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.
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.
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
What is the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam?
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam 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 cloud practitioner practice questions and answers
aws cloud practitioner practice exam questions and references
For auditing purposes, your company now wants to monitor all API activity for all regions in your AWS environment. What can you use to fulfill this new requirement?
A. For each region, enable CloudTrail and send all logs to a bucket in each region.
B. Enable CloudTrail for all regions.
C. Ensure one CloudTrail is enabled for all regions.
D. Use AWS Config to enable the trail for all regions.
Answer:
C. Ensure one CloudTrail is enabled for all regions.
Turn on CloudTrail for all regions in your environment and CloudTrail will deliver log files from all regions to one S3 bucket.
AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.
What is the best solution to provide secure access to an S3 bucket not using the internet?
A. Use a VPN connection.
B. Use an Internet Gateway.
C. Use a VPC Endpoint to access S3.
D. Use a NAT Gateway.
Answer:
C. Use a VPC Endpoint to access S3.
A VPC endpoint enables you to privately connect your VPC to supported AWS services and VPC endpoint services powered by PrivateLink without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection. Instances in your VPC do not require public IP addresses to communicate with resources in the service. Traffic between your VPC and the other service does not leave the Amazon network.
AWS PrivateLink simplifies the security of data shared with cloud-based applications by eliminating the exposure of data to the public Internet.
A. and D.
It is AWS responsibility to secure Edge locations and decommission the data.
AWS responsibility “Security of the Cloud” – AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the AWS Cloud. This infrastructure is composed of the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS Cloud services.
You have EC2 instances running at 90% utilization and you expect this to continue for at least a year. What type of EC2 instance would you choose to ensure your cost stay at a minimum?
A. Dedicated host instances
B. On-demand instances
C. Spot instances
D. Reserved instances
Answer:
D. Reserved instances:
Reserved instances are the best choice for instances with continuous usage and offer a reduced cost because you purchase the instance for the entire year.
Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RI) provide a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand pricing and provide a capacity reservation when used in a specific Availability Zone.
What tool would you use to get an estimated monthly cost for your environment?
A. TCO Calculator
B. Simply Monthly Calculator
C. Cost Explorer
D. Consolidated Billing
Answer:
B. Simply Monthly Calculator:
The AWS Simple Monthly Calculator helps customers and prospects estimate their monthly AWS bill more efficiently. Using this tool, they can add, modify and remove services from their ‘bill’ and it will recalculate their estimated monthly charges automatically.
How do you make sure your organization does not exceed its monthly budget?
A. Sign up for the free alert under filing preferences in the AWS Management Console.
B. Set a schedule to regularly review the Billing an Cost Management dashboard each month.
C. Create an email alert in AWS Budget
D. In CloudWatch, create an alarm that triggers each time the limit is exceeded.
Answer:
C. Create an email alert in AWS Budget.
AWS Budgets gives you the ability to set custom budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount.
You can also use AWS Budgets to set reservation utilization or coverage targets and receive alerts when your utilization drops below the threshold you define. Reservation alerts are supported for Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Elasticsearch reservations.
An Edge Location is a specialization AWS data centre that works with which services?
A. Lambda
B. CloudWatch
C. CloudFront
D. Route 53
Answer:
A. C. D. : Lambda, CloudFront and Route 53
Lambda@Edge lets you run Lambda functions to customize the content that CloudFront delivers, executing the functions in AWS locations closer to the viewer.
Amazon CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js, and image files, to your users. CloudFront delivers your content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations. When a user requests content that you’re serving with CloudFront, the user is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency (time delay), so that content is delivered with the best possible performance.
CloudFront speeds up the distribution of your content by routing each user request through the AWS backbone network to the edge location that can best serve your content. Typically, this is a CloudFront edge server that provides the fastest delivery to the viewer. Using the AWS network dramatically reduces the number of networks that your users’ requests must pass through, which improves performance. Users get lower latency—the time it takes to load the first byte of the file—and higher data transfer rates.
You also get increased reliability and availability because copies of your files (also known as objects) are now held (or cached) in multiple edge locations around the world.
What is the preferred method of linking 2 AWS accounts?
A. AWS Organizations
B. Cost Explorer
C. VPC Peering
D. Consolidated billing
Answer:
A. AWS Organizations
AWS Organizations is an account management service that enables you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organization that you create and centrally manage. AWSOrganizations includes account management and consolidated billing capabilities that enable you to better meet the budgetary, security, and compliance needs of your business.
Which of the following service is most useful when a Disaster Recovery method is triggered in AWS.
A. Amazon Route 53
B. Amazon SNS
C. Amazon SQS
D. Amazon Inspector
Answer:
A. Route 53 is a domain name system service by AWS. When a Disaster does occur , it can be easy to switch to secondary sites using the Route53 service.
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that
computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.
Which of the following disaster recovery deployment mechanisms that has the highest downtime
A. Pilot light
B. Warm standby
C. Multi Site
D. Backup and Restore
Answer:
D. The below snapshot from the AWS Documentation shows the spectrum of the Disaster recovery methods. If you go to the further end of the spectrum you have the least time for downtime for the users.
Your company is planning to host resources in the AWS Cloud. They want to use services which can be used to decouple resources hosted on the cloud. Which of the following services can help fulfil this requirement?
A. AWS EBS Volumes
B. AWS EBS Snapshots
C. AWS Glacier
D. AWS SQS
Answer:
D. AWS SQS: Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly-scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between applications or microservices. It moves data between distributed application components and helps you decouple these components.
What is the availability and durability rating of S3 Standard Storage Class?
Choose the correct answer:
A. 99.999999999% Durability and 99.99% Availability
B. 99.999999999% Availability and 99.90% Durability
C. 99.999999999% Durability and 99.00% Availability
D. 99.999999999% Availability and 99.99% Durability
Answer:
A. 99.999999999% Durability and 99.99% Availability
S3 Standard Storage class has a rating of 99.999999999% durability (referred to as 11 nines) and 99.99% availability.
What AWS database is primarily used to analyze data using standard SQL formatting with compatibility for your existing business intelligence tools
A. Redshift
B. RDS
C. DynamoDB
D. ElastiCache
Answer:
A. Redshift is a database offering that is fully-managed and used for data warehousing and analytics, including compatibility with existing business intelligence tools.
Which of the following are the benefits of AWS Organizations?
Choose the 2 correct answers:
A. Analyze cost before migrating to AWS.
B. Centrally manage access polices across multiple AWS accounts.
C. Automate AWS account creation and management.
D. Provide technical help (by AWS) for issues in your AWS account.
Answer:
B. and C.:
CENTRALLY MANAGE POLICIES ACROSS MULTIPLE AWS ACCOUNTS
AUTOMATE AWS ACCOUNT CREATION AND MANAGEMENT
CONTROL ACCESS TO AWS SERVICES
CONSOLIDATE BILLING ACROSS MULTIPLE AWS ACCOUNTS
There is a requirement hosting a set of servers in the Cloud for a short period of 3 months. Which of the following types of instances should be chosen to be cost effective.
A. Spot Instances
B. On-Demand
C. No Upfront costs Reserved
D. Partial Upfront costs Reserved
Answer:
B. Since the requirement is just for 3 months, then the best cost effective option is to use On-Demand Instances.
What service helps you to aggregate logs from your EC2 instance? Choose one answer from the options below:
A. SQS
B. S3
C. Cloudtrail
D. Cloudwatch Logs
Answer:
D. You can use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to monitor, store, and access your log files from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, AWS CloudTrail, and other sources. You can then retrieve the associated log data from CloudWatch Log.
A company is deploying a new two-tier web application in AWS. The company wants to store their most frequently used data so that the response time for the application is improved. Which AWS service provides the solution for the company’s requirements?
A. MySQL Installed on two Amazon EC2 Instances in a single Availability Zone
B. Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ
C. Amazon ElastiCache
D. Amazon DynamoDB
Answer:
C. Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory data store or cache in the cloud. The service improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory data stores, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases.
You have a distributed application that periodically processes large volumes of data across multiple Amazon EC2 Instances. The application is designed to recover gracefully from Amazon EC2 instance failures. You are required to accomplish this task in the most cost-effective way. Which of the following will meet your requirements?
A. Spot Instances
B. Reserved Instances
C. Dedicated Instances
On-Demand Instances
Answer:
A. When you think of cost effectiveness, you can either have to choose Spot or Reserved instances. Now when you have a regular processing job, the best is to use spot instances and since your application is designed recover gracefully from Amazon EC2 instance failures, then even if you lose the Spot instance , there is no issue because your application can recover.
Which of the following features is associated with a Subnet in a VPC to protect against Incoming traffic requests?
A. AWS Inspector
B. Subnet Groups
C. Security Groups
D. NACL
Answer:
D. A network access control list (ACL) is an optional layer of security for your VPC that acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets. You might set up network ACLs with rules similar to your security groups in order to add an additional layer of security to your VPC.
A company is deploying a two-tier, highly available web application to AWS. Which service provides durable storage for static content while utilizing Overall CPU resources for the web tier?
A. Amazon EBC volume.
B. Amazon S3
C. Amazon EC2 instance store
D. Amazon RDS instance
Answer:
B. Amazon S3 is the default storage service that should be considered for companies. It provides durable storage for all static content.
What are characteristics of Amazon S3? Choose 2 answers from the options given below.
A. S3 allows you to store objects of virtually unlimited size.
B. S3 allows you to store unlimited amounts of data.
C. S3 should be used to host relational database.
D. Objects are directly accessible via a URL.
Answer:
B. and D.: Each object does have a limitation in S3, but you can store virtually unlimited amounts of data. Also each object gets a directly accessible URL
When working on the costing for on-demand EC2 instances , which are the following are attributes which determine the costing of the EC2 Instance. Choose 3 answers from the options given below
A. Instance Type
B. AMI Type
C. Region
D. Edge location
Answer:
A. B. C. : See components making up the pricing below.
You have a mission-critical application which must be globally available at all times. If this is the case, which of the below deployment mechanisms would you employ
A. Deployment to multiple edge locations
B. Deployment to multiple Availability Zones
D. Deployment to multiple Data Centers
D. Deployment to multiple Regions
Answer:
D. Regions represent different geographic locations and it is best to host your application across multiple regions for disaster recovery.
Which of the following are right principles when designing cloud based systems. Choose 2 answers from the options below
A. Build Tightly-coupled components
B. Build loosely-coupled components
C. Assume everything will fail
D. Use as many services as possible
Answer:
B. and C. Always build components which are loosely coupled. This is so that even if one component does fail, the entire system does not fail. Also if you build with the assumption that everything will fail, then you will ensure that the right measures are taken to build a highly available and fault tolerant system.
You have 2 accounts in your AWS account. One for the Dev and the other for QA. All are part of consolidated billing. The master account has purchase 3 reserved instances. The Dev department is currently using 2 reserved instances. The QA team is planning on using 3 instances which of the same instance type. What is the pricing tier of the instances that can be used by the QA Team?
A. No Reserved and 3 on-demand
B. One Reserved and 2 on-demand
C. Two Reserved and 1 on-demand
D. Three Reserved and no on-demand
Answer:
B. Since all are a part of consolidating billing, the pricing of reserved instances can be shared by All. And since 2 are already used by the Dev team , another one can be used by the QA team. The rest of the instances can be on-demand instances.
Which of the following storage mechanisms can be used to store messages effectively which can be used across distributed systems?
A. Amazon Glacier
B. Amazon EBS Volumes
C. Amazon EBS Snapshots
D. Amazon SQS
Answer:
D. Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly-scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between applications or microservices. It moves data between distributed application components and helps you decouple these components.
You are exploring what services AWS has off-hand. You have a large number of data sets that need to be processed. Which of the following services can help fulfil this requirement.
A. EMR
B. S3
C. Glacier
D. Storage Gateway
Answer:
A. Amazon EMR helps you analyze and process vast amounts of data by distributing the computational work across a cluster of virtual servers running in the AWS Cloud. The cluster is managed using an open-source framework called Hadoop. Amazon EMR lets you focus on crunching or analyzing your data without having to worry about time-consuming setup, management, and tuning of Hadoop clusters or the compute capacity they rely on.
Which of the following services allows you to analyze EC2 Instances against pre-defined security templates to check for vulnerabilities
A. AWS Trusted Advisor
B. AWS Inspector
C. AWS WAF
D. AWS Shield
Answer:
B. Amazon Inspector enables you to analyze the behaviour of your AWS resources and helps you to identify potential security issues. Using Amazon Inspector, you can define a collection of AWS resources that you want to include in an assessment target. You can then create an assessment template and launch a security assessment run of this target.
Your company is planning to offload some of the batch processing workloads on to AWS. These jobs can be interrupted and resumed at any time. Which of the following instance types would be the most cost effective to use for this purpose.
A. On-Demand
B. Spot
C. Full Upfront Reserved
D. Partial Upfront Reserved
Answer:
B. Spot Instances are a cost-effective choice if you can be flexible about when your applications run and if your applications can be interrupted. For example, Spot Instances are well-suited for data analysis, batch jobs, background processing, and optional tasks
Which of the below cannot be used to get data onto Amazon Glacier.
A. AWS Glacier API
B. AWS Console
C. AWS Glacier SDK
D. AWS S3 Lifecycle policies
Answer:
B. Note that the AWS Console cannot be used to upload data onto Glacier. The console can only be used to create a Glacier vault which can be used to upload the data.
Which of the following from AWS can be used to transfer petabytes of data from on-premise locations to the AWS Cloud.
A. AWS Import/Export
B. AWS EC2
C. AWS Snowball
D. AWS Transfer
Answer:
C. Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data& into and out of the AWS cloud. Using Snowball addresses common challenges with large-scale data transfers including high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns. Transferring data with Snowball is simple, fast, secure, and can be as little as one-fifth the cost of high-speed Internet.
Which of the following services allows you to analyze EC2 Instances against pre-defined security templates to check for vulnerabilities
A. AWS Trusted Advisor
B. AWS Inspector
C. AWS WAF
D. AWS Shield
Answer:
B. Amazon Inspector enables you to analyze the behavior of your AWS resources and helps you to identify potential security issues. Using Amazon Inspector, you can define a collection of AWS resources that you want to include in an assessment target. You can then create an assessment template and launch a security assessment run of this target.
Your company wants to move an existing Oracle database to the AWS Cloud. Which of the following services can help facilitate this move.
A. AWS Database Migration Service
B. AWS VM Migration Service
C. AWS Inspector
D. AWS Trusted Advisor
Answer:
A. 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.
Which of the following features of AWS RDS allows for offloading reads of the database.
A. Cross region replication
B. Creating Read Replica’s
C. Using snapshots
D. Using Multi-AZ feature
Answer:
B. You can reduce the load on your source DB Instance by routing read queries from your applications to the read replica. Read replicas allow you to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads.
Which of the following does AWS perform on its behalf for EBS volumes to make it less prone to failure?
A. Replication of the volume across Availability Zones
B. Replication of the volume in the same Availability Zone
C. Replication of the volume across Regions
D. Replication of the volume across Edge locations
Answer:
B. When you create an EBS volume in an Availability Zone, it is automatically replicated within that zone to prevent data loss due to failure of any single hardware component
Your company is planning to host a large e-commerce application on the AWS Cloud. One of their major concerns is Internet attacks such as DDos attacks. Which of the following services can help mitigate this concern. Choose 2 answers from the options given below
A. A. Cloudfront
B. AWS Shield
C. C. AWS EC2
D. AWS Config
Answer:
A. and B. : One of the first techniques to mitigate DDoS attacks is to minimize the surface area that can be attacked thereby limiting the options for attackers and allowing you to build protections in a single place. We want to ensure that we do not expose our application or resources to ports, protocols or applications from where they do not expect any communication. Thus, minimizing the possible points of attack and letting us concentrate our mitigation efforts. In some cases, you can do this by placing your computation resources behind Content Distribution
Networks (CDNs), Load Balancers and restricting direct Internet traffic to certain parts of your infrastructure
like your database servers. In other cases, you can use firewalls or Access Control Lists (ACLs) to control what traffic reaches your applications.
Which of the following are 2 ways that AWS allows to link accounts
A. Consolidating billing
B. AWS Organizations
C. Cost Explorer
D. IAM
Answer:
A. and B. : You can use the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations to consolidate payment for multiple AWS accounts or multiple AISPL accounts. With consolidated billing, you can see a combined view of AWS charges incurred by all of your accounts. You also can get a cost report for each member account that is associated with your master account. Consolidated billing is offered at no additional charge.
Which of the following helps in DDos protection. Choose 2 answers from the options given below
A. Cloudfront
B. AWS Shield
C. AWS EC2
D. AWS Config
Answer:
A. and B. : One of the first techniques to mitigate DDoS attacks is to minimize the surface area that can be attacked thereby limiting the options for attackers and allowing you to build protections in a single place. We want to ensure that we do not expose our application or resources to ports, protocols or applications from where they do not expect any communication. Thus, minimizing the possible points of attack and letting us concentrate our mitigation efforts. In some cases, you can do this by placing your computation resources behind; Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), Load Balancers and restricting direct Internet traffic to certain parts of your infrastructure like your database servers. In other cases, you can use firewalls or Access Control Lists (ACLs) to control what traffic reaches your applications.
A company wants to host a self-managed database in AWS. How would you ideally implement this solution?
A. Using the AWS DynamoDB service
B. Using the AWS RDS service
C. Hosting a database on an EC2 Instance
D. Using the Amazon Aurora service
Answer:
C. If you want a self-managed database, that means you want complete control over the database engine and the underlying infrastructure. In such a case you need to host the database on an EC2 Instance
There is a requirement to host a database server for a minimum period of one year. Which of the following would result in the least cost?
A. Spot Instances
B. On-Demand
C. No Upfront costs Reserved
D. Partial Upfront costs Reserved
Answer:
D. : If the database is going to be used for a minimum of one year at least , then it is better to get Reserved Instances. You can save on costs , and if you use a partial upfront options , you can get a better discount
which of the below can be used to import data into Amazon Glacier? Choose 3 answers from the options given below:
A. AWS Glacier API
B. AWS Console
C. AWS Glacier SDK
D. AWS S3 Lifecycle policies
Answer:
A. C. and D. : The AWS Console cannot be used to upload data onto Glacier. The console can only be used to create a Glacier vault which can be used to upload the data.
Which of the following can be used to secure EC2 Instances hosted in AWS. Choose 2 answers
A. Usage of Security Groups
B. Usage of AMI’s
C. Usage of Network Access Control Lists
D. Usage of the Internet gateway
Answer:
A and C: Security groups acts as a virtual firewall for your instance to control inbound and outbound traffic. Network access control list (ACL) is an optional layer of security for your VPC that acts as a firewall for
controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets.
You plan to deploy an application on AWS. This application needs to be PCI Compliant. Which of the below steps are needed to ensure the compliance? Choose 2 answers from the below list:
A. Choose AWS services which are PCI Compliant
B. Ensure the right steps are taken during application development for PCI Compliance
C. Encure the AWS Services are made PCI Compliant
D. Do an audit after the deployment of the application for PCI Compliance.
Question: Which of the following is a factor when calculating Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the AWS Cloud?
A. The number of servers migrated to AWS
B. The number of users migrated to AWS
C. The number of passwords migrated to AWS
D. The number of keys migrated to AWS
Answer:
A. Running servers will incur costs. The number of running servers is one factor of Server Costs; a key component of AWS’s Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Reference: AWS cost calculator
Which AWS Services can be used to store files? Choose 2 answers from the options given below:
A. Amazon CloudWatch
B. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
C. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
D. AWS COnfig
D. AWS Amazon Athena
Answer:
B. and C. Amazon S3 is a Object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. Amazon Elastic Block Store is a Persistent block storage for Amazon EC2.
Question: What best describes Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
Choose the correct answer:
A. AWS is the cloud.
B. AWS only provides compute and storage services.
C. AWS is a cloud services provider.
D. None of the above.
Answer:
C: AWS is defined as a cloud services provider. They provide hundreds of services of which compute and storage are included (not not limited to).
Reference: AWS
Question: Which AWS service can be used as a global content delivery network (CDN) service?
A. Amazon SES
B. Amazon CouldTrail
C. Amazon CloudFront
D. Amazon S3
Answer:
C: Amazon CloudFront is a web service that gives businesses and web application developers an easy
and cost effective way to distribute content with low latency and high data transfer speeds. Like other AWS services, Amazon CloudFront is a self-service, pay-per-use offering, requiring no long term commitments or minimum fees. With CloudFront, your files are delivered to end-users using a global network of edge locations.Reference: AWS cloudfront
What best describes the concept of fault tolerance?
Choose the correct answer:
A. The ability for a system to withstand a certain amount of failure and still remain functional.
B. The ability for a system to grow in size, capacity, and/or scope.
C. The ability for a system to be accessible when you attempt to access it.
D. The ability for a system to grow and shrink based on demand.
Answer:
A: Fault tolerance describes the concept of a system (in our case a web application) to have failure in some of its components and still remain accessible (highly available). Fault tolerant web applications will have at least two web servers (in case one fails).
Question: The firm you work for is considering migrating to AWS. They are concerned about cost and the initial investment needed. Which of the following features of AWS pricing helps lower the initial investment amount needed? Choose 2 answers from the options given below:
A. The ability to choose the lowest cost vendor.
B. The ability to pay as you go
C. No upfront costs
D. Discounts for upfront payments
Answer:
B and C: The best features of moving to the AWS Cloud is: No upfront cost and The ability to pay as you go where the customer only pays for the resources needed. Reference: AWS pricing
Question: Your company has
started using AWS. Your IT Security team is concerned with the
security of hosting resources in the Cloud. Which AWS service provides security optimization recommendations that could help the IT Security team secure resources using AWS?
A. AWS API Gateway
B. Reserved Instances
C. AWS Trusted Advisor
D. AWS Spot Instances
Answer:
C: An online resource to help you reduce cost, increase performance, and improve security by optimizing your AWS environment, Trusted Advisor provides real time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. Reference: AWS trusted advisor
What is the relationship between AWS global infrastructure and the concept of high availability?
Choose the correct answer:
A. AWS is centrally located in one location and is subject to widespread outages if something happens at that one location.
B. AWS regions and Availability Zones allow for redundant architecture to be placed in isolated parts of the world.
C. Each AWS region handles a different AWS services, and you must use all regions to fully use AWS.
D. None of the above
Answer
B: As an AWS user, you can create your applications infrastructure and duplicate it. By placing duplicate infrastructure in multiple regions, high availability is created because if one region fails you have a backup (in a another region) to use.
Question: You are hosting a number of EC2 Instances on AWS. You are looking to monitor CPU Utilization on the Instance. Which service would you use to collect and track performance metrics for AWS services?
C: Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources. Reference: AWS cloudwatch/
Question: Which of the following support plans give access to all the checks in the Trusted Advisor service. Choose 2 answers from the options given below:
Question: Which of the following in AWS maps to a separate geographic location?
A. AWS Region
B. AWS Data Centers
C. AWS Availability Zone
Answer:
A: Amazon cloud computing resources are hosted in multiple locations world-wide. These locations are composed of AWS Regions and Availability Zones. Each AWS Region is a separate geographic area. Reference: AWS Regions And Availability Zone
A. The ability for a system to grow and shrink based on demand.
B. The ability for a system to grow in size, capacity, and/or scope.
C. The ability for a system be be accessible when you attempt to access it.
D. The ability for a system to withstand a certain amount of failure and still remain functional.
Answer
B: Scalability refers to the concept of a system being able to easily (and cost-effectively) scale UP. For web applications, this means the ability to easily add server capacity when demand requires.
Question: If you wanted to monitor all events in your AWS account, which of the below services would you use?
A. AWS CloudWatch
B. AWS CloudWatch logs
C. AWS Config
D. AWS CloudTrail
Answer:
D: AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk
auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting. Reference: Cloudtrail
What are the four primary benefits of using the cloud/AWS?
Choose the correct answer:
A. Fault tolerance, scalability, elasticity, and high availability.
B. Elasticity, scalability, easy access, limited storage.
C. Fault tolerance, scalability, sometimes available, unlimited storage
D. Unlimited storage, limited compute capacity, fault tolerance, and high availability.
Answer:
A: Fault tolerance, scalability, elasticity, and high availability are the four primary benefits of AWS/the cloud.
What best describes a simplified definition of the “cloud”?
Choose the correct answer:
A. All the computers in your local home network.
B. Your internet service provider
C. A computer located somewhere else that you are utilizing in some capacity.
D. An on-premise data center that your company owns.
Answer
D: The simplest definition of the cloud is a computer that is located somewhere else that you are utilizing in some capacity. AWS is a cloud services provider, as the provide access to computers they own (located at AWS data centers), that you use for various purposes.
Question: Your development team is planning to host a development environment on the cloud. This consists of EC2 and RDS instances. This environment will probably only be required for 2 months. Which types of instances would you use for this purpose?
A. On-Demand
B. Spot
C. Reserved
D. Dedicated
Answer:
A: The best and cost effective option would be to use On-Demand Instances. The AWS documentation gives the following additional information on On-Demand EC2 Instances. With On-Demand instances you only pay for
EC2 instances you use. The use of On-Demand instances frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. Reference: AWS ec2 pricing on-demand
Question: Which of the following can be used to secure EC2 Instances?
A. Security Groups
B. EC2 Lists
C. AWS Configs
D. AWS CloudWatch
Answer:
A: security group< acts as a virtual firewall for your instance to control inbound and outbound traffic. When you launch an instance in a VPC, you can assign up to five security groups to the instance. Security groups act at the instance level, not the subnet level. Therefore, each instance in a subnet in your VPC could be assigned to a different set of security groups. If you don’t specify a particular group at launch time, the instance is automatically assigned to the default security group for the VPC. Reference: VPC Security Groups
Exam Topics:
The AWS Cloud Practitioner exam is broken down into 4 domains
Cloud Concepts
Security
Technology
Billing and Pricing.
What is the purpose of a DNS server?
Choose the correct answer:
A. To act as an internet search engine.
B. To protect you from hacking attacks.
C. To convert common language domain names to IP addresses.
D. To serve web application content.
Answer:
C: Domain name system servers act as a “third party” that provides the service of converting common language domain names to IP addresses (which are required for a web browser to properly make a request for web content).
What best describes the concept of high availability?
Choose the correct answer:
A. The ability for a system to grow in size, capacity, and/or scope.
B. The ability for a system to withstand a certain amount of failure and still remain functional.
C. The ability for a system to grow and shrink based on demand.
D. The ability for a system to be accessible when you attempt to access it.
Answer:
D: High availability refers to the concept that something will be accessible when you try to access it. An object or web application is “highly available” when it is accessible a vast majority of the time.
What is the major difference between AWS’s RDS and DynamoDB database services?
Choose the correct answer:
A. RDS offers NoSQL database options, and DynamoDB offers SQL database options.
B. RDS offers one SQL database option, and DynamoDB offers many NoSQL database options.
C. RDS offers SQL database options, and DynamoDB offers a NoSQL database option.
D. None of the above
Answer:
C. RDS is a SQL database service (that offers several database engine options), and DynamoDB is a NoSQL database option that only offers one NoSQL engine.
Reference:
What are two open source in-memory engines supported by ElastiCache?
If you want to have SMS or email notifications sent to various members of your department with status updates on resources in your AWS account, what service should you choose?
Choose the correct answer:
A. SNS
B. GetSMS
C. RDS
D. STS
Answer:
A. Simple Notification Service (SNS) is what publishes messages to SMS and/or email endpoints.
Office 365 suite is an alternative, with similar features.
For about $79 per year (or $6.99 per month), Office 365 Personal will allow a customer to install and use Microsoft Office on one Windows or Mac PC, plus one tablet. It also includes all of the other benefits of Office 365, including 20 GB of additional OneDrive cloud storage and 60 minutes per month of Skype calls. Office 365 Suite Features and plans. To get a professional email with Office 365, you need to get your domain name from a domain provider like DjamgaWeb or Godaddy.
LibreOpenOffice:
LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite, a project of The Document Foundation. LibreOffice suite comprises programs for word processing, the creation and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 110 languages.
Apache Open Office:
is an open-source office productivity software suite. It is one of the successor projects of OpenOffice.org and the designated successor of IBM Lotus Symphony.[5] It is a close cousin of LibreOffice and NeoOffice.
It contains a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation application (Impress), a drawing application (Draw), a formula editor (Math), and a database management application (Base).
I currently use both G suite and Office 365 and from my personal experience G suite is far superior in design, simplicity and usability.
Office 365 interface is heavy and confusing and opens several tabs on the browser.
G suite interface is Gmail like, smooth.
The question is why G suite?
Gives you a professional custom email (you@yourcompany.com (mailto:you@yourcompany.com))
Allows you to access documents in the cloud with over 30GB of storage
Helps you work faster from anywhere and from any device
