QuickSight is a very fast, easy-to-use, cloud-powered business analytics service that makes it easy to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from their data, anytime, on any device.
enables organizations to scale their business analytics capabilities to hundreds of thousands of users, and delivers fast and responsive query performance by using SPICE – a robust in-memory engine.
supports various datasources including
Excel files and flat files like CSV, TSV, CLF, ELF
On-premises databases like PostgreSQL, SQL Server and MySQL
supports various functions to format and transform the data.
alias data fields and change data types.
subset the data using built in filters and perform database join operations using drag and drop.
create calculated fields using mathematical operations and built-in functions such conditional statements, string, numerical and date functions
supports assorted visualizations that facilitate different analytical approaches:
Comparison and distribution – Bar charts (several assorted variants)
Changes over time – Line graphs, Area line charts
Correlation – Scatter plots, Heat maps
Aggregation – Pie graphs, Tree maps
Tabular – Pivot tables
comes with a built-in suggestion engine that provides suggested visualizations based on the properties of the underlying datasets
support Stories, that provide guided tours through specific views of an analysis. They are used to convey key points, a thought process, or the evolution of an analysis for collaboration.
QuickSight is built with “SPICE” – a Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine
SPICE uses a combination of columnar storage, in-memory technologies enabled through the latest hardware innovations and machine code generation to run interactive queries on large datasets and get rapid responses.
SPICE supports rich data discovery and business analytics capabilities to help customers derive valuable insights from their data without worrying about provisioning or managing infrastructure.
SPICE supports rich calculations to help derive valuable insights from the analysis without worrying about provisioning or managing infrastructure.
Data in SPICE is persisted until it is explicitly deleted by the user.
QuickSight can also be configured to keep the data in SPICE up-to-date as the data in the underlying sources change.
SPICE automatically replicates data for high availability and enables QuickSight to scale to hundreds of thousands of users who can all simultaneously perform fast interactive analysis across a wide variety of AWS data sources.
Quick Sight Authors and Readers
QuickSight Author is a user who
can connect to data sources (within AWS or outside), create visuals and analyze data.
can create interactive dashboards using advanced QuickSight capabilities such as parameters and calculated fields, and publish dashboards with other users in the account.
QuickSight Reader is a user who
consumes interactive dashboards.
can log in via their organization’s preferred authentication mechanism (QuickSight username/password, SAML portal or AD auth), view shared dashboards, filter data, drill down to details or export data as a CSV file, using a web browser or mobile app.
Readers do not have any allocated SPICE capacity.
QuickSight Security
QuickSight supports multi-factor authentication (MFA) for the AWS account via the AWS Management console.
For VPC with public connectivity, QuickSight’s IP address range can be added to the database instances’ security group rules to enable traffic flow into the VPC and database instances.
QuickSight supports Row-level security (RLS)
RLS enables dataset owners to control access to data at row granularity based on permissions associated with the user interacting with the data.
With RLS, QuickSight users only need to manage a single set of data and apply appropriate row-level dataset rules to it.
All associated dashboards and analyses will enforce these rules, simplifying dataset management and removing the need to maintain multiple datasets for users with different data access privileges.
QuickSight supports Private VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) Access, which uses an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) for secure, private communication with data sources in a VPC. It also allows the use of AWS Direct Connect to create a secure, private link with the on-premises resources.
QuickSight supports users defined via IAM or email signup.
QuickSight Enterprise Edition
QuickSight Enterprise Edition offers enhanced functionality which includes
QuickSight Readers,
Connectivity to data sources in Private VPC,
Row-level security,
Hourly refresh of SPICE data
Encryption at Rest
AD connectivity and group-based management of assets for AD accounts
AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions
Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
You are using QuickSight to identify demand trends over multiple months for your top five product lines. Which type of visualization do you choose?
Scatter Plot
Pie Chart
Pivot Table
Line Chart
You need to provide customers with rich visualizations that allow you to easily connect multiple disparate data sources in S3, Redshift, and several CSV files. Which tool should you use that requires the least setup?
AWS Database Migration Service enables quick and secure data migration with minimal to zero downtime.
Database Migration Service helps migration to AWS with virtually no downtime. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database.
AWS DMS can migrate
relational databases, data warehouses, NoSQL databases, and other types of data stores
data to and from the most widely used commercial and open-source databases.
DMS supports homogeneous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations (using SCT) between different database platforms, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to Aurora.
AWS Schema Conversion Tool helps in heterogeneous database migrations by automatically converting the source database schema and a majority of the database code objects, including views, stored procedures, and functions, to a format compatible with the target database.
DMS enables both one-time migration and continuous data replication with high availability and consolidates databases into a petabyte-scale data warehouse by streaming data to Redshift and S3.
DMS continually monitors source and target databases, network connectivity, and the replication instance.
DMS automatically manages all of the infrastructure that supports the migration server, including hardware and software, software patching, and error reporting.
DMS is highly resilient and self–healing. If the primary replication server fails for any reason, a backup replication server can take over with little or no interruption of service.
In case of interruption, DMS automatically restarts the process and continues the migration from where it was halted.
AWS DMS supports the Multi-AZ option to provide high availability for database migration and continuous data replication by enabling redundant replication instances.
AWS DMS ensures that the data migration is secure. Data at rest is encrypted with AWS KMS encryption. During migration, SSL can be used to encrypt the in-flight data as it travels from source to target.
AWS DMS Fleet Advisor is a free, fully managed capability of AWS DMS that automates migration planning and helps you migrate database and analytics fleets to the cloud at scale with minimal effort.
Database Migration Service Components
DMS Replication Instance
A DMS replication instance performs the actual data migration between the source and the target.
DMS replication instance is a managed EC2 instance that hosts one or more replication tasks.
The replication instance also caches the transaction logs during the migration.
CPU and memory capacity of the replication instance influences the overall time required for the migration.
DMS can provide high availability and failover support using a Multi-AZ deployment.
In a Multi-AZ deployment, DMS automatically provisions and maintains a standby replica of the replication instance in a different AZ
Primary replication instance is synchronously replicated to the standby replica.
If the primary replication instance fails or becomes unresponsive, the standby resumes any running tasks with minimal interruption.
Because the primary is constantly replicating its state to the standby, Multi-AZ deployment does incur some performance overhead.
Endpoints
AWS DMS uses an endpoint to access the source or target data store.
Replication tasks
DMS replication task helps move a set of data from the source endpoint to the target endpoint.
Replication task required Replication instance, source, and target endpoints
Replication task supports following migration type options
Full load (Migrate existing data) – Migrate the data from the source to the target database as a one-time migration.
CDC only (Replicate data changes only) – Replicate only changes, while using native export tools for performing bulk data load.
Full load + CDC (Migrate existing data and replicate ongoing changes) – Performs a full data load while capturing changes on the source. After the full load is complete, captured changes are applied to the target. Once the changes reach a steady state, the applications can be switched over to the target.
LOB mode options
Don’t include LOB columns – LOB columns are excluded
Full LOB mode – Migrate complete LOBs regardless of size. AWS DMS migrates LOBs piecewise in chunks controlled by the Max LOB Size parameter. This mode is slower than using limited LOB mode.
Limited LOB mode – Truncate LOBs to the value specified by the Max LOB Size parameter. This mode is faster than using full LOB mode.
Data validation – If the data validation needs to be performed, once the migration has been completed.
AWS Schema Conversion Tool
AWS Schema Conversion Tool helps in heterogeneous database migrations by automatically converting the source database schema and a majority of the database code objects, including views, stored procedures, and functions, to a format compatible with the target database.
DMS and SCT work in conjunction to migrate databases and support ongoing replication for a variety of uses such as populating data marts, synchronizing systems, etc.
SCT can copy database schemas for homogeneous migrations and convert them for heterogeneous migrations.
SCT clearly marks any objects that cannot be automatically converted so that they can be manually converted to complete the migration.
SCT can scan the application source code for embedded SQL statements and convert them as part of a database schema conversion project.
SCT performs cloud-native code optimization by converting legacy Oracle and SQL Server functions to their equivalent AWS service, thus helping modernize the applications simultaneously during database migration.
Once schema conversion is complete, SCT can help migrate data from a range of data warehouses to Redshift using built-in data migration agents.
Database Migration Service Best Practices
DMS Performance
In full load, multiple tables are loaded in parallel and it is recommended to drop primary key indexes, secondary indexes, referential integrity constraints, and data manipulation language (DML) triggers.
For a full load + CDC task, it is recommended to add secondary indexes before the CDC phase. Because AWS DMS uses logical replication, secondary indexes that support DML operations should be in-place to prevent full table scans.
Replication task can be paused before the CDC phase to build indexes, create triggers, and create referential integrity constraints
Use multiple tasks for a single migration to improve performance
Disable backups and Multi-AZ on the target until ready to cut over.
Migration LOBs
DMS migrates LOBS in a two step process
creates a new row in the target table and populates the row with all data except the associated LOB value.
Update the row in the target table with the LOB data.
All LOB columns on the target table must be nullable
Limited LOB mode
default for all migration tasks
migrates all LOB values up to a user-specified size limit, default 32K
LOB values larger than the size limit must be manually migrated. typically provides the best performance.
Ensure that the Max LOB size parameter setting is set to the largest LOB size for all the tables.
Full LOB mode
migrates all LOB data in the tables, regardless of size.
provides the convenience of moving all LOB data in the tables, but the process can have a significant impact on performance.
Migrating Large Tables
Break the migration into more than one task.
Using row filtering, use a key or a partition key to create multiple tasks
Convert schema
Use SCT to convert the source objects, table, indexes, views, triggers, and other system objects into the target DDL format
DMS doesn’t perform schema or code conversion
Replication
Enable Multi-AZ for ongoing replication (for high availability and failover support)
DMS can read/write from/to encrypted DBs
DMS Fleet Advisor
AWS DMS Fleet Advisor is a free, fully managed capability of AWS DMS that automates migration planning and helps you migrate database and analytics fleets to the cloud at scale with minimal effort.
DMS Fleet Advisor is intended for users looking to migrate a large number of database and analytics servers to AWS.
AWS DMS Fleet Advisor helps discover and analyze the OLTP and OLAP database workloads and allows building a customized migration plan by determining the complexity of migrating the source databases to target services in AWS.
AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions
Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
Which AWS service would simplify the migration of a database to AWS?
Standard queues support at-least-once message delivery. However, occasionally (because of the highly distributed architecture that allows nearly unlimited throughput), more than one copy of a message might be delivered out of order.
Standard queues support a nearly unlimited number of API calls per second, per API action (SendMessage, ReceiveMessage, or DeleteMessage).
Standard queues provide best-effort ordering which ensures that messages are generally delivered in the same order as they’re sent.
SQS Standard Queue Features
Redundant infrastructure
offers reliable and scalable hosted queues for storing messages
is engineered to always be available and deliver messages
provides the ability to store messages in a fail safe queue
highly concurrent access to messages
At-Least-Once delivery
ensures delivery of each message at least once
stores copies of the messages on multiple servers for redundancy and high availability
might deliver duplicate copy of messages, if the servers storing a copy of a message is unavailable when you receive or delete the message and the copy of the message is not deleted on that unavailable server
Applications should be designed to be idempotent with the ability to handle duplicate messages and not be adversely affected if it processes the same message more than once
Message Attributes
SQS messages can contain up to 10 metadata attributes.
take the form of name-type-value triples
can be used to separate the body of a message from the metadata that describes it.
helps process and store information with greater speed and efficiency because the applications don’t have to inspect an entire message before understanding how to process it
Message Sampling
behavior of retrieving messages from the queue depends on whether short (standard) polling, the default behavior, or long polling is used
With short polling,
samples only a subset of the servers (based on a weighted random distribution) and returns messages from just those servers.
A receive request might not return all the messages in the queue. But a subsequent receive request would return the message
With Long polling,
request persists for the time specified and returns as soon as the message is available thereby reducing costs and time the message has to dwell in the queue
long polling doesn’t return a response until a message arrives in the message queue, or the long poll times out.
makes it inexpensive to retrieve messages from the SQS queue as soon as the messages are available.
might help reduce the cost of using SQS, as the number of empty receives are reduced
Batching
SQS allows send, receive and delete batching, which helps club up to 10 messages in a single batch while charging price for a single message
helps lower cost and also increases the throughput
Configurable settings per queue
All queues don’t have to be alike
Order
makes a best effort to preserve order in messages does not guarantee first in, first out delivery of messages
can be handled by placing sequencing information within the message and performing the ordering on the client side
Loose coupling
removes tight coupling between components
provides the ability to move data between distributed components of the applications that perform different tasks without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available
Multiple writers and readers
supports multiple readers and writers interacting with the same queue as the same time
locks the message during processing, using Visibility Timeout, preventing it to be processed by any other consumer
Variable message size
supports message in any format up to 256KB of text.
messages larger than 256 KB can be managed using the S3 or DynamoDB, with SQS holding a pointer to the S3 object
Access Control
Access can be controlled for who can produce and consume messages to each queue
Delay Queues
Delay queue allows the user to set a default delay on a queue such that delivery of all messages enqueued is postponed for that time duration
Dead Letter Queues
Dead letter queue is a queue for messages that were not able to be processed after a maximum number of attempts
useful to isolate messages that can’t be processed for later analysis.
PCI Compliance
supports the processing, storage, and transmission of credit card data by a merchant or service provider, and has been validated as being PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry – Data Security Standard) compliant
Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
enables real-time processing of streaming data at a massive scale
provides ordering of records per shard
provides an ability to read and/or replay records in the same order
allows multiple applications to consume the same data
data is replicated across three data centers within a region
data is preserved for 24 hours, by default, and can be extended to 365 days
data inserted in Kinesis, it can’t be deleted (immutability) but only expires
streams can be scaled using multiple shards, based on the partition key
each shard provides the capacity of 1MB/sec data input and 2MB/sec data output with 1000 PUT requests per second
Kinesis vs SQS
real-time processing of streaming big data vs reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages
ordered records, as well as the ability to read and/or replay records in the same order vs no guarantee on data ordering (with the standard queues before the FIFO queue feature was released)
data storage up to 24 hours, extended to 365 days vs 1 minute to extended to 14 days but cleared if deleted by the consumer.
supports multiple consumers vs a single consumer at a time and requires multiple queues to deliver messages to multiple consumers.
Kinesis Producer
API
PutRecord and PutRecords are synchronous
PutRecords uses batching and increases throughput
might experience ProvisionedThroughputExceeded Exceptions, when sending more data. Use retries with backoff, resharding, or change partition key.
KPL
producer supports synchronous or asynchronous use cases
supports inbuilt batching and retry mechanism
Kinesis Agent can help monitor log files and send them to KDS
supports third-party libraries like Spark, Flume, Kafka connect, etc.
Kinesis Consumers
Kinesis SDK
Records are polled by consumers from a shard
Kinesis Client Library (KCL)
Read records from Kinesis produced with the KPL (de-aggregation)
supports the checkpointing feature to keep track of the application’s state and resume progress using the DynamoDB table.
if application receives provisioned-throughput exceptions, increase the provisioned throughput for the DynamoDB table
Kinesis Connector Library – can be replaced using Firehose or Lambda
data transfer solution for delivering near real-time streaming data to destinations such as S3, Redshift, OpenSearch service, and Splunk.
is a fully managed service that automatically scales to match the throughput of your data and requires no ongoing administration
is Near Real Time (min. 60 secs) as it buffers incoming streaming data to a certain size or for a certain period of time before delivering it
supports batching, compression, and encryption of the data before loading it, minimizing the amount of storage used at the destination and increasing security
supports data compression, minimizing the amount of storage used at the destination. It currently supports GZIP, ZIP, and SNAPPY compression formats. Only GZIP is supported if the data is further loaded to Redshift.
supports out of box data transformation as well as custom transformationusing Lambda function to transform incoming source data and deliver the transformed data to destinations
uses at least once semantics for data delivery.
supports multiple producers as datasource, which include Kinesis data stream, KPL, Kinesis Agent, or the Kinesis Data Firehose API using the AWS SDK, CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch Events, or AWS IoT
does NOT support consumers like Spark and KCL
supports interface VPC endpoint to keep traffic between the VPC and Kinesis Data Firehose from leaving the Amazon network.
Managed Streaming for Kafka- MSK is an AWS streaming data service that manages Apache Kafka infrastructure and operations.
makes it easy for developers and DevOps managers to run Kafka applications and Kafka Connect connectors on AWS, without the need to become experts in operating Kafka.
operates, maintains, and scales Kafka clusters, provides enterprise-grade security features out of the box, and has built-in AWS integrations that accelerate development of streaming data applications.
always runs within a VPC managed by the MSK and is available to your own selected VPC, subnet, and security group when the cluster is setup.
IP addresses from the VPC are attached to the MSK resources through elastic network interfaces (ENIs), and all network traffic stays within the AWS network and is not accessible to the internet by default.
integrates with CloudWatch for monitoring, metrics, and logging.
MSK Serverless is a cluster type for MSK that makes it easy for you to run Apache Kafka clusters without having to manage compute and storage capacity.
supports EBS server-side encryption using KMS to encrypt storage.
supports encryption in transit enabled via TLS for inter-broker communication.
provides simple and cost-effective solutions to analyze all the data using standard SQL and the existing Business Intelligence (BI) tools.
manages the work needed to set up, operate, and scale a data warehouse, from provisioning the infrastructure capacity to automating ongoing administrative tasks such as backups, and patching.
automatically monitors your nodes and drives to help you recover from failures.
only supported Single-AZ deployments. However, now supports Multi-AZ deployments.
replicates all the data within the data warehouse cluster when it is loaded and also continuously backs up your data to S3.
attempts to maintain at least three copies of your data (the original and replica on the compute nodes and a backup in S3).
supports cross-region snapshot replication to another region for disaster recovery
is made up of all of the columns listed in the sort key definition, in the order they are listed and is more efficient when query predicates use a prefix, or query’s filter applies conditions, such as filters and joins, which is a subset of the sort key columns in order.
Interleaved sort key
gives equal weight to each column in the sort key, so query predicates can use any subset of the columns that make up the sort key, in any order.
also supports EMR, DynamoDB, remote hosts using SSH
parallelized and efficient
can decrypt data as it is loaded from S3
DON’T use multiple concurrent COPY commands to load one table from multiple files as Redshift is forced to perform a serialized load, which is much slower.
supports data decryption when loading data, if data encrypted
supports decompressing data, if data is compressed.
Split the Load Data into Multiple Files
Load the data in sort key order to avoid needing to vacuum.
Use a Manifest File
provides Data consistency, to avoid S3 eventual consistency issues
helps specify different S3 locations in a more efficient way that with the use of S3 prefixes.
Redshift Distribution Style determines how data is distributed across compute nodes and helps minimize the impact of the redistribution step by locating the data where it needs to be before the query is executed.
Redshift Enhanced VPC routing forces all COPY and UNLOAD traffic between the cluster and the data repositories through the VPC.
Workload management (WLM) enables users to flexibly manage priorities within workloads so that short, fast-running queries won’t get stuck in queues behind long-running queries.
Redshift Spectrum helps query and retrieve structured and semistructured data from files in S3 without having to load the data into Redshift tables.
Redshift Spectrum external tables are read-only. You can’t COPY or INSERT to an external table.
Federated Query feature allows querying and analyzing data across operational databases, data warehouses, and data lakes.
Redshift Serverless is a serverless option of Redshift that makes it more efficient to run and scale analytics in seconds without the need to set up and manage data warehouse infrastructure.
is a web service that utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of EC2 and S3
launches all nodes for a given cluster in the same Availability Zone, which improves performance as it provides a higher data access rate.
seamlessly supports Reserved, On-Demand, and Spot Instances
consists of Master/Primary Node for management and Slave nodes, which consist of Core nodes holding data and providing compute and Task nodes for performing tasks only.
is fault tolerant for slave node failures and continues job execution if a slave node goes down
supports Persistent and Transient cluster types
Persistent EMR clusters continue to run after the data processing job is complete
Transient EMR clusters shut down when the job or the steps (series of jobs) are complete
supports EMRFS which allows S3 to be used as a durable HA data storage
EMR Serverless helps run big data frameworks such as Apache Spark and Apache Hive without configuring, managing, and scaling clusters.
EMR Studio is an IDE that helps data scientists and data engineers to develop, visualize, and debug data engineering and data science applications written in R, Python, Scala, and PySpark.
EMR Notebooks provide a managed environment, based on Jupyter Notebook, that helps prepare and visualize data, collaborate with peers, build applications, and perform interactive analysis using EMR clusters.
AWS Glue is a fully managed, ETL service that automates the time-consuming steps of data preparation for analytics.
is serverless and supports a pay-as-you-go model.
handles provisioning, configuration, and scaling of the resources required to run the ETL jobs on a fully managed, scale-out Apache Spark environment.
helps setup, orchestrate, and monitor complex data flows.
supports custom Scala or Python code and import custom libraries and Jar files into the AWS Glue ETL jobs to access data sources not natively supported by AWS Glue.
supports server side encryption for data at rest and SSL for data in motion.
provides development endpoints to edit, debug, and test the code it generates.
AWS Glue natively supports data stored in RDS, Redshift, DynamoDB, S3, MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL databases in the VPC running on EC2 and Data streams from MSK, Kinesis Data Streams, and Apache Kafka.
Glue ETL engine to Extract, Transform, and Load data that can automatically generate Scala or Python code.
Glue Data Catalog is a central repository and persistent metadata store to store structural and operational metadata for all the data assets.
Glue Crawlers scan various data stores to automatically infer schemas and partition structures to populate the Data Catalog with corresponding table definitions and statistics.
Glue Job Bookmark tracks data that has already been processed during a previous run of an ETL job by persisting state information from the job run.
AWS Glue Streaming ETL enables performing ETL operations on streaming data using continuously-running jobs.
Glue provides flexible scheduler that handles dependency resolution, job monitoring, and retries.
Glue Studio offers a graphical interface for authoring AWS Glue jobs to process data allowing you to define the flow of the data sources, transformations, and targets in the visual interface and generating Apache Spark code on your behalf.
Glue Data Quality helps reduces manual data quality effort by automatically measuring and monitoring the quality of data in data lakes and pipelines.
Glue DataBrew is a visual data preparation tool that makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to prepare, visualize, clean, and normalize terabytes, and even petabytes of data directly from your data lake, data warehouses, and databases, including S3, Redshift, Aurora, and RDS.
AWS Lake Formation helps create secure data lakes, making data available for wide-ranging analytics.
is an integrated data lake service that helps to discover, ingest, clean, catalog, transform, and secure data and make it available for analysis and ML.
automatically manages access to the registered data in S3 through services including AWS Glue, Athena, Redshift, QuickSight, and EMR using Zeppelin notebooks with Apache Spark to ensure compliance with your defined policies.
helps configure and manage your data lake without manually integrating multiple underlying AWS services.
uses a shared infrastructure with AWS Glue, including console controls, ETL code creation and job monitoring, blueprints to create workflows for data ingest, the same data catalog, and a serverless architecture.
can manage data ingestion through AWS Glue. Data is automatically classified, and relevant data definitions, schema, and metadata are stored in the central Glue Data Catalog. Once the data is in the S3 data lake, access policies, including table-and-column-level access controls can be defined, and encryption for data at rest enforced.
integrates with IAM so authenticated users and roles can be automatically mapped to data protection policies that are stored in the data catalog. The IAM integration also supports Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP to federate into IAM using SAML.
helps centralize data access policy controls. Users and roles can be defined to control access, down to the table and column level.
supports private endpoints in the VPC and records all activity in AWS CloudTrail for network isolation and auditability.
is a very fast, easy-to-use, cloud-powered business analytics service that makes it easy to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from their data, anytime, on any device.
delivers fast and responsive query performance by using a robust in-memory engine (SPICE).
“SPICE” stands for a Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine
can also be configured to keep the data in SPICE up-to-date as the data in the underlying sources change.
automatically replicates data for high availability and enables QuickSight to scale to support users to perform simultaneous fast interactive analysis across a wide variety of AWS data sources.
supports
Excel files and flat files like CSV, TSV, CLF, ELF
on-premises databases like PostgreSQL, SQL Server and MySQL
SaaS applications like Salesforce
and AWS data sources such as Redshift, RDS, Aurora, Athena, and S3
supports various functions to format and transform the data.
supports assorted visualizations that facilitate different analytical approaches:
Comparison and distribution – Bar charts (several assorted variants)
Elasticsearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch clusters in the AWS Cloud.
Elasticsearch provides
real-time, distributed search and analytics engine
ability to provision all the resources for Elasticsearch cluster and launches the cluster
easy to use cluster scaling options. Scaling Elasticsearch Service domain by adding or modifying instances, and storage volumes is an online operation that does not require any downtime.
provides self-healing clusters, which automatically detects and replaces failed Elasticsearch nodes, reducing the overhead associated with self-managed infrastructures
domain snapshots to back up and restore ES domains and replicate domains across AZs
enhanced security with IAM, Network, Domain access policies, and fine-grained access control
storage volumes for the data using EBS volumes
ability to span cluster nodes across multiple AZs in the same region, known as zone awareness, for high availability and redundancy. Elasticsearch Service automatically distributes the primary and replica shards across instances in different AZs.
dedicated master nodes to improve cluster stability
data visualization using the Kibana tool
integration with CloudWatch for monitoring ES domain metrics
integration with CloudTrail for auditing configuration API calls to ES domains
integration with S3, Kinesis, and DynamoDB for loading streaming data
ability to handle structured and Unstructured data
supports encryption at rest through KMS, node-to-node encryption over TLS, and the ability to require clients to communicate with HTTPS
Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive analytics service built on open-source frameworks, supporting open-table and file formats.
provides a simplified, flexible way to analyze petabytes of data in an S3 data lake and 30 data sources, including on-premises data sources or other cloud systems using SQL or Python without loading the data.
is built on open-source Trino and Presto engines and Apache Spark frameworks, with no provisioning or configuration effort required.
is highly available and runs queries using compute resources across multiple facilities, automatically routing queries appropriately if a particular facility is unreachable
can process unstructured, semi-structured, and structured datasets.
integrates with QuickSight for visualizing the data or creating dashboards.
supports various standard data formats, including CSV, TSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet.
supports compressed data in Snappy, Zlib, LZO, and GZIP formats. You can improve performance and reduce costs by compressing, partitioning, and using columnar formats.
can handle complex analysis, including large joins, window functions, and arrays
uses a managed Glue Data Catalog to store information and schemas about the databases and tables that you create for the data stored in S3
uses schema-on-read technology, which means that the table definitions are applied to the data in S3 when queries are being applied. There’s no data loading or transformation required. Table definitions and schema can be deleted without impacting the underlying data stored in S3.
supports fine-grained access control with AWS Lake Formation which allows for centrally managing permissions and access control for data catalog resources in the S3 data lake.
SQS FIFO Queue provides enhanced messaging between applications with the additional features
FIFO (First-In-First-Out) delivery
order in which messages are sent and received is strictly preserved
key when the order of operations & events is critical
Exactly-once processing
a message is delivered once and remains available until consumer processes and deletes it
key when duplicates can’t be tolerated.
limited to 300 or 3000 (with batching) transactions per second (TPS)
FIFO queues provide all the capabilities of Standard queues, improve upon, and complement the standard queue.
FIFO queues support message groups that allow multiple ordered message groups within a single queue.
FIFO Queue name should end with .fifo
SQS Buffered Asynchronous Client doesn’t currently support FIFO queues
Not all the AWS Services support FIFO like
Auto Scaling Lifecycle Hooks
AWS IoT Rule Actions
AWS Lambda Dead-Letter Queues
Amazon S3 Event Notifications
SQS FIFO supports one or more producers and messages are stored in the order that they were successfully received by SQS.
SQS FIFO queues don’t serve messages from the same message group to more than one consumer at a time.
Message Deduplication
SQS APIs provide deduplication functionality that prevents message producers from sending duplicates.
Message deduplication ID is the token used for the deduplication of sent messages.
If a message with a particular message deduplication ID is sent successfully, any messages sent with the same message deduplication ID are accepted successfully but aren’t delivered during the 5-minute deduplication interval.
So basically, any duplicates introduced by the message producer are removed within a 5-minute deduplication interval
Message deduplication applies to an entire queue, not to individual message groups
Message groups
Messages are grouped into distinct, ordered “bundles” within a FIFO queue
Message group ID is the tag that specifies that a message belongs to a specific message group
For each message group ID, all messages are sent and received in strict order
However, messages with different message group ID values might be sent and received out of order.
Every message must be associated with a message group ID, without which the action fails.
SQS delivers the messages in the order in which they arrive for processing if multiple hosts (or different threads on the same host) send messages with the same message group ID
Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
A restaurant reservation application needs the ability to maintain a waiting list. When a customer tries to reserve a table, and none are available, the customer must be put on the waiting list, and the application must notify the customer when a table becomes free. What service should the Solutions Architect recommend to ensure that the system respects the order in which the customer requests are put onto the waiting list?
Amazon SNS
AWS Lambda with sequential dispatch
A FIFO queue in Amazon SQS
A standard queue in Amazon SQS
In relation to Amazon SQS, how can you ensure that messages are delivered in order? Select 2 answers
Increase the size of your queue
Send them with a timestamp
Using FIFO queues
Give each message a unique id
Use sequence number within the messages with Standard queues
A company has run a major auction platform where people buy and sell a wide range of products. The platform requires that transactions from buyers and sellers get processed in exactly the order received. At the moment, the platform is implemented using RabbitMQ, which is a light weighted queue system. The company consulted you to migrate the on-premise platform to AWS. How should you design the migration plan? (Select TWO)
When the bids are received, send the bids to an SQS FIFO queue before they are processed.
When the users have submitted the bids from frontend, the backend service delivers the messages to an SQS standard queue.
Add a message group ID to the messages before they are sent to the SQS queue so that the message processing is in a strict order.
Use an EC2 or Lambda to add a deduplication ID to the messages before the messages are sent to the SQS queue to ensure that bids are processed in the right order.
Trusted Advisor inspects the AWS environment to make recommendations for system performance, saving money, availability, and closing security gaps
Trusted Advisor checks the following categories
Cost Optimization
Recommendations that can potentially save money by highlighting unused resources and opportunities to reduce your bill.
Security
Identification of security settings and gaps, inline with the best practices, that could make the AWS solution less secure
Fault Tolerance
Recommendations that help increase the resiliency and availability of the AWS solution by highlighting redundancy shortfalls, current service limits, and over-utilized resources.
Performance
Recommendations that can help to improve the speed and responsiveness of the applications
AWS Support API provides programmatic access to AWS Support Center features to create, manage, and close the Support cases, and operationally manage the Trusted Advisor check requests and status.
Trusted Advisor Priority helps you focus on the most important recommendations to optimize your cloud deployments, improve resilience, and address security gaps.
Trusted Advisor notification feature helps stay up-to-date with the AWS resource deployment by performing an automated weekly refresh.
AWS Support API
API provides two different groups of operations:
Support case management operations to manage the entire life cycle of your AWS support cases, from creating a case to resolving it, and includes
Open a support case
Get a list and detailed information about recent support cases
Filter your search for support cases by dates and case identifiers, including resolved cases
Add communications and file attachments to your cases, and add the email recipients for case correspondence
Resolve your cases
AWS Trusted Advisor operations to access checks
Get the names and identifiers for the checks
Request that a check be run against your AWS account and resources
Get summaries and detailed information for your check results
Refresh the checks
Get the status of each check
AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions
Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
The Trusted Advisor service provides insight regarding which categories of an AWS account?
Security, fault tolerance, high availability, and connectivity
Security, access control, high availability, and performance
Performance, cost optimization, security, and fault tolerance (Note – Service limits is the latest addition)
Performance, cost optimization, access control, and connectivity
Which of the following are categories of AWS Trusted Advisor? (Select TWO.)
Loose Coupling
Disaster recovery
Infrastructure as a Code
Security
Service limits
Which AWS tool will identify security groups that grant unrestricted Internet access to a limited list of ports?
AWS Direct Connect is a network service that provides an alternative to using the Internet to utilize AWS cloud services
DX links your internal network to an AWS Direct Connect location over a standard Ethernet fiber-optic cable with one end of the cable connected to your router, the other to an AWS Direct Connect router.
Connections can be established with
Dedicated connections – 1Gbps, 10Gbps, and 100Gbps capacity.
Hosted connection – Speeds of 50, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 Mbps can be ordered from any APN partners supporting AWS DX. Also, supports 1, 2, 5 & 10 Gbps with selected partners.
Virtual interfaces can be created directly to public AWS services ( e.g. S3) or to VPC, bypassing internet service providers in the network path.
DX locations in public Regions or AWS GovCloud (US) can access public services in any other public Region.
Each AWS DX location enables connectivity to all AZs within the geographically nearest AWS region.
DX supports both the IPv4 and IPv6 communication protocols.
Direct Connect Advantages
Reduced Bandwidth Costs
All data transferred over the dedicated connection is charged at the reduced data transfer rate rather than Internet data transfer rates.
Transferring data to and from AWS directly reduces the bandwidth commitment to the Internet service provider
Consistent Network Performance
provides a dedicated connection and a more consistent network performance experience than the Internet which can widely vary.
AWS Services Compatibility
is a network service and works with all of the AWS services like S3, EC2, and VPC
Private Connectivity to AWS VPC
Using DX Private Virtual Interface a private, dedicated, high bandwidth network connection can be established between the network and VPC
Elastic
can be easily scaled to meet the needs by either using a higher bandwidth connection or by establishing multiple connections.
Direct Connect Anatomy
Amazon maintains AWS Direct Connect PoP across different locations (referred to as Colocation Facilities) which are different from AWS regions.
As a consumer, you can either purchase a rack space or use any of the AWS APN Partners which already have the infrastructure within the Colocation Facility and configure a Customer Gateway
Connection from the AWS Direct Connect PoP to the AWS regions is maintained by AWS itself.
Connection from the Customer Gateway to the Customer Data Center can be established using any Service Provider Network.
Connection between the PoP and the Customer gateway within the Colocation Facility is called Cross Connect.
Once a DX connection is created with AWS, an LOA-CFA (Letter Of Authority – Connecting Facility Assignment) would be received.
LOA-CFA can be handover to the Colocation Facility or the APN Partner to establish the Cross Connect
Once the Cross Connect and the connectivity between the CGW and Customer DataCenter are established, Virtual Interfaces can be created
AWS Direct Connect requires a VGW to access the AWS VPC.
Virtual Interfaces – VIF
Each connection requires a Virtual Interface
Each connection can be configured with one or more virtual interfaces.
Supports, Public, Private, and Transit Virtual Interface
Each VIF needs a VLAN ID, interface IP address, ASN, and BGP key.
To use the connection with another AWS account, a hosted virtual interface (Hosted VIF) can be created for that account. These hosted virtual interfaces work the same as standard virtual interfaces and can connect to public resources or a VPC.
Direct Connect Network Requirements
Single-mode fiber with
a 1000BASE-LX (1310 nm) transceiver for 1 gigabit Ethernet,
a 10GBASE-LR (1310 nm) transceiver for 10 gigabits, or
a 100GBASE-LR4 for 100 gigabit Ethernet.
802.1Q VLAN encapsulation must be supported
Auto-negotiation for a port must be disabled so that the speed and mode (half or full duplex) cannot be modified and should be manually configured
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and BGP MD5 authentication must be supported
Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) is optional and helps in quick failure detection.
Direct Connect Connections
Dedicated Connection
provides a physical Ethernet connection associated with a single customer
Customers can request a dedicated connection through the AWS Direct Connect console, the CLI, or the API.
support port speeds of 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and 100 Gbps.
supports multiple virtual interfaces (current limit of 50)
Hosted Connection
A physical Ethernet connection that an AWS Direct Connect Partner provisions on behalf of a customer.
Customers request a hosted connection by contacting a partner in the AWS Direct Connect Partner Program, which provisions the connection
Support port speeds of 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps, 300 Mbps, 400 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 2 Gbps, 5 Gbps, and 10 Gbps
1 Gbps, 2 Gbps, 5 Gbps or 10 Gbps hosted connections are supported by limited partners.
supports a single virtual interface
AWS uses traffic policing on hosted connections and excess traffic is dropped.
Direct Connect Virtual Interfaces – VIF
Public Virtual Interface
enables connectivity to all the AWS Public IP addresses
helps connect to public resources e.g. SQS, S3, EC2, Glacier, etc which are reachable publicly only.
can be used to access all public resources across regions
allows a maximum of 1000 prefixes. You can summarize the prefixes into a larger range to reduce the number of prefixes.
does not support Jumbo frames.
Private Virtual Interface
helps connect to the VPC for e.g. instances with a private IP address
supports
Virtual Private Gateway
Allows connections only to a single specific VPC with the attached VGW in the same region
Private VIF and Virtual Private Gateway – VGW should be in the same region
helps access one or more VPC Transit Gateways associated with Direct Connect Gateways.
supports Jumbo frames with 8500 MTU
Direct Connect Redundancy
Direct Connect connections do not provide redundancy and have multiple single points of failures w.r.t to the hardware devices as each connection consists of a single dedicated connection between ports on your router and an Amazon router.
Redundancy can be provided by
Establishing a second DX connection, preferably in a different Colocation Facility using a different router and AWS DX PoP.
IPsec VPN connection between the Customer DC to the VGW.
For Multiple ports requested in the same AWS Direct Connect location, Amazon itself makes sure they are provisioned on redundant Amazon routers to prevent impact from a hardware failure
High Resiliency – 99.9%
High resiliency for critical workloads can be achieved by using two single connections to multiple locations.
It provides resiliency against connectivity failures caused by a fiber cut or a device failure. It also helps prevent a complete location failure.
Maximum Resiliency – 99.99%
Maximum resiliency for critical workloads can be achieved using separate connections that terminate on separate devices in more than one location.
It provides resiliency against device, connectivity, and complete location failures.
Direct Connect LAG – Link Aggregation Group
A LAG is a logical interface that uses the Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) to aggregate multiple connections at a single AWS Direct Connect endpoint, treating them as a single, managed connection.
LAG can combine multiple connections to increase available bandwidth.
LAG can be created from existing or new connections.
Existing connections (whether standalone or part of another LAG) with the LAG can be associated after LAG creation.
LAG needs following rules
All connections must use the same bandwidth and port speed of 1, 10, 100 Gbps.
All connections must be dedicated connections.
Maximum of four connections in a LAG. Each connection in the LAG counts toward the overall connection limit for the Region.
All connections in the LAG must terminate at the same AWS Direct Connect endpoint.
Multi-chassis LAG (MLAG) is not supported by AWS.
LAG doesn’t make the connectivity to AWS more resilient.
LAG connections operate in Active/Active mode.
LAG supports attributes to define a minimum number of operational connections for the LAG function, with a default value of 0.
Direct Connect Failover
Bidirectional Forwarding Detection – BFD is a detection protocol that provides fast forwarding path failure detection times. These fast failure detection times facilitate faster routing reconvergence times.
When connecting to AWS services over DX connections it is recommended to enable BFD for fast failure detection and failover.
By default, BGP waits for three keep-alives to fail at a hold-down time of 90 seconds. Enabling BFD for the DX connection allows the BGP neighbor relationship to be quickly torn down.
Asynchronous BFD is automatically enabled for each DX virtual interface, but will not take effect until it’s configured on your router.
AWS has set the BFD liveness detection minimum interval to 300, and the BFD liveness detection multiplier to 3
It’s a best practice not to configure graceful restart and BFD at the same time to avoid failover or connection issues. For fast failover, configure BFD without graceful restart enabled.
BFD is supported for LAGs.
Direct Connect Security
Direct Connect does not encrypt the traffic that is in transit by default. To encrypt the data in transit that traverses DX, you must use the transit encryption options for that service.
DX connections can be secured
with IPSec VPN to provide secure, reliable connectivity.
with MACsec to encrypt the data from the corporate data center to the DX location.
MAC Security (MACsec)
is an IEEE standard that provides data confidentiality, data integrity, and data origin authenticity.
provides Layer2 security for 10Gbps and 100Gbps Dedicated Connections only.
delivers native, near line-rate, point-to-point encryption ensuring that data communications between AWS and the data center, office, or colocation facility remain protected.
removes VPN limitation that required the aggregation of multiple IPsec VPN tunnels to work around the throughput limits of using a single VPN connection.
Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
You are building a solution for a customer to extend their on-premises data center to AWS. The customer requires a 50-Mbps dedicated and private connection to their VPC. Which AWS product or feature satisfies this requirement?
Amazon VPC peering
Elastic IP Addresses
AWS Direct Connect
Amazon VPC virtual private gateway
Is there any way to own a direct connection to Amazon Web Services?
You can create an encrypted tunnel to VPC, but you don’t own the connection.
Yes, it’s called Amazon Dedicated Connection.
No, AWS only allows access from the public Internet.
Yes, it’s called Direct Connect
An organization has established an Internet-based VPN connection between their on-premises data center and AWS. They are considering migrating from VPN to AWS Direct Connect. Which operational concern should drive an organization to consider switching from an Internet-based VPN connection to AWS Direct Connect?
AWS Direct Connect provides greater redundancy than an Internet-based VPN connection.
AWS Direct Connect provides greater resiliency than an Internet-based VPN connection.
AWS Direct Connect provides greater bandwidth than an Internet-based VPN connection.
AWS Direct Connect provides greater control of network provider selection than an Internet-based VPN connection.
Does AWS Direct Connect allow you access to all Availabilities Zones within a Region?
Depends on the type of connection
No
Yes
Only when there’s just one availability zone in a region. If there are more than one, only one availability zone can be accessed directly.
A customer has established an AWS Direct Connect connection to AWS. The link is up and routes are being advertised from the customer’s end, however, the customer is unable to connect from EC2 instances inside its VPC to servers residing in its datacenter. Which of the following options provide a viable solution to remedy this situation? (Choose 2 answers)
Add a route to the route table with an IPSec VPN connection as the target (deals with VPN)
Enable route propagation to the Virtual Private Gateway (VGW)
Enable route propagation to the customer gateway (CGW) (route propagation is enabled on VGW)
Modify the route table of all Instances using the ‘route’ command. (no route command available)
Modify the Instances VPC subnet route table by adding a route back to the customer’s on-premises environment.
A company has configured and peered two VPCs: VPC-1 and VPC-2. VPC-1 contains only private subnets, and VPC-2 contains only public subnets. The company uses a single AWS Direct Connect connection and private virtual interface to connect their on-premises network with VPC-1. Which two methods increase the fault tolerance of the connection to VPC-1? Choose 2 answers
Establish a hardware VPN over the internet between VPC-2 and the on-premises network. (Peered VPC does not support Edge to Edge Routing)
Establish a hardware VPN over the internet between VPC-1 and the on-premises network
Establish a new AWS Direct Connect connection and private virtual interface in the same region as VPC-2 (Peered VPC does not support Edge to Edge Routing)
Establish a new AWS Direct Connect connection and private virtual interface in a different AWS region than VPC-1 (need to be in the same region as VPC-1)
Establish a new AWS Direct Connect connection and private virtual interface in the same AWS region as VPC-1
Your company previously configured a heavily used, dynamically routed VPN connection between your on-premises data center and AWS. You recently provisioned a Direct Connect connection and would like to start using the new connection. After configuring Direct Connect settings in the AWS Console, which of the following options will provide the most seamless transition for your users?
Delete your existing VPN connection to avoid routing loops configure your Direct Connect router with the appropriate settings and verify network traffic is leveraging Direct Connect.
Configure your Direct Connect router with a higher BGP priority than your VPN router, verify network traffic is leveraging Direct Connect, and then delete your existing VPN connection.
Update your VPC route tables to point to the Direct Connect connection configure your Direct Connect router with the appropriate settings verify network traffic is leveraging Direct Connect and then delete the VPN connection.
Configure your Direct Connect router, update your VPC route tables to point to the Direct Connect connection, configure your VPN connection with a higher BGP priority. And verify network traffic is leveraging the Direct Connect connection
You are designing the network infrastructure for an application server in Amazon VPC. Users will access all the application instances from the Internet as well as from an on-premises network The on-premises network is connected to your VPC over an AWS Direct Connect link. How would you design routing to meet the above requirements?
Configure a single routing table with a default route via the Internet gateway. Propagate a default route via BGP on the AWS Direct Connect customer router. Associate the routing table with all VPC subnets (propagating the default route would cause conflict)
Configure a single routing table with a default route via the internet gateway. Propagate specific routes for the on-premises networks via BGP on the AWS Direct Connect customer router. Associate the routing table with all VPC subnets.
Configure a single routing table with two default routes: one to the internet via an Internet gateway the other to the on-premises network via the VPN gateway use this routing table across all subnets in your VPC. (there cannot be 2 default routes)
Configure two routing tables one that has a default route via the Internet gateway and another that has a default route via the VPN gateway Associate both routing tables with each VPC subnet. (as the instances have to be in the public subnet and should have a single routing table associated with them)
You are implementing AWS Direct Connect. You intend to use AWS public service endpoints such as Amazon S3, across the AWS Direct Connect link. You want other Internet traffic to use your existing link to an Internet Service Provider. What is the correct way to configure AWS Direct Connect for access to services such as Amazon S3?
Configure a public Interface on your AWS Direct Connect link. Configure a static route via your AWS Direct Connect link that points to Amazon S3. Advertise a default route to AWS using BGP.
Create a private interface on your AWS Direct Connect link. Configure a static route via your AWS Direct Connect link that points to Amazon S3 Configure specific routes to your network in your VPC.
Create a public interface on your AWS Direct Connect link. Redistribute BGP routes into your existing routing infrastructure advertise specific routes for your network to AWS
Create a private interface on your AWS Direct connect link. Redistribute BGP routes into your existing routing infrastructure and advertise a default route to AWS.
You have been asked to design network connectivity between your existing data centers and AWS. Your application’s EC2 instances must be able to connect to existing backend resources located in your data center. Network traffic between AWS and your data centers will start small, but ramp up to 10s of GB per second over the course of several months. The success of your application is dependent upon getting to market quickly. Which of the following design options will allow you to meet your objectives?
Quickly create an internal ELB for your backend applications, submit a DirectConnect request to provision a 1 Gbps cross-connect between your data center and VPC, then increase the number or size of your DirectConnect connections as needed.
Allocate EIPs and an Internet Gateway for your VPC instances to use for quick, temporary access to your backend applications, then provision a VPN connection between a VPC and existing on-premises equipment.
Provision a VPN connection between a VPC and existing on-premises equipment, submit a DirectConnect partner request to provision cross connects between your data center and the DirectConnect location, then cut over from the VPN connection to one or more DirectConnect connections as needed.
Quickly submit a DirectConnect request to provision a 1 Gbps cross connect between your data center and VPC, then increase the number or size of your DirectConnect connections as needed.
You are tasked with moving a legacy application from a virtual machine running inside your datacenter to an Amazon VPC. Unfortunately, this app requires access to a number of on-premises services and no one who configured the app still works for your company. Even worse there’s no documentation for it. What will allow the application running inside the VPC to reach back and access its internal dependencies without being reconfigured? (Choose 3 answers)
An AWS Direct Connect link between the VPC and the network housing the internal services (VPN or a DX for communication)
An Internet Gateway to allow a VPN connection. (Virtual and Customer gateway is needed)
An Elastic IP address on the VPC instance (Don’t need a EIP as private subnets can also interact with on-premises network)
An IP address space that does not conflict with the one on-premises (IP address cannot conflict)
Entries in Amazon Route 53 that allow the Instance to resolve its dependencies’ IP addresses (Route 53 is not required)
A VM Import of the current virtual machine (VM Import to copy the VM to AWS as there is no documentation it can’t be configured from scratch)
S3 Glacier is a storage service optimized for archival, infrequently used data, or “cold data.”
S3 Glacier is an extremely secure, durable, and low-cost storage service for data archiving and long-term backup.
provides average annual durability of 99.999999999% (11 9’s) for an archive.
redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility.
synchronously stores the data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS on uploading archives, to enhance durability.
performs regular, systematic data integrity checks and is built to be automatically self-healing.
enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling storage to AWS, without having to worry about capacity planning, hardware provisioning, data replication, hardware failure detection, recovery, or time-consuming hardware migrations.
offers a range of storage classes and patterns
S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
Use for archiving data that is rarely accessed and requires milliseconds retrieval.
S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly the S3 Glacier storage class)
Use for archives where portions of the data might need to be retrieved in minutes.
offers a range of data retrievals options where the retrieval time varies from minutes to hours.
Expedited retrieval: 1-5 mins
Standard retrieval: 3-5 hours
Bulk retrieval: 5-12 hours
S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Use for archiving data that rarely need to be accessed.
Data stored has a default retrieval time of 12 hours.
S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval and S3 Glacier Deep Archive objects are not available for real-time access.
is a great storage choice when low storage cost is paramount, with data rarely retrieved, and retrieval latency is acceptable. S3 should be used if applications require fast, frequent real-time access to the data.
can store virtually any kind of data in any format.
allows interaction through AWS Management Console, Command Line Interface CLI, and SDKs or REST-based APIs.
AWS Management console can only be used to create and delete vaults.
Rest of the operations to upload, download data, and create jobs for retrieval need CLI, SDK, or REST-based APIs.
Use cases include
Digital media archives
Data that must be retained for regulatory compliance
Financial and healthcare records
Raw genomic sequence data
Long-term database backups
S3 Glacier Storage Classes
S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
Use for archiving data that is rarely accessed and requires milliseconds retrieval.
Use for archives where portions of the data might need to be retrieved in minutes.
Data has a minimum storage duration period of 90 days and can be accessed in as little as 1-5 minutes by using an expedited retrieval
You can also request free Bulk retrievals in up to 5-12 hours.
S3 supports restore requests at a rate of up to 1,000 transactions per second, per AWS account.
S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Use for archiving data that rarely needs to be accessed.
S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the lowest cost storage option in AWS.
Retrieval costs can be reduced further using bulk retrieval, which returns data within 48 hours.
Data stored has a minimum storage duration period of 180 days
Data stored has a default retrieval time of 12 hours.
S3 supports restore requests at a rate of up to 1,000 transactions per second, per AWS account.
S3 Glacier Flexible Data Retrievals Options
Glacier provides three options for retrieving data with varying access times and costs: Expedited, Standard, and Bulk retrievals.
Expedited Retrievals
Expedited retrievals allow quick access to the data when occasional urgent requests for a subset of archives are required.
Data has a minimum storage duration period of 90 days
Data accessed are typically made available within 1-5 minutes.
There are two types of Expedited retrievals: On-Demand and Provisioned.
On-Demand requests are like EC2 On-Demand instances and are available the vast majority of the time.
Provisioned requests are guaranteed to be available when needed.
Standard Retrievals
Standard retrievals allow access to any of the archives within several hours.
Standard retrievals typically complete within 3-5 hours.
Bulk Retrievals
Bulk retrievals are Glacier’s lowest-cost retrieval option, enabling retrieval of large amounts, even petabytes, of data inexpensively in a day.
Bulk retrievals typically complete within 5-12 hours.
S3 Glacier Data Model
Glacier data model core concepts include vaults and archives and also include job and notification configuration resources
Vault
A vault is a container for storing archives.
Each vault resource has a unique address, which comprises the region the vault was created and the unique vault name within the region and account for e.g. https://glacier.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/111122223333/vaults/examplevault
Vault allows the storage of an unlimited number of archives.
Glacier supports various vault operations which are region-specific.
An AWS account can create up to 1,000 vaults per region.
Archive
An archive can be any data such as a photo, video, or document and is a base unit of storage in Glacier.
Each archive has a unique ID and an optional description, which can only be specified during the upload of an archive.
Glacier assigns the archive an ID, which is unique in the AWS region in which it is stored.
An archive can be uploaded in a single request. While for large archives, Glacier provides a multipart upload API that enables uploading an archive in parts.
An Archive can be up to 40TB.
Jobs
A Job is required to retrieve an Archive and vault inventory list
Data retrieval requests are asynchronous operations, are queued and some jobs can take about four hours to complete.
A job is first initiated and then the output of the job is downloaded after the job is completed.
Vault inventory jobs need the vault name.
Data retrieval jobs need both the vault name and the archive id, with an optional description
A vault can have multiple jobs in progress at any point in time and can be identified by Job ID, assigned when is it created for tracking
Glacier maintains job information such as job type, description, creation date, completion date, and job status and can be queried
After the job completes, the job output can be downloaded in full or partially by specifying a byte range.
Notification Configuration
As the jobs are asynchronous, Glacier supports a notification mechanism to an SNS topic when the job completes
SNS topic for notification can either be specified with each individual job request or with the vault
Glacier stores the notification configuration as a JSON document
Glacier Supported Operations
Vault Operations
Glacier provides operations to create and delete vaults.
A vault can be deleted only if there are no archives in the vault as of the last computed inventory and there have been no writes to the vault since the last inventory (as the inventory is prepared periodically)
Vault Inventory
Vault inventory helps retrieve a list of archives in a vault with information such as archive ID, creation date, and size for each archive
Inventory for each vault is prepared periodically, every 24 hours
Vault inventory is updated approximately once a day, starting on the day the first archive is uploaded to the vault.
When a vault inventory job is, Glacier returns the last inventory it generated, which is a point-in-time snapshot and not real-time data.
Vault Metadata or Description can also be obtained for a specific vault or for all vaults in a region, which provides information such as
creation date,
number of archives in the vault,
total size in bytes used by all the archives in the vault,
and the date the vault inventory was generated
S3 Glacier also provides operations to set, retrieve, and delete a notification configuration on the vault. Notifications can be used to identify vault events.
Archive Operations
S3 Glacier provides operations to upload, download and delete archives.
All archive operations must either be done using AWS CLI or SDK. It cannot be done using AWS Management Console.
An existing archive cannot be updated, it has to be deleted and uploaded.
Archive Upload
An archive can be uploaded in a single operation (1 byte to up to 4 GB in size) or in parts referred to as Multipart upload (40 TB)
Multipart Upload helps to
improve the upload experience for larger archives.
upload archives in parts, independently, parallelly and in any order
faster recovery by needing to upload only the part that failed upload and not the entire archive.
upload archives without even knowing the size
upload archives from 1 byte to about 40,000 GB (10,000 parts * 4 GB) in size
To upload existing data to Glacier, consider using the AWS Import/Export Snowball service, which accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers the data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network, bypassing the Internet.
Glacier returns a response that includes an archive ID that is unique in the region in which the archive is stored.
Glacier does not support any additional metadata information apart from an optional description. Any additional metadata information required should be maintained on the client side.
Archive Download
Downloading an archive is an asynchronous operation and is the 2 step process
Initiate an archive retrieval job
When a Job is initiated, a job ID is returned as a part of the response.
Job is executed asynchronously and the output can be downloaded after the job completes.
A job can be initiated to download the entire archive or a portion of the archive.
After the job completes, download the bytes
An archive can be downloaded as all the bytes or a specific byte range to download only a portion of the output
Downloading the archive in chunks helps in the event of a download failure, as only that part needs to be downloaded
Job completion status can be checked by
Check status explicitly (Not Recommended)
periodically poll the describe job operation request to obtain job information
Completion notification
An SNS topic can be specified, when the job is initiated or with the vault, to be used to notify job completion
About Range Retrievals
S3 Glacier allows retrieving an archive either in whole (default) or a range, or a portion.
Range retrievals need a range to be provided that is megabyte aligned.
Glacier returns a checksum in the response which can be used to verify if any errors in the download by comparing it with the checksum computed on the client side.
Specifying a range of bytes can be helpful when:
Control bandwidth costs
Glacier allows retrieval of up to 5 percent of the average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month
Scheduling range retrievals can help in two ways.
meet the monthly free allowance of 5 percent by spreading out the data requested
if the amount of data retrieved doesn’t meet the free allowance percentage, scheduling range retrievals enable a reduction of the peak retrieval rate, which determines the retrieval fees.
Manage your data downloads
Glacier allows retrieved data to be downloaded for 24 hours after the retrieval request completes
Only portions of the archive can be retrieved so that the schedule of downloads can be managed within the given download window.
Retrieve a targeted part of a large archive
Retrieving an archive in a range can be useful if an archive is uploaded as an aggregate of multiple individual files, and only a few files need to be retrieved
Archive Deletion
An archive can be deleted from the vault only one at a time
This operation is idempotent. Deleting an already-deleted archive does not result in an error
AWS applies a pro-rated charge for items that are deleted prior to 90 days, as it is meant for long-term storage
Archive Update
An existing archive cannot be updated and must be deleted and re-uploaded, which would be assigned a new archive id
S3 Glacier Vault Lock
S3 Glacier Vault Lock helps deploy and enforce compliance controls for individual S3 Glacier vaults with a vault lock policy.
Specify controls such as “write once read many” (WORM) can be enforced using a vault lock policy and the policy can be locked for future edits.
Once locked, the policy can no longer be changed.
S3 Glacier Security
S3 Glacier supports data in transit encryption using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or client-side encryption.
All data is encrypted on the server side with Glacier handling key management and key protection. It uses AES-256, one of the strongest block ciphers available
Security and compliance of S3 Glacier are assessed by third-party auditors as part of multiple AWS compliance programs including SOC, HIPAA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, etc.
AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions
Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
What is Amazon Glacier?
You mean Amazon “Iceberg”: it’s a low-cost storage service.
A security tool that allows to “freeze” an EBS volume and perform computer forensics on it.
A low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup
It’s a security tool that allows to “freeze” an EC2 instance and perform computer forensics on it.
Amazon Glacier is designed for: (Choose 2 answers)
Active database storage
Infrequently accessed data
Data archives
Frequently accessed data
Cached session data
An organization is generating digital policy files which are required by the admins for verification. Once the files are verified they may not be required in the future unless there is some compliance issue. If the organization wants to save them in a cost effective way, which is the best possible solution?
AWS RRS
AWS S3
AWS RDS
AWS Glacier
A user has moved an object to Glacier using the life cycle rules. The user requests to restore the archive after 6 months. When the restore request is completed the user accesses that archive. Which of the below mentioned statements is not true in this condition?
The archive will be available as an object for the duration specified by the user during the restoration request
The restored object’s storage class will be RRS (After the object is restored the storage class still remains GLACIER. Read more)
The user can modify the restoration period only by issuing a new restore request with the updated period
The user needs to pay storage for both RRS (restored) and Glacier (Archive) Rates
To meet regulatory requirements, a pharmaceuticals company needs to archive data after a drug trial test is concluded. Each drug trial test may generate up to several thousands of files, with compressed file sizes ranging from 1 byte to 100MB. Once archived, data rarely needs to be restored, and on the rare occasion when restoration is needed, the company has 24 hours to restore specific files that match certain metadata. Searches must be possible by numeric file ID, drug name, participant names, date ranges, and other metadata. Which is the most cost-effective architectural approach that can meet the requirements?
Store individual files in Amazon Glacier, using the file ID as the archive name. When restoring data, query the Amazon Glacier vault for files matching the search criteria. (Individual files are expensive and does not allow searching by participant names etc)
Store individual files in Amazon S3, and store search metadata in an Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) multi-AZ database. Create a lifecycle rule to move the data to Amazon Glacier after a certain number of days. When restoring data, query the Amazon RDS database for files matching the search criteria, and move the files matching the search criteria back to S3 Standard class. (As the data is not needed can be stored to Glacier directly and the data need not be moved back to S3 standard)
Store individual files in Amazon Glacier, and store the search metadata in an Amazon RDS multi-AZ database. When restoring data, query the Amazon RDS database for files matching the search criteria, and retrieve the archive name that matches the file ID returned from the database query. (Individual files and Multi-AZ is expensive)
First, compress and then concatenate all files for a completed drug trial test into a single Amazon Glacier archive. Store the associated byte ranges for the compressed files along with other search metadata in an Amazon RDS database with regular snapshotting. When restoring data, query the database for files that match the search criteria, and create restored files from the retrieved byte ranges.
Store individual compressed files and search metadata in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Create a lifecycle rule to move the data to Amazon Glacier, after a certain number of days. When restoring data, query the Amazon S3 bucket for files matching the search criteria, and retrieve the file to S3 reduced redundancy in order to move it back to S3 Standard class. (Once the data is moved from S3 to Glacier the metadata is lost, as Glacier does not have metadata and must be maintained externally)
A user is uploading archives to Glacier. The user is trying to understand key Glacier resources. Which of the below mentioned options is not a Glacier resource?
AWS Glue is a fully-managed, ETL i.e extract, transform, and load service that automates the time-consuming steps of data preparation for analytics
is serverless and supports pay-as-you-go model. There is no infrastructure to provision or manage.
handles provisioning, configuration, and scaling of the resources required to run the ETL jobs on a fully managed, scale-out Apache Spark environment.
makes it simple and cost-effective to categorize the data, clean it, enrich it, and move it reliably between various data stores and streams.
also helps setup, orchestrate, and monitor complex data flows.
help automate much of the undifferentiated heavy lifting involved with discovering, categorizing, cleaning, enriching, and moving data, so more time can be spent on analyzing the data.
also supports custom Scala or Python code and import custom libraries and Jar files into the AWS Glue ETL jobs to access data sources not natively supported by AWS Glue.
supports server side encryption for data at rest and SSL for data in motion.
provides development endpoints to edit, debug, and test the code it generates.
Glue ETL engine to Extract, Transform, and Load data that can automatically generate Scala or Python code.
Glue Data Catalog is a central repository and persistent metadata store to store structural and operational metadata for all the data assets.
Glue crawlers scan various data stores to automatically infer schemas and partition structures to populate the Data Catalog with corresponding table definitions and statistics.
AWS Glue Streaming ETL enables performing ETL operations on streaming data using continuously-running jobs.
Glue Flexible scheduler that handles dependency resolution, job monitoring, and retries.
Glue Studio offers a graphical interface for authoring AWS Glue jobs to process data allowing you to define the flow of the data sources, transformations, and targets in the visual interface and generating Apache Spark code on your behalf.
Glue Data Quality helps reduces manual data quality efforts by automatically measuring and monitoring the quality of data in data lakes and pipelines.
Glue DataBrew is a visual data preparation tool that makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to prepare data with an interactive, point-and-click visual interface without writing code. It helps to visualize, clean, and normalize data directly from the data lake, data warehouses, and databases, including S3, Redshift, Aurora, and RDS.
AWS Glue Data Catalog
AWS Glue Data Catalog is a central repository and persistent metadata store to store structural and operational metadata for all the data assets.
AWS Glue Data Catalog provides a uniform repository where disparate systems can store and find metadata to keep track of data in data silos, and use that metadata to query and transform the data.
For a given data set, Data Catalog can store its table definition, physical location, add business-relevant attributes, as well as track how this data has changed over time.
Data Catalog is Apache Hive Metastore compatible and is a drop-in replacement for the Hive Metastore for Big Data applications running on EMR.
Data Catalog also provides out-of-box integration with Athena, EMR, and Redshift Spectrum.
Table definitions once added to the Glue Data Catalog, are available for ETL and also readily available for querying in Athena, EMR, and Redshift Spectrum to provide a common view of the data between these services.
Data Catalog supports bulk import of the metadata from existing persistent Apache Hive Metastore by using our import script.
Data Catalog provides comprehensive audit and governance capabilities, with schema change tracking and data access controls, which helps ensure that data is not inappropriately modified or inadvertently shared
Each AWS account has one AWS Glue Data Catalog per region.
AWS Glue Crawlers
AWS Glue crawler connects to a data store, progresses through a prioritized list of classifiers to extract the schema of the data and other statistics, and then populates the Data Catalog with this metadata.
Glue crawlers scan various data stores to automatically infer schemas and partition structures to populate the Data Catalog with corresponding table definitions and statistics.
Glue crawlers can be scheduled to run periodically so that the metadata is always up-to-date and in-sync with the underlying data.
Crawlers automatically add new tables, new partitions to existing tables, and new versions of table definitions.
Dynamic Frames
AWS Glue is designed to work with semi-structured data and introduces a dynamic frame component, which can be used in the ETL scripts.
Dynamic frame is a distributed table that supports nested data such as structures and arrays.
Each record is self-describing, designed for schema flexibility with semi-structured data. Each record contains both data and the schema that describes that data.
A Dynamic Frame is similar to an Apache Spark dataframe, which is a data abstraction used to organize data into rows and columns, except that each record is self-describing so no schema is required initially.
Dynamic frames provide schema flexibility and a set of advanced transformations specifically designed for dynamic frames.
Conversion can be done between Dynamic frames and Spark dataframes, to take advantage of both AWS Glue and Spark transformations to do the kinds of analysis needed.
AWS Glue Streaming ETL
AWS Glue enables performing ETL operations on streaming data using continuously-running jobs.
AWS Glue streaming ETL is built on the Apache Spark Structured Streaming engine, and can ingest streams from Kinesis Data Streams and Apache Kafka using Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka.
Streaming ETL can clean and transform streaming data and load it into S3 or JDBC data stores.
Use Streaming ETL in AWS Glue to process event data like IoT streams, clickstreams, and network logs.
Glue Job Bookmark
Glue Job Bookmark tracks data that has already been processed during a previous run of an ETL job by persisting state information from the job run.
Job bookmarks help Glue maintain state information and prevent the reprocessing of old data.
Job bookmarks help process new data when rerunning on a scheduled interval
Job bookmark is composed of the states for various elements of jobs, such as sources, transformations, and targets. for e.g, an ETL job might read new partitions in an S3 file. Glue tracks which partition the job has processed successfully to prevent duplicate processing and duplicate data in the job’s target data store.
Glue Databrew
Glue DataBrew is a visual data preparation tool that enables users to clean and normalize data without writing any code.
is serverless, and can help explore and transform terabytes of raw data without needing to create clusters or manage any infrastructure.
helps reduce the time it takes to prepare data for analytics and machine learning (ML).
provides 250 ready-made transformations to automate data preparation tasks, such as filtering anomalies, converting data to standard formats, and correcting invalid values.
business analysts, data scientists, and data engineers can more easily collaborate to get insights from raw data.
AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions
Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
An organization is setting up a data catalog and metadata management environment for their numerous data stores currently running on AWS. The data catalog will be used to determine the structure and other attributes of data in the data stores. The data stores are composed of Amazon RDS databases, Amazon Redshift, and CSV files residing on Amazon S3. The catalog should be populated on a scheduled basis, and minimal administration is required to manage the catalog. How can this be accomplished?
Set up Amazon DynamoDB as the data catalog and run a scheduled AWS Lambda function that connects to data sources to populate the database.
Use an Amazon database as the data catalog and run a scheduled AWS Lambda function that connects to data sources to populate the database.
Use AWS Glue Data Catalog as the data catalog and schedule crawlers that connect to data sources to populate the database.
Set up Apache Hive metastore on an Amazon EC2 instance and run a scheduled bash script that connects to data sources to populate the metastore.
I recently recertified for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) exam.
SOA-C02 is the updated version of the SOA-C01 AWS exam with hands-on labs included, which is the first with AWS.
NOTE: As of March 28, 2023, the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam will not include exam labs until further notice. This removal of exam labs is temporary while we evaluate the exam labs and make improvements to provide an optimal candidate experience.
SOA-C02 is the first AWS exam that included 2 sections
Objective questions
Hands-on labs
With Labs
SOA-C02 Exam consists of around 50 objective-type questions and 3 Hands-on labs to be answered in 190 minutes.
Labs are performed in a separate instance. Copy-paste works, so make sure you copy the exact names on resource creation.
Labs are pretty easy if you have worked on AWS.
Plan to leave 20 minutes to complete each exam lab.
NOTE: Once you complete a section and click next you cannot go back to the section. The same is for the labs. Once a lab is completed, you cannot return back to the lab.
Practice the Sample Lab provided when you book the exam, which would give you a feel of how the hands-on exam would actually be.
Without Labs
SOA-C02 exam consists of 65 questions in 130 minutes, and the time is more than sufficient if you are well-prepared.
SOA-C02 exam includes two types of questions, multiple-choice and multiple-response.
SOA-C02 has a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. The scaled score needed to pass the exam is 720.
Associate exams currently cost $ 150 + tax.
You can get an additional 30 minutes if English is your second language by requesting Exam Accommodations. It might not be needed for Associate exams but is helpful for Professional and Specialty ones.
AWS exams can be taken either remotely or online, I prefer to take them online as it provides a lot of flexibility. Just make sure you have a proper place to take the exam with no disturbance and nothing around you.
Also, if you are taking the AWS Online exam for the first time try to join at least 30 minutes before the actual time as I have had issues with both PSI and Pearson with long wait times.
Signed up with AWS for the Free Tier account which provides a lot of the Services to be tried for free with certain limits which are more than enough to get things going. Be sure to decommission anything, if you using anything beyond the free limits, preventing any surprises 🙂
Elastic Beanstalk helps to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud without having to worry about the infrastructure that runs those applications.
Understand Elastic Beanstalk overall – Applications, Versions, and Environments
SCP provides the maximum permission that a user can have, however, the user still needs to be explicitly given IAM policy.
Consolidated billing enables consolidating payments from multiple AWS accounts and includes combined usage and volume discounts including sharing of Reserved Instances across accounts.
Systems Manager is the operations hub and provides various services like parameter store, patch manager
Parameter Store provides secure, scalable, centralized, hierarchical storage for configuration data and secret management. Does not support secrets rotation. Use Secrets Manager instead
Session Manager provides secure and auditable instance management without the need to open inbound ports, maintain bastion hosts, or manage SSH keys.
Patch Manager helps automate the process of patching managed instances with both security-related and other types of updates.
collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, and visualizes it.
EC2 metrics can track (disk, network, CPU, status checks) but do not capture metrics like memory, disk swap, disk storage, etc.
CloudWatch unified agent can be used to gather custom metrics like memory, disk swap, disk storage, etc.
CloudWatch Alarm actions can be configured to perform actions based on various metrics for e.g. CPU below 5%
CloudWatch alarm can monitor StatusCheckFailed_System status on an EC2 instance and automatically recover the instance if it becomes impaired due to an underlying hardware failure or a problem that requires AWS involvement to repair.
Load Balancer metrics SurgeQueueLength and SpilloverCount
HealthyHostCount, UnHealthyHostCount determines the number of healthy and unhealthy instances registered with the load balancer.
Reasons for 4XX and 5XX errors
CloudWatch logs can be used to monitor, store, and access log files from EC2 instances, CloudTrail, Route 53, and other sources. You can create metric filters over the logs.
With Organizations, the trail can be configured to log CloudTrail from all accounts to a central account.
CloudTrail log file integrity validation can be used to check whether a log file was modified, deleted, or unchanged after being delivered.
AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security, compliance, and governance.
supports managed as well as custom rules that can be evaluated on periodic basis or as the event occurs for compliance and trigger automatic remediation
Conformance pack is a collection of AWS Config rules and remediation actions that can be easily deployed as a single entity in an account and a Region or across an organization in AWS Organizations.
Egress-Only Internet Gateway – relevant to IPv6 only to allow egress traffic from private subnet to internet, without allowing ingress traffic
VPC Flow Logs enables you to capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in the VPC and can help in monitoring the traffic or troubleshooting any connectivity issues
VPC Peering provides a connection between two VPCs that enables routing of traffic between them using private IP addresses.
VPC Endpoints enables the creation of a private connection between VPC to supported AWS services and VPC endpoint services powered by PrivateLink using its private IP address
Ability to debug networking issues like EC2 not accessible, EC2 not reachable, or not able to communicate with others or Internet.
Failover routing policy helps to configure active-passive failover.
Geolocation routing policy helps route traffic based on the location of the users.
Geoproximity routing policy helps route traffic based on the location of the resources and, optionally, shift traffic from resources in one location to resources in another.
Latency routing policy use with resources in multiple AWS Regions and you want to route traffic to the Region that provides the best latency with less round-trip time.
Weighted routing policy helps route traffic to multiple resources in specified proportions.
Focus on Weighted, Latency routing policies
Understand ELB, ALB, and NLB and what features they provide like
InstanceLimitExceeded – Concurrent running instance limit, default is 20, has been reached in a region. Request increase in limits.
InsufficientInstanceCapacity – AWS does not currently have enough available capacity to service the request. Change AZ or Instance Type.
Monitoring EC2 instances
System status checks failure – Stop and Start
Instance status checks failure – Reboot
EC2 supports Instance Recovery where the recovered instance is identical to the original instance, including the instance ID, private IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses, and all instance metadata.
EC2 Image Builder can be used to pre-baked images with software to speed up booting and launching time.
Lambda functions can be hosted in VPC with internet access controlled by a NAT instance.
RDS Proxy acts as an intermediary between the application and an RDS database. RDS Proxy establishes and manages the necessary connection pools to the database so that the application creates fewer database connections.
S3 data protection provides encryption at rest and encryption in transit
S3 default encryption can be used to encrypt the data with S3 bucket policies to prevent or reject unencrypted object uploads.
Multi-part handling for fault-tolerant and performant large file uploads
static website hosting, CORS
S3 Versioning can help recover from accidental deletes and overwrites.
Pre-Signed URLs for both upload and download
S3 Transfer Acceleration enables fast, easy, and secure transfers of files over long distances between the client and an S3 bucket using globally distributed edge locations in CloudFront.
Understand Glacier as archival storage. Glacier does not provide immediate access to the data even with expediated retrievals.
Storage Gateway allows storage of data in the AWS cloud for scalable and cost-effective storage while maintaining data security.
Gateway-cached volumes stores data is stored in S3 and retains a copy of recently read data locally for low latency access to the frequently accessed data
Gateway-stored volumes maintain the entire data set locally to provide low latency access
EFS is a cost-optimized, serverless, scalable, and fully managed file storage for use with AWS Cloud and on-premises resources.
supports data at rest encryption only during the creation. After creation, the file system cannot be encrypted and must be copied over to a new encrypted disk.
supports General purpose and Max I/O performance mode.
If hitting PercentIOLimit issue move to Max I/O performance mode.
FSx makes it easy and cost-effective to launch, run, and scale feature-rich, high-performance file systems in the cloud
FSx for Windows supports SMB protocol and a Multi-AZ file system to provide high availability across multiple AZs.
AWS Backup can be used to automate backup for EC2 instances and EFS file systems
Data Lifecycle Manager to automate the creation, retention, and deletion of EBS snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs.
AWS DataSync automates moving data between on-premises storage and S3 or Elastic File System (EFS).
Databases
RDS provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.
Multi-AZ deployment provides high availability, durability, and failover support
Read replicas enable increased scalability and database availability in the case of an AZ failure.
Automated backups and database change logs enable point-in-time recovery of the database during the backup retention period, up to the last five minutes of database usage.
Aurora is a fully managed, MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible, relational database engine
Backtracking “rewinds” the DB cluster to the specified time and performs in-place restore and does not create a new instance.
Automated Backups that help restore the DB as a new instance
Know ElastiCache use cases, mainly for caching performance
Understand ElastiCache Redis vs Memcached
Redis provides Multi-AZ support helps provide high availability across AZs and Online resharding to dynamically scale.
ElastiCache can be used as a caching layer for RDS.
S3 default encryption can help encrypt objects, however, it does not encrypt existing objects before the setting was enabled. You can use S3 Inventory to list the objects and S3 Batch to encrypt them.
Understand KMS for key management and envelope encryption
KMS with imported customer key material does not support rotation and has to be done manually.
AWS WAF – Web Application Firewall helps protect the applications against common web exploits like XSS or SQL Injection and bots that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources
AWS GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors the AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation.
AWS Secrets Manager can help securely expose credentials as well as rotate them.
Secrets Manager integrates with Lambda and supports credentials rotation
AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS
is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS.
automatically assesses applications for exposure, vulnerabilities, and deviations from best practices.
AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) handles the complexity of creating, storing, and renewing public and private SSL/TLS X.509 certificates and keys that protect the AWS websites and applications.
Know AWS Artifact as on-demand access to compliance reports
Analytics
Amazon Athena can be used to query S3 data without duplicating the data and using SQL queries
OpenSearch (Elasticsearch) service is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene.
Opensearch production setup would be 3 AZs, 3 dedicated master nodes, 6 nodes with two replicas in each AZ.
Integration Tools
Understand SQS as a message queuing service and SNS as pub/sub notification service
Focus on SQS as a decoupling service
Understand SQS FIFO, make sure you know the differences between standard and FIFO
Understand CloudWatch integration with SNS for notification
Practice Labs
Create IAM users, IAM roles with specific limited policies.
Create a private S3 bucket
enable versioning
enable default encryption
enable lifecycle policies to transition and expire the objects
enable same region replication
Create a public S3 bucket with static website hosting
Set up a VPC with public and private subnets with Routes, SGs, NACLs.
Set up a VPC with public and private subnets and enable communication from private subnets to the Internet using NAT gateway
Create EC2 instance, create a Snapshot and restore it as a new instance.
Set up Security Groups for ALB and Target Groups, and create ALB, Launch Template, Auto Scaling Group, and target groups with sample applications. Test the flow.
Create Multi-AZ RDS instance and instance force failover.
Set up SNS topic. Use Cloud Watch Metrics to create a CloudWatch alarm on specific thresholds and send notifications to the SNS topic
Set up SNS topic. Use Cloud Watch Logs to create a CloudWatch alarm on log patterns and send notifications to the SNS topic.
Update a CloudFormation template and re-run the stack and check the impact.
Use AWS Data Lifecycle Manager to define snapshot lifecycle.
Use AWS Backup to define EFS backup with hourly and daily backup rules.
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) Exam Day
Make sure you are relaxed and get some good night’s sleep. The exam is not tough if you are well-prepared.
If you are taking the AWS Online exam
Try to join at least 30 minutes before the actual time as I have had issues with both PSI and Pearson with long wait times.
The online verification process does take some time and usually, there are glitches.
Remember, you would not be allowed to take the take if you are late by more than 30 minutes.
Make sure you have your desk clear, no hand-watches, or external monitors, keep your phones away, and nobody can enter the room.
