Chapter 1 Introduction to Cloud Computing and AWS

4. Which of the following is the best tool to control access to your AWS services and administration console? A. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) B. Key Management Service (KMS) C. AWS Directory Service D. Simple WorkFlow (SWF)

A. AWS IAM lets you create user accounts, groups, and roles and assign them rights and permissions over specific services and resources within your AWS account. KMS is a tool for generating and managing encryption keys, Directory Service allows you to integrate your resources with external users and resources through third-party authentication services, and SWF is a tool for coordinating application tasks.

7. What does the term availability zone refer to in AWS documentation? A. One or more isolated physical data centers within an AWS region B. All the hardware resources within a single region C. A single network subnet used by resources within a single region D. A single isolated server room within a data center

A. An availability zone is an isolated physical data center within an AWS region. Regions are geographic areas that contain multiple availability zones, subnets are IP address blocks that can be used within a zone to organize your networked resources, and there can be multiple data centers within an availability zone.

2. Which service would you use to most effectively reduce the latency your end users experience when accessing your application resources over the Internet? A. Amazon CloudFront B. Amazon Route 53 C. Elastic Load Balancing D. Amazon Glacier

A. CloudFront maintains a network of endpoints where cached versions of your application data are stored to provide quicker responses to user requests. Route 53 manages DNS and network routing, Elastic Load Balancing routes incoming user requests among a cluster of available servers, and Glacier provides high-latency, low-cost file storage.

11. Your company needs direct access to AWS support for both development and IT team leaders. Which support plan should you purchase? A. Business B. Developer C. Basic D. Enterprise

A. Unlike the Basic and Developer plans (which allow access to a support associate to no or one user, respectively), the Business plan allows multiple team members.

1. Your developers want to run fully provisioned EC2 instances to support their application code deployments but prefer not to have to worry about manually configuring and launching the necessary infrastructure. Which of the following should they use? A. AWS Lambda B. AWS Elastic Beanstalk C. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling D. Amazon Route 53

B. Elastic Beanstalk takes care of the ongoing underlying deployment details for you, allowing you to focus exclusively on your code. Lambda will respond to trigger events by running code a single time, Auto Scaling will ramp up existing infrastructure in response to demand, and Route 53 manages DNS and network routing.

10. Which of the following would you use to administrate your AWS infrastructure via your local command line or shell scripts? A. AWS Config B. AWS CLI C. AWS SDK D. The AWS Console

B. The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a tool for accessing AWS APIs from the command-line shell of your local computer. The AWS SDK is for accessing resources programmatically, the AWS Console works graphically through your browser, and AWS Config is a service for editing and auditing your AWS account resources.

8. Which AWS tool lets you organize your EC2 instances and configure their network connectivity and access control? A. Load Balancing B. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) C. Amazon CloudFront D. AWS endpoints

B. VPCs are virtualized network environments where you can control the connectivity of your EC2 (and RDS, etc.) infrastructure. Load Balancing routes incoming user requests among a cluster of available servers, CloudFront maintains a network of endpoints where cached versions of your application data are stored to provide quicker responses to user requests, and AWS endpoints are URIs that point to AWS resources within your account.

5. For data workloads requiring more speed and flexibility than a closely defined structure offers, which service should you choose? A. Relational Database Service (RDS) B. Amazon Aurora C. Amazon DynamoDB D. Key Management Service (KMS)

C. DynamoDB provides a NoSQL (nonrelational) database service for workloads that can be more efficiently run without the relational schema of SQL database engines (like those, including Aurora, that are offered by RDS). KMS is a tool for generating and managing encryption keys.

3. Which of the following is the best use-case scenario for Elastic Block Store? A. You need a cheap and reliable place to store files your application can access. B. You need a safe place to store backup archives from your local servers. C. You need a source for on-demand compute cycles to meet fluctuating demand for your application. D. You need persistent storage for the file system run by your EC2 instance.

D. Elastic Block Store provides virtual block devices (think: storage drives) on which you can install and run filesystems and data operations. It is not normally a cost-effective option for long-term data storage.

9. You want to be sure that the application you're building using EC2 and S3 resources will be reliable enough to meet the regulatory standards required within your industry. What should you check? A. Historical uptime log records B. The AWS Program Compliance Tool C. The AWS service level agreement (SLA) D. The AWS Shared Responsibility Model

C. The AWS service level agreement tells you the level of service availability you can realistically expect from a particular AWS service. You can use this information when assessing your compliance with external standards. Log records, while they can offer important historical performance metrics, probably won't be enough to prove compliance. The AWS Shared Responsibility Model outlines who is responsible for various elements of your AWS infrastructure. There is no AWS Program Compliance tool.

6. Which of the following is the correct endpoint address for an EC2 instance running in the AWS Ireland region? A. compute.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com B. ec2.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com C. elasticcomputecloud.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com D. ec2.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com

D. EC2 endpoints will always start with an ec2 prefix followed by the region designation (eu-west-1 in the case of Ireland).