Cloud Computing Modules 9-10 (Reading)

9-2 Rex is managing a cluster of four web servers with a load balancer on the front end. His company's website has recently started receiving a significant increase in traffic due to a successful advertising campaign, so he's ready to increase the budget available for running this cluster of web servers. However, Rex needs to decide whether to scale up or scale out. Currently, he has three reserved instances running in the cluster and one on-demand instance. He needs to increase performance capacity overall by about 25 percent. What approach should Rex take to reach his new capacity goal while minimizing the impact on his budget?

Add another reserved instance to the cluster

10-1 Terry is preparing a lab activity for his students where they'll be practicing patch techniques on a variety of operating system configurations. Terry needs to deploy several VMs in the lab, and he'll need to be able to make multiple changes to the VM configurations during the course of the activity. Which of the following tools would be most useful for automated deployment in this situation?

Ansible

9-1 Heidi is investigating a connectivity problem involving AWS EC2 instances running in a particular region. The problem began about three weeks ago and has resulted in repeatedly rebooting or recovering the server instances in this cluster. The servers appear to be caught in a cycle where the system's automated attempts at solving the problem seem to trigger the problem all over again. Heidi wants to go back to the first few error messages collected to see if she can determine what started the problem in the first place. What sort of data does Heidi need to access in order to examine this information?

Event logs

10-2 Mateo is troubleshooting a recurring issue with one of his applications running on a private cloud in his company's on-prem network. It seems the OS patches are not being applied properly, with frequent errors showing the VM is not in compliance with his patch management policies. Mateo is looking for indications of other patches that need to be applied in order to fix this problem. Which of the following components most likely needs to be updated?

The local agent on the VM

9-3 Kylie works for a retail chain that hosts its own e-commerce site. The site relies on three databases: one that holds the product catalog, one that stores historical order data, and a third that processes payments as purchases are made. To minimize DR costs while increasing her company's preparedness, Kylie has decided to invest in a failover service for one database in order to reduce RTO and RPO for that data to seconds. Which database should she choose?

The payment processing database

10-3 Question Workspace Check My Work Dominique and her team are ready to deploy updates to a core business application running in their organization's cloud. They've spun up a second, identical environment to their production environment, applied the updates, and completed testing. Because of the nature of the updates, however, the team has decided there's a moderate risk of problems during the deployment even after all the prep work they've done. Dominique has asked for suggestions on how to minimize the impact of these anticipated issues should they occur. Which of the following strategies would best ensure the deployment goes smoothly with minimal impact on users while giving Dominique's team the time and opportunity they need to resolve issues that might arise?

Transfer a small percentage of live traffic to the updated environment