Chapter 1 Quiz: Intro to Cloud Computing

Pedro is looking for internal and external clues as to what may be causing a problem that has been reported via their ticketing system. Which of the following steps is he currently on from the troubleshooting model?

Establish a theory of probable cause. : Once the problem has been described in the first step of identifying the problem, the technician then needs to establish a theory of probable cause by looking for clues as to what may be causing the problem.

John has received a ticket from the service desk describing an issue that a user is having with a cloud application. The ticket describes the issue that the user is having along with the answers to the probing questions that the service desk technician had asked. Which of the following is the next step in the troubleshooting model?

Establish a theory of probable cause: After the problem has been identified, the next step is to establish a theory of probable cause. Beginning with the symptoms, look for internal and external clues for what might be causing the problem.

Craig wants to create a computing infrastructure that will allow developers within his company to build applications on a primarily internally hosted platform rather than outsourcing the infrastructure to a third party provider. However, he wants the ability to easily interact with AWS products. Which of the following could Craig use to do so?

Eucalyptus: Eucalyptus is the Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. It is a partially open-source private cloud platform that is designed to interact with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Zara is implementing a configuration management tool that makes use of a system that sends XML messages to endpoints on various systems in order to make changes. What kind of technology is she putting into use?

API: An Application Programming Interface can be used as an endpoint to send JSON, XML, or other properly formatted messages (in formats that the specific API supports) to in order to perform whatever action is requested or specified by the contents of the message.

Janelle's company has adopted the CompTIA troubleshooting model as part of their standard operating procedures to use when troubleshooting issues. She sees the step listed as identify the problem. Which of the following should she do as part of that step?

Ask the user probing questions to determine whether any recent changes have been made. : Asking the user probing questions is part of the first step of identifying the problem.

A small company has decided that they have the extra bandwidth to host their website on-premises in their server room. However, occasionally their site goes viral for a few days at a time, which has caused the site to become completely unavailable to all users. Which of the following might solve their problem?

Cloud bursting: Cloud bursting is the idea that when a privately hosted application is not available, it can rely on cloud resources to accommodate spikes in demand.

A large telecom company currently has both wireless and landline operations and wants to divest itself of the landline division. However, a lot of the servers that run each separate division are located in the same data center. Before they sell off the landline division, they want to migrate the servers out of that data center. Which of the following would be the best and most cost-effective solution so that they can preserve the capital that they have on hand while not taking on any new debt?

Convert the servers to virtual machines and migrate them to a cloud service provider. : Converting the servers to virtual machines and migrating them to a cloud service provider means little upfront capital investment and moves to a pay-as-you-go scenario. This means the new division has a lot of flexibility as to how to continue operations after the divestiture and would be the best and most cost-effective option while preserving capital and not taking on new debt.

Fictional Corp's IT management team has decided that with their larger infrastructure, they need to look at automating some of the deployments of virtual machines and configurations. They want to use APIs to manage the configurations and installation of operating systems and software as well as for monitoring purposes. Which of the following describes the environment that they are wanting to create and start using?

DevOps: DevOps is the idea that you can use programming and development techniques in day-to-day management of operations tasks such as creating new virtual machines and configuring them with the operating system, software, and configuration settings necessary to run them.

Carrie has just finished verifying that the problem she fixed on a problematic virtual machine has not caused any other issues, and the system is now running normally. Which of the following should she do while she is closing out the issue in the ticketing system?

Document findings, actions, and outcomes. : Documenting the findings, actions, and outcomes is the very last step of the CompTIA troubleshooting model.

Max has been hired as a consultant to help revamp the procedures that the IT department uses. He sees a lot of things that they are doing correctly, but sees that the information in the trouble tickets is severely lacking of detail. Which of the following systems would Max most likely recommend putting into place that could have been populated from ticket information if it had been there?

Knowledge base: A knowledge base is a system that can be referenced by service desk employees as well as administrators in order to keep track of a variety of types of knowledge. This includes a list of issues that have arisen over time that can be referenced later to determine what was done to resolve the issue in helping to troubleshoot and resolve the issue in the future.

Alejandro is wanting to configure a couple of new virtual machines to take advantage of DHCP services offered by their cloud service provider. The portal that the CSP provides has their offerings broken up into multiple higher level categories. Which of the following should he most likely look under to configure this service for his company's use?

Network components: DHCP is classified under the network components group.

Aaron's boss has learned that organizations can create their own clouds in their existing data centers. He has been tasked with researching products that could make better use of the hardware in their data centers and keeping their data on-premises. Which of the following products might Aaron recommend?

OpenStack: OpenStack is an open-source software that allows administrators to create their own private cloud on their own hardware.

Fictional Corp's Vice President of Sales has just returned from a conference where he learned about a great customer relationship management platform that he would like for the company to begin using. This platform doesn't require any investment in hardware, operating systems, or any other software, and only requires administration of user accounts and configuration of the types of data that it needs to store. Users would access it through their web browser, and the administration and maintenance tasks for the IT department would be minimal. Which of the following is the VP suggesting that the company use?

Public cloud: The VP has suggested using a public cloud offering of Software as a Service.

Fictional Corp currently uses a private cloud within their data center. The CTO has recently learned about hybrid cloud implementations and their benefits, and has instructed the cloud team to implement a hybrid cloud as soon as possible. Which of the following types of cloud services should they start looking at adding to their setup?

Public: A hybrid cloud is made up of a public cloud and private cloud that are integrated to work together. If the company already has a private cloud, then they need to integrate a public cloud into the setup in order to give them a hybrid cloud.

Timothy is responsible for monitoring the performance of the applications the company has deployed on their internal private cloud as well as on the cloud service provider. When the applications were initially developed, the IT department had agreed to ensure that the services were available to varying degrees depending on criticality. As such, he needs to reference the documents for each of those services so he knows how they should be performing. Which document is Timothy most likely referencing?

SLA: The service-level agreement defines how a service should perform and at what levels.

Fictional Corp is looking at solutions for their new CRM system for the sales department. The IT staff already has a fairly heavy workload, but they do not want to hire any additional IT staff. In order to reduce the maintenance burden of the new system, which of the following types of CRM should they choose to meet these needs?

SaaS: Software as a Service requires the least amount of maintenance since the hardware, operating system, and software maintenance are all taken care of by the cloud service provider.

Creative Co has just set up a private cloud. However, they have employees that work remotely in the field and want them to be able to access resources on the private cloud. Which of the following could Creative Co implement in order to allow users to create secure connections from their computers across the Internet into the private cloud?

VPN: Users could establish a VPN connection to the company's network, which would treat their computer as if it was actually on the local area network, or LAN.

Eddie has a virtual machine that is currently serving as the sole web server for the organization he works for. The amount of traffic to the website has been increasing lately, and Eddie wants to add another web server to help answer some of the requests. Which of the following technologies should Eddie look at implementing in addition to the second web server?

load balancer: A load balancer can be deployed in order to split the traffic between two or more servers or other devices.

A holiday ornament manufacturer sees traffic increase to their website in the couple of months leading up to the holiday, but then it tapers off and is very low for the rest of the year. Which of the following benefits of cloud computing might they be the most interested in for this use?

Elasticity: Elasticity and scalability describe the ability to add capacity when needed and reduce it when it is no longer needed.

Jim is a technician at Fictional Corp and has been assigned a ticket from the service desk to investigate a problem into one of the cloud applications being used by the company. He has a theory as to what could be causing the problem and tested it to determine the actual cause of the problem. Which of the following should Jim do next?

Establish a plan of action to resolve the problem and implement the solution. : Once Jim has tested the theory to determine the cause, the next step is to establish a plan of action to resolve the problem and implement the solution.

Bonnie has been tasked with performing an analysis on her company's firewall infrastructure. The organization has a number of office locations across the United States in addition to a number of people that work remotely from home. She finds that many of the existing firewalls are no longer supported by the manufacturer and has convinced the company to allocate some budget to find a solution to replace them. Which of the following might she recommend as a replacement?

FWaaS: Firewall as a service is a cloud service that allows administrators to automate much of the maintenance and upkeep as well as provide service to many locations simultaneously.

A social media organization has grown from its initial startup phase to being widely known within the United States. It has decided that it is time to broaden its horizons and see if it can grow the userbase globally as well. They have plans to expand into Europe within the next 12 months. Which of the following should they become familiar with before they start marketing the platform to European users.

GDPR: The General Data Protection Regulation is a European Union law that established data protection standards for information that could be tied to individuals. Since social media organizations commonly collect data about their userbase, they need to be very aware of the regulations in that area.

Patrick manages the cloud services that are used by a small hospital system. He knows that there are a lot of laws and regulations out there that pertain to storing PII that are different than other industries. Which of the following sets of laws and regulations is he specifically thinking of that do not apply to other industries?

HIPAA: The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act only applies to the medical industry.

Fictional Corp has a data center that runs multiple internal applications. However, they want to migrate their email to a cloud service provider so that mail will continue to be delivered in the case of any Internet service interruptions. They also want to use a single directory service so that they don't have to create duplicate user accounts on the internal and external systems. Which of the following types of services is best suited for Fictional Corp's needs?

Hybrid cloud: A hybrid cloud combines a public and private cloud. In this case, the private cloud would be in Fictional Corp's data center and they would make use of the public cloud for their email services.

A small startup company has just received a round of funding in order to provide the capacity that is required to deliver their smartphone app to a larger number of devices. They have decided to use a public cloud rather than build their own data center, but want to manage as much of the infrastructure as possible while realizing the savings on capital expenditures from the purchase of hardware. Which of the following service models will give them the most control over the security of the platform they want to develop?

IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service gives customers and users the most granular control over applications that are developed and deployed on it.

Danny is looking at deploying a new application that requires root-level access to the server. He is currently researching the capabilities of various cloud service providers but is only finding one type of implementation that would meet the requirements set forth by the application developer. Which of the following types of cloud offerings is he most likely going to need?

IaaS: Since customers manage their own virtual machines, Danny should have the root-level access that he needs for the application.

A user calls into the service desk stating they're having a problem accessing a particular cloud application. The service desk technician asks them some probing questions to see if there have been any changes to their local computer and what they were doing when it stopped working. Which step of the troubleshooting model describes the step that the process is currently at?

Identify the problem. : The very first step of the troubleshooting model is to identify the problem. In this step, the service desk should be questioning the user and backing up any data before making changes.

Ted has been tasked with moving the company's physical server infrastructure to a cloud-based infrastructure. He knows that the servers the company uses in the data center are fairly new and are nowhere near ready for retirement. However, he also knows that security is a very important factor in any decisions that are made. Which of the following is unlikely to be considered as a factor in the confidentiality aspect of security planning?

If the company were to deploy a private cloud, what kind of uptime requirements would the system need in order to meet the SLAs?: When considering the SLAs of a given service, this is part of the availability piece, not necessarily the confidentiality piece of security planning.

Fictional Corp is in the process of merging with Widgets Inc. They both use different cloud service providers for a variety of different applications that their employees need to perform their jobs. The IT departments of the organizations have been tasked with merging the IT infrastructure. One of the first tasks that they are looking at is combining the directory services for the two organizations so that all users are in one large LDAP database. Migrating from one cloud service provider to another is currently not a possibility due to the complexity of the applications deployed. Which of the following describes the type of infrastructure they will end up with as they continue to link the infrastructures together?

Multi-cloud: A multi-cloud infrastructure describes a cloud infrastructure where resources have been provisioned on multiple cloud service providers and the resources have been linked or integrated with each other.

Sharon has just finished probing her way through a virtual machine that has been causing problems on the company's private cloud looking for clues as to what might be causing those problems. She has a theory of what could be causing the problem. What is the next step that she should perform if she is following the CompTIA troubleshooting model?

Test the theory to determine cause. : Once Sharon has established a theory of probable cause, she needs to test the theory to determine whether that is actually the cause.

Teddy fixed an issue with a cloud-based application a few hours ago and just received a call from a user stating that another part of the application is now broken. Which of the following steps of the troubleshooting model did he most likely omit?

Verify full system functionality, and, if applicable, implement preventive measures. : If a new problem arose from fixing the other problem, most likely he did not verify full system functionality before closing the issue.

Which of the following steps of the troubleshooting model, if not done, could potentially cause users to experience new issues or problems with a system.

Verify full system functionality, and, if applicable, implement preventive measures. : If you want to be sure that users will not call back with a new problem with the system, it is best to verify full system functionality, not just testing the part that was fixed.