shown below with regards to the read consistency for DynamoDB. Only in Strong Read consistency can you be guaranteed that you get the write read value after all the writes are completed.
Q27: You’ ve been asked to move an existing development environment on the AWS Cloud. This environment consists mainly of Docker based containers. You need to ensure that minimum effort is taken during the migration process. Which of the following step would you consider for this requirement?
A. Create an Opswork stack and deploy the Docker containers
B. Create an application and Environment for the Docker containers in the Elastic Beanstalk service
C. Create an EC2 Instance. Install Docker and deploy the necessary containers.
D. Create an EC2 Instance. Install Docker and deploy the necessary containers. Add an Autoscaling Group for scalability of the containers.
B. The Elastic Beanstalk service is the ideal service to quickly provision development environments. You can also create environments which can be used to host Docker based containers.
Q28: You’ve written an application that uploads objects onto an S3 bucket. The size of the object varies between 200 – 500 MB. You’ve seen that the application sometimes takes a longer than expected time to upload the object. You want to improve the performance of the application. Which of the following would you consider?
A. Create multiple threads and upload the objects in the multiple threads
B. Write the items in batches for better performance
C. Use the Multipart upload API
D. Enable versioning on the Bucket
C. All other options are invalid since the best way to handle large object uploads to the S3 service is to use the Multipart upload API. The Multipart upload API enables you to upload large objects in parts. You can use this API to upload new large objects or make a copy of an existing object. Multipart uploading is a three-step process: You initiate the upload, you upload the object parts, and after you have uploaded all the parts, you complete the multipart upload. Upon receiving the complete multipart upload request, Amazon S3 constructs the object from the uploaded parts, and you can then access the object just as you would any other object in your bucket.
Q29: A security system monitors 600 cameras, saving image metadata every 1 minute to an Amazon DynamoDb table. Each sample involves 1kb of data, and the data writes are evenly distributed over time. How much write throughput is required for the target table?
A. 6000
B. 10
C. 3600
D. 600
B. When you mention the write capacity of a table in Dynamo DB, you mention it as the number of 1KB writes per second. So in the above question, since the write is happening every minute, we need to divide the value of 600 by 60, to get the number of KB writes per second. This gives a value of 10.
You can specify the Write capacity in the Capacity tab of the DynamoDB table.
Q33: You have instances inside private subnets and a properly configured bastion host instance in a public subnet. None of the instances in the private subnets have a public or Elastic IP address. How can you connect an instance in the private subnet to the open internet to download system updates?
A. Create and assign EIP to each instance
B. Create and attach a second IGW to the VPC.
C. Create and utilize a NAT Gateway
D. Connect to a VPN
C. You can use a network address translation (NAT) gateway in a public subnet in your VPC to enable instances in the private subnet to initiate outbound traffic to the Internet, but prevent the instances from receiving inbound traffic initiated by someone on the Internet.
Reference: AWS Network Address Translation Gateway
Q34: What feature of VPC networking should you utilize if you want to create “elasticity” in your application’s architecture?
A. Security Groups
B. Route Tables
C. Elastic Load Balancer
D. Auto Scaling
D. Auto scaling is designed specifically with elasticity in mind. Auto scaling allows for the increase and decrease of compute power based on demand, thus creating elasticity in the architecture.
Reference: AWS Autoscalling
Q31: An organization is using an Amazon ElastiCache cluster in front of their Amazon RDS instance. The organization would like the Developer to implement logic into the code so that the cluster only retrieves data from RDS when there is a cache miss. What strategy can the Developer implement to achieve this?
A. Lazy loading
B. Write-through
C. Error retries
D. Exponential backoff
Answer:
Answer – A
Whenever your application requests data, it first makes the request to the ElastiCache cache. If the data exists in the cache and is current, ElastiCache returns the data to your application. If the data does not exist in the cache, or the data in the cache has expired, your application requests data from your data store which returns the data to your application. Your application then writes the data received from the store to the cache so it can be more quickly retrieved next time it is requested. All other options are incorrect.
Reference: Caching Strategies
Q32: A developer is writing an application that will run on Ec2 instances and read messages from SQS queue. The nessages will arrive every 15-60 seconds. How should the Developer efficiently query the queue for new messages?
A. Use long polling
B. Set a custom visibility timeout
C. Use short polling
D. Implement exponential backoff
Answer – A Long polling will help insure that the applications make less requests for messages in a shorter period of time. This is more cost effective. Since the messages are only going to be available after 15 seconds and we don't know exacly when they would be available, it is better to use Long Polling.
Reference: Amazon SQS Long Polling
Q33: You are using AWS SAM to define a Lambda function and configure CodeDeploy to manage deployment patterns. With new Lambda function working as per expectation which of the following will shift traffic from original Lambda function to new Lambda function in the shortest time frame?
A. Canary10Percent5Minutes
B. Linear10PercentEvery10Minutes
C. Canary10Percent15Minutes
D. Linear10PercentEvery1Minute
Answer – A
With Canary Deployment Preference type, Traffic is shifted in two intervals. With Canary10Percent5Minutes, 10 percent of traffic is shifted in the first interval while remaining all traffic is shifted after 5 minutes.
Reference: Gradual Code Deployment
Q34: You are using AWS SAM templates to deploy a serverless application. Which of the following resource will embed application from Amazon S3 buckets?
A. AWS::Serverless::Api
B. AWS::Serverless::Application
C. AWS::Serverless::Layerversion
D. AWS::Serverless::Function
Answer – B
AWS::Serverless::Application resource in AWS SAm template is used to embed application frm Amazon S3 buckets.
Reference: Declaring Serverless Resources
Q35: You are using AWS Envelope Encryption for encrypting all sensitive data. Which of the followings is True with regards to Envelope Encryption?
A. Data is encrypted be encrypting Data key which is further encrypted using encrypted Master Key.
B. Data is encrypted by plaintext Data key which is further encrypted using encrypted Master Key.
C. Data is encrypted by encrypted Data key which is further encrypted using plaintext Master Key.
D. Data is encrypted by plaintext Data key which is further encrypted using plaintext Master Key.
Answer – D
With Envelope Encryption, unencrypted data is encrypted using plaintext Data key. This Data is further encrypted using plaintext Master key. This plaintext Master key is securely stored in AWS KMS & known as Customer Master Keys.
Reference: AWS Key Management Service Concepts
Q36: You are developing an application that will be comprised of the following architecture –
A set of Ec2 instances to process the videos.
These (Ec2 instances) will be spun up by an autoscaling group.
SQS Queues to maintain the processing messages.
There will be 2 pricing tiers.
How will you ensure that the premium customers videos are given more preference?
A. Create 2 Autoscaling Groups, one for normal and one for premium customers
B. Create 2 set of Ec2 Instances, one for normal and one for premium customers
C. Create 2 SQS queus, one for normal and one for premium customers
D. Create 2 Elastic Load Balancers, one for normal and one for premium customers.
Answer – C
The ideal option would be to create 2 SQS queues. Messages can then be processed by the application from the high priority queue first.<br? The other options are not the ideal options. They would lead to extra costs and also extra maintenance.
Reference: SQS
Q37: You are developing an application that will interact with a DynamoDB table. The table is going to take in a lot of read and write operations. Which of the following would be the ideal partition key for the DynamoDB table to ensure ideal performance?
A. CustomerID
B. CustomerName
C. Location
D. Age
Answer- A
Use high-cardinality attributes. These are attributes that have distinct values for each item, like e-mailid, employee_no, customerid, sessionid, orderid, and so on..
Use composite attributes. Try to combine more than one attribute to form a unique key.
Reference: Choosing the right DynamoDB Partition Key
Q38: A developer is making use of AWS services to develop an application. He has been asked to develop the application in a manner to compensate any network delays. Which of the following two mechanisms should he implement in the application?
A. Multiple SQS queues
B. Exponential backoff algorithm
C. Retries in your application code
D. Consider using the Java sdk.
Answer- B. and C.
In addition to simple retries, each AWS SDK implements exponential backoff algorithm for better flow control. The idea behind exponential backoff is to use progressively longer waits between retries for consecutive error responses. You should implement a maximum delay interval, as well as a maximum number of retries. The maximum delay interval and maximum number of retries are not necessarily fixed values, and should be set based on the operation being performed, as well as other local factors, such as network latency.
Reference: Error Retries and Exponential Backoff in AWS
Q39: An application is being developed that is going to write data to a DynamoDB table. You have to setup the read and write throughput for the table. Data is going to be read at the rate of 300 items every 30 seconds. Each item is of size 6KB. The reads can be eventual consistent reads. What should be the read capacity that needs to be set on the table?
A. 10
B. 20
C. 6
D. 30
Answer – A
Since there are 300 items read every 30 seconds , that means there are (300/30) = 10 items read every second.
Since each item is 6KB in size , that means , 2 reads will be required for each item.
So we have total of 2*10 = 20 reads for the number of items per second
Since eventual consistency is required , we can divide the number of reads(20) by 2 , and in the end we get the Read Capacity of 10.
Q40: You are in charge of deploying an application that will be hosted on an EC2 Instance and sit behind an Elastic Load balancer. You have been requested to monitor the incoming connections to the Elastic Load Balancer. Which of the below options can suffice this requirement?
A. Use AWS CloudTrail with your load balancer
B. Enable access logs on the load balancer
C. Use a CloudWatch Logs Agent
D. Create a custom metric CloudWatch lter on your load balancer
Answer – B
Elastic Load Balancing provides access logs that capture detailed information about requests sent to your load balancer. Each log contains information such as the time the request was received, the client's IP address, latencies, request paths, and server responses. You can use these access logs to analyze traffic patterns and troubleshoot issues.
Reference: Access Logs for Your Application Load Balancer
Q41: A static web site has been hosted on a bucket and is now being accessed by users. One of the web pages javascript section has been changed to access data which is hosted in another S3 bucket. Now that same web page is no longer loading in the browser. Which of the following can help alleviate the error?
A. Enable versioning for the underlying S3 bucket.
B. Enable Replication so that the objects get replicated to the other bucket
C. Enable CORS for the bucket
D. Change the Bucket policy for the bucket to allow access from the other bucket
Answer – C
Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) defines a way for client web applications that are loaded in one domain to interact with resources in a different domain. With CORS support, you can build rich client-side web applications with Amazon S3 and selectively allow cross-origin access to your Amazon S3 resources.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing: Use-case Scenarios The following are example scenarios for using CORS:
Scenario 1: Suppose that you are hosting a website in an Amazon S3 bucket named website as described in Hosting a Static Website on Amazon S3. Your users load the website endpoint http://website.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com. Now you want to use JavaScript on the webpages that are stored in this bucket to be able to make authenticated GET and PUT requests against the same bucket by using the Amazon S3 API endpoint for the bucket, website.s3.amazonaws.com. A browser would normally block JavaScript from allowing those requests, but with CORS you can congure your bucket to explicitly enable cross-origin requests from website.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com.
Scenario 2: Suppose that you want to host a web font from your S3 bucket. Again, browsers require a CORS check (also called a preight check) for loading web fonts. You would congure the bucket that is hosting the web font to allow any origin to make these requests.
Q42: Your mobile application includes a photo-sharing service that is expecting tens of thousands of users at launch. You will leverage Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage of the user Images, and you must decide how to authenticate and authorize your users for access to these images. You also need to manage the storage of these images. Which two of the following approaches should you use? Choose two answers from the options below
A. Create an Amazon S3 bucket per user, and use your application to generate the S3 URL for the appropriate content.
B. Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user accounts as your application-level user database, and offload the burden of authentication from your application code.
C. Authenticate your users at the application level, and use AWS Security Token Service (STS)to grant token-based authorization to S3 objects.
D. Authenticate your users at the application level, and send an SMS token message to the user. Create an Amazon S3 bucket with the same name as the SMS message token, and move the user’s objects to that bucket.
Answer- C
The AWS Security Token Service (STS) is a web service that enables you to request temporary, limited-privilege credentials for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users or for users that you authenticate (federated users). The token can then be used to grant access to the objects in S3.
You can then provides access to the objects based on the key values generated via the user id.
Q43: Your current log analysis application takes more than four hours to generate a report of the top 10 users of your web application. You have been asked to implement a system that can report this information in real time, ensure that the report is always up to date, and handle increases in the number of requests to your web application. Choose the option that is cost-effective and can fulfill the requirements.
A. Publish your data to CloudWatch Logs, and congure your application to Autoscale to handle the load on demand.
B. Publish your log data to an Amazon S3 bucket. Use AWS CloudFormation to create an Auto Scaling group to scale your post-processing application which is congured to pull down your log les stored an Amazon S3
C. Post your log data to an Amazon Kinesis data stream, and subscribe your log-processing application so that is congured to process your logging data.
D. Create a multi-AZ Amazon RDS MySQL cluster, post the logging data to MySQL, and run a map reduce job to retrieve the required information on user counts.
Answer:
Answer – C
Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. Amazon Kinesis offers key capabilities to cost effectively process streaming data at any scale, along with the flexibility to choose the tools that best suit the requirements of your application. With Amazon Kinesis, you can ingest real-time data such as application logs, website clickstreams, IoT telemetry data, and more into your databases, data lakes and data warehouses, or build your own real-time applications using this data.
Reference: Amazon Kinesis
Q44: You’ve been instructed to develop a mobile application that will make use of AWS services. You need to decide on a data store to store the user sessions. Which of the following would be an ideal data store for session management?
A. AWS Simple Storage Service
B. AWS DynamoDB
C. AWS RDS
D. AWS Redshift
Answer:
Answer – B
DynamoDB is a alternative solution which can be used for storage of session management. The latency of access to data is less , hence this can be used as a data store for session management
Reference: Scalable Session Handling in PHP Using Amazon DynamoDB
Q45: Your application currently interacts with a DynamoDB table. Records are inserted into the table via the application. There is now a requirement to ensure that whenever items are updated in the DynamoDB primary table , another record is inserted into a secondary table. Which of the below feature should be used when developing such a solution?
A. AWS DynamoDB Encryption
B. AWS DynamoDB Streams
C. AWS DynamoDB Accelerator
D. AWSTable Accelerator
Answer – B
DynamoDB Streams Use Cases and Design Patterns This post describes some common use cases you might encounter, along with their design options and solutions, when migrating data from relational data stores to Amazon DynamoDB. We will consider how to manage the following scenarios:
How do you set up a relationship across multiple tables in which, based on the value of an item from one table, you update the item in a second table?
How do you trigger an event based on a particular transaction?
How do you audit or archive transactions?
How do you replicate data across multiple tables (similar to that of materialized views/streams/replication in relational data stores)?
Relational databases provide native support for transactions, triggers, auditing, and replication. Typically, a transaction in a database refers to performing create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations against multiple tables in a block. A transaction can have only two states—success or failure. In other words, there is no partial completion. As a NoSQL database, DynamoDB is not designed to support transactions. Although client-side libraries are available to mimic the transaction capabilities, they are not scalable and cost-effective. For example, the Java Transaction Library for DynamoDB creates 7N+4 additional writes for every write operation. This is partly because the library holds metadata to manage the transactions to ensure that it’s consistent and can be rolled back before commit. You can use DynamoDB Streams to address all these use cases. DynamoDB Streams is a powerful service that you can combine with other AWS services to solve many similar problems. When enabled, DynamoDB Streams captures a time-ordered sequence of item-level modifications in a DynamoDB table and durably stores the information for up to 24 hours. Applications can access a series of stream records, which contain an item change, from a DynamoDB stream in near real time. AWS maintains separate endpoints for DynamoDB and DynamoDB Streams. To work with database tables and indexes, your application must access a DynamoDB endpoint. To read and process DynamoDB Streams records, your application must access a DynamoDB Streams endpoint in the same Region. All of the other options are incorrect since none of these would meet the core requirement.
Reference: DynamoDB Streams Use Cases and Design Patterns
Q46: An application has been making use of AWS DynamoDB for its back-end data store. The size of the table has now grown to 20 GB , and the scans on the table are causing throttling errors. Which of the following should now be implemented to avoid such errors?
A. Large Page size
B. Reduced page size
C. Parallel Scans
D. Sequential scans
Answer – B
When you scan your table in Amazon DynamoDB, you should follow the DynamoDB best practices for avoiding sudden bursts of read activity. You can use the following technique to minimize the impact of a scan on a table's provisioned throughput. Reduce page size Because a Scan operation reads an entire page (by default, 1 MB), you can reduce the impact of the scan operation by setting a smaller page size. The Scan operation provides a Limit parameter that you can use to set the page size for your request. Each Query or Scan request that has a smaller page size uses fewer read operations and creates a “pause” between each request. For example, suppose that each item is 4 KB and you set the page size to 40 items. A Query request would then consume only 20 eventually consistent read operations or 40 strongly consistent read operations. A larger number of smaller Query or Scan operations would allow your other critical requests to succeed without throttling.
Reference1: Rate-Limited Scans in Amazon DynamoDB
Q47: Which of the following is correct way of passing a stage variable to an HTTP URL ? (Select TWO.)
A. http://example.com/${}/prod
B. http://example.com/${stageVariables.}/prod
C. http://${stageVariables.}.example.com/dev/operation
D. http://${stageVariables}.example.com/dev/operation
E. http://${}.example.com/dev/operation
F. http://example.com/${stageVariables}/prod
Answer – B. and C.
A stage variable can be used as part of HTTP integration URL as in following cases, · A full URI without protocol · A full domain · A subdomain · A path · A query string In the above case , option B & C displays stage variable as a path & sub-domain.
Reference: Amazon API Gateway Stage Variables Reference
Q48: Your company is planning on creating new development environments in AWS. They want to make use of their existing Chef recipes which they use for their on-premise configuration for servers in AWS. Which of the following service would be ideal to use in this regard?
A. AWS Elastic Beanstalk
B. AWS OpsWork
C. AWS Cloudformation
D. AWS SQS
Answer – B
AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet. Chef and Puppet are automation platforms that allow you to use code to automate the configurations of your servers. OpsWorks lets you use Chef and Puppet to automate how servers are configured, deployed, and managed across your Amazon EC2 instances or on-premises compute environments All other options are invalid since they cannot be used to work with Chef recipes for configuration management.
Reference: AWS OpsWorks
Q49: Your company has developed a web application and is hosting it in an Amazon S3 bucket configured for static website hosting. The users can log in to this app using their Google/Facebook login accounts. The application is using the AWS SDK for JavaScript in the browser to access data stored in an Amazon DynamoDB table. How can you ensure that API keys for access to your data in DynamoDB are kept secure?
A. Create an Amazon S3 role in IAM with access to the specific DynamoDB tables, and assign it to the bucket hosting your website
B. Configure S3 bucket tags with your AWS access keys for your bucket hosing your website so that the application can query them for access.
C. Configure a web identity federation role within IAM to enable access to the correct DynamoDB resources and retrieve temporary credentials
D. Store AWS keys in global variables within your application and configure the application to use these credentials when making requests.
Answer – C
With web identity federation, you don't need to create custom sign-in code or manage your own user identities. Instead, users of your app can sign in using a well-known identity provider (IdP) —such as Login with Amazon, Facebook, Google, or any other OpenID Connect (OIDC)-compatible IdP, receive an authentication token, and then exchange that token for temporary security credentials in AWS that map to an IAM role with permissions to use the resources in your AWS account. Using an IdP helps you keep your AWS account secure, because you don't have to embed and distribute long-term security credentials with your application. Option A is invalid since Roles cannot be assigned to S3 buckets Options B and D are invalid since the AWS Access keys should not be used
Reference: About Web Identity Federation
Q50: Your application currently makes use of AWS Cognito for managing user identities. You want to analyze the information that is stored in AWS Cognito for your application. Which of the following features of AWS Cognito should you use for this purpose?
A. Cognito Data
B. Cognito Events
C. Cognito Streams
D. Cognito Callbacks
Answer – C
Amazon Cognito Streams gives developers control and insight into their data stored in Amazon Cognito. Developers can now configure a Kinesis stream to receive events as data is updated and synchronized. Amazon Cognito can push each dataset change to a Kinesis stream you own in real time. All other options are invalid since you should use Cognito Streams
Reference:
Q51: You’ve developed a set of scripts using AWS Lambda. These scripts need to access EC2 Instances in a VPC. Which of the following needs to be done to ensure that the AWS Lambda function can access the resources in the VPC. Choose 2 answers from the options given below
A. Ensure that the subnet ID’s are mentioned when conguring the Lambda function
B. Ensure that the NACL ID’s are mentioned when conguring the Lambda function
C. Ensure that the Security Group ID’s are mentioned when conguring the Lambda function
D. Ensure that the VPC Flow Log ID’s are mentioned when conguring the Lambda function
Answer: A and C.
AWS Lambda runs your function code securely within a VPC by default. However, to enable your Lambda function to access resources inside your private VPC, you must provide additional VPCspecific configuration information that includes VPC subnet IDs and security group IDs. AWS Lambda uses this information to set up elastic network interfaces (ENIs) that enable your function to connect securely to other resources within your private VPC.
Reference: Configuring a Lambda Function to Access Resources in an Amazon VPC
Q52: You’ve currently been tasked to migrate an existing on-premise environment into Elastic Beanstalk. The application does not make use of Docker containers. You also can’t see any relevant environments in the beanstalk service that would be suitable to host your application. What should you consider doing in this case?
A. Migrate your application to using Docker containers and then migrate the app to the Elastic Beanstalk environment.
B. Consider using Cloudformation to deploy your environment to Elastic Beanstalk
C. Consider using Packer to create a custom platform
D. Consider deploying your application using the Elastic Container Service
Answer – C
Elastic Beanstalk supports custom platforms. A custom platform is a more advanced customization than a Custom Image in several ways. A custom platform lets you develop an entire new platform from scratch, customizing the operating system, additional software, and scripts that Elastic Beanstalk runs on platform instances. This flexibility allows you to build a platform for an application that uses a language or other infrastructure software, for which Elastic Beanstalk doesn't provide a platform out of the box. Compare that to custom images, where you modify an AMI for use with an existing Elastic Beanstalk platform, and Elastic Beanstalk still provides the platform scripts and controls the platform's software stack. In addition, with custom platforms you use an automated, scripted way to create and maintain your customization, whereas with custom images you make the changes manually over a running instance. To create a custom platform, you build an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from one of the supported operating systems—Ubuntu, RHEL, or Amazon Linux (see the flavor entry in Platform.yaml File Format for the exact version numbers)—and add further customizations. You create your own Elastic Beanstalk platform using Packer, which is an open-source tool for creating machine images for many platforms, including AMIs for use with Amazon EC2. An Elastic Beanstalk platform comprises an AMI configured to run a set of software that supports an application, and metadata that can include custom configuration options and default configuration option settings.
Reference: AWS Elastic Beanstalk Custom Platforms
Q53: Company B is writing 10 items to the Dynamo DB table every second. Each item is 15.5Kb in size. What would be the required provisioned write throughput for best performance? Choose the correct answer from the options below.
A. 10
B. 160
C. 155
D. 16
Answer – B.
Company B is writing 10 items to the Dynamo DB table every second. Each item is 15.5Kb in size. What would be the required provisioned write throughput for best performance? Choose the correct answer from the options below.
Reference: Read/Write Capacity Mode
Q57: Which of the following practices allows multiple developers working on the same application to merge code changes frequently, without impacting each other and enables the identification of bugs early on in the release process?
Q60: You want to receive an email whenever a user pushes code to CodeCommit repository, how can you configure this?
A. Create a new SNS topic and configure it to poll for CodeCommit eveents. Ask all users to subscribe to the topic to receive notifications
B. Configure a CloudWatch Events rule to send a message to SES which will trigger an email to be sent whenever a user pushes code to the repository.
C. Configure Notifications in the console, this will create a CloudWatch events rule to send a notification to a SNS topic which will trigger an email to be sent to the user.
D. Configure a CloudWatch Events rule to send a message to SQS which will trigger an email to be sent whenever a user pushes code to the repository.
Q63: You are deploying a number of EC2 and RDS instances using CloudFormation. Which section of the CloudFormation template would you use to define these?
A. Transforms
B. Outputs
C. Resources
D. Instances
Answer: C.
The Resources section defines your resources you are provisioning. Outputs is used to output user defines data relating to the reources you have built and can also used as input to another CloudFormation stack. Transforms is used to reference code located in S3.
Reference: Resources
Q64: Which AWS service can be used to fully automate your entire release process?
A. CodeDeploy
B. CodePipeline
C. CodeCommit
D. CodeBuild
Answer: B.
AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates
Q65: You want to use the output of your CloudFormation stack as input to another CloudFormation stack. Which sections of the CloudFormation template would you use to help you configure this?
A. Outputs
B. Transforms
C. Resources
D. Exports
Answer: A.
Outputs is used to output user defines data relating to the reources you have built and can also used as input to another CloudFormation stack.
Reference: CloudFormation Outputs
Q66: You have some code located in an S3 bucket that you want to reference in your CloudFormation template. Which section of the template can you use to define this?
A. Inputs
B. Resources
C. Transforms
D. Files
Answer: C.
Transforms is used to reference code located in S3 and also specififying the use of the Serverless Application Model (SAM) for Lambda deployments.
Reference: Transforms
Q67: You are deploying an application to a number of Ec2 instances using CodeDeploy. What is the name of the file
used to specify source files and lifecycle hooks?
Q68: Which of the following approaches allows you to re-use pieces of CloudFormation code in multiple templates, for common use cases like provisioning a load balancer or web server?
A. Share the code using an EBS volume
B. Copy and paste the code into the template each time you need to use it
C. Use a cloudformation nested stack
D. Store the code you want to re-use in an AMI and reference the AMI from within your CloudFormation template.
Q72: Which of the following is an encrypted key used by KMS to encrypt your data
A. Custmoer Mamaged Key
B. Encryption Key
C. Envelope Key
D. Customer Master Key
Answer: C.
Your Data key also known as the Enveloppe key is encrypted using the master key.This approach is known as Envelope encryption.
Envelope encryption is the practice of encrypting plaintext data with a data key, and then encrypting the data key under another key.
AWS has provided whitepapers to help you understand the technical concepts. Below are the recommended whitepapers for the AWS Certified Developer – Associate Exam.
The AWS Certified Developer-Associate Examination (DVA-C01) is a pass or fail exam. The examination is scored against a minimum standard established by AWS professionals guided by certification industry best practices and guidelines.
Your results for the examination are reported as a score from 100 – 1000, with a minimum passing score of 720.
Domain 1: Deployment (22%)
1.1 Deploy written code in AWS using existing CI/CD pipelines, processes, and patterns.
1.2 Deploy applications using Elastic Beanstalk.
1.3 Prepare the application deployment package to be deployed to AWS.
1.4 Deploy serverless applications
22%
Domain 2: Security (26%)
2.1 Make authenticated calls to AWS services.
2.2 Implement encryption using AWS services.
2.3 Implement application authentication and authorization.
26%
Domain 3: Development with AWS Services (30%)
3.1 Write code for serverless applications.
3.2 Translate functional requirements into application design.
3.3 Implement application design into application code.
3.4 Write code that interacts with AWS services by using APIs, SDKs, and AWS CLI.
30%
Domain 4: Refactoring
4.1 Optimize application to best use AWS services and features.
4.2 Migrate existing application code to run on AWS.
10%
Domain 5: Monitoring and Troubleshooting (10%)
5.1 Write code that can be monitored.
5.2 Perform root cause analysis on faults found in testing or production.
What is the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam?
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam (CLF-C01) is an introduction to AWS services and the intention is to examine the candidates ability to define what the AWS cloud is and its global infrastructure. It provides an overview of AWS core services security aspects, pricing and support services. The main objective is to provide an overall understanding about the Amazon Web Services Cloud platform. The course helps you get the conceptual understanding of the AWS and can help you know about the basics of AWS and cloud computing, including the services, cases and benefits.
To succeed with the real exam, do not memorize the answers below. It is very important that you understand why a question is right or wrong and the concepts behind it by carefully reading the reference documents in the answers.
AWS Certification Exams Roadmap[/caption]
