Exam Prep: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Foundations Week1

Week 1 from Coursera

https://www.coursera.org/learn/cloud-practitioner-exam-prep/home/week/1

Domain 1: Cloud Concepts

1. Benefits of the AWS Cloud

AWS Cloud allows you to focus on business value. A big part of this is looking at how utilizing AWS can help you shift your technical resources away from on-premises infrastructure management, such as server acquisition and maintenance, space-management cooling, and everything else that goes into running and or collocating your data center requirements. With these technical resources freed up, they're able to prioritize on other activities-- activities such as optimizing resource utilization, more efficient applications, better end-user experience, and more areas that will help your organization streamline operations and generate more revenue.

The ability to horizontally scale Amazon EC2 instances based on demand is an example of which concept in the AWS Cloud value proposition?

A, Economy of scale.

B, Elasticity.

C, High availability.

D, Agility

Answer: B

Economy of scale: gives AWS buying power and the ability to offer the services at a low cost to the consumer.

High availability: is about resiliency (弹性) in your architecture, and avoiding single points of failure.

Agility: is the ability to add and remove new or existing services quickly and easily.

2. Aspects of AWS Cloud Economics

1. TCO: Total cost of ownership.

There are four primary parts of TCO: operational expenses, or opex; capital expenses, or capex; labor costs associated with on-premises operations; and the impact of software licensing costs.

Opex: to put it simply, describes your operating costs. These are the day-to-day costs to your organization, such as services and items that get used up. Some examples of these types of expenses could be printer toner, website hosting, utilities, and other things required or necessary for your organization's progression and success. These aren't long-term investments, but the costs necessary to keep going.

Capex: on the other hand, are the costs associated with creating the longer-term benefits. This could be expenditures such as purchasing a building, servers, your printer that uses the toner mentioned before, and your power backups. Capex items are generally purchased once, and are expected to aid your organization for years.

Labor costs associated with on-premises operations: this is fairly self-explanatory. This is literally the labor costs you incur in order to handle your on-premises operations. For an example of this, think of the network operation center technicians who might handle the installation, configuration, troubleshooting, and management of your servers and infrastructure. They're paid for their labor, you need their labor to handle your on-premises infrastructure, so they're part of the labor costs associated with the on-premises operations.

The impact of software licensing costs: how any software licenses you are currently using might be affected by a move to the cloud. Can they be transferred, or do they require a different kind of license? Can you forego (放弃) your current licenses in favor of the ones managed by AWS?

2. How strongly the use of managed services can help reduce your technical workload and costs for variety of use cases? --rightsizing infrastructure, automation, reducing compliance scope, and the use of managed services

Which on-premises expense will be reduced if the company migrates their application to Amazon EC2?

A, Server hardware costs.

B, Amazon EBS storage costs.

C, Storage backup costs.

D, Cost of transferring data

Answer: A

Server hardware costs: costs are included on EC2 costs.

Amazon EBS storage costs: sounds like it could be good until you realize that when you're migrating to the AWS Cloud, using EBS will be a cost that you probably didn't have when you were operating the application on premises. And it is a separate cost from EC2.

Storage backup costs: moving to the cloud should help to reduce some of those storage costs, but storage backup costs are separate from EC2.

Cost of transferring data: this is a distractor because it is also a separate cost from EC2.

3. Cloud Architecture Design Principles

There are four design principles: designing for failure; decoupled components versus monolithic architectures; implementing elasticity in the cloud versus on-premises; and thinking parallel.

1. failure: what and how components fail, and how you can architect around it

A very simple example: building an application that could run on a single server, but using at least two servers instead. In this scenario, you would be designing your architecture with the failure of your single server as a consideration.

2. Decoupling components (AWS) versus Monolithic architectures

Monolithic architectures: all processes are tightly coupled, or connected, and run as a single service. An issue that can arise with this design is, if one process of the application experiences a spike in demand, the entire architecture must be scaled. Additionally, improving and updating monolithic applications can be more complex, because of the high level of interconnectivity.

Decoupling components: the one that now has two application servers. If your application was using a database, and it was on the same server as the rest of the components, then you could likely encounter a scenario where the needs of the database and the needs of the other application components are at different levels. Additionally, updates to one could mean downtime for both, and failure for one could mean failure for both. If, on the other hand, you decoupled your other application components from your database, then each would gain the ability to be scaled and managed based on their individual needs, and a failure for your other application components wouldn't immediately mean that your database was also failing.

3. Implementing elasticity in the cloud (AWS) versus on-premises.

In an on-premises environment, if the demand rises past what you currently have deployed, then managing that additional demand is very difficult. Additionally, if there is less demand, then your unused capacity becomes wasted money. In the AWS Cloud, you have the ability to dynamically change your capacity based on your demand.

4. Thinking parallel (horizontal scaling)

Serial and sequential processing, similar to monolithic, tightly coupled architectures, are incredibly limiting. Dependencies can make or break entire processes, and any failure in the chain, means a failure for the whole job. Thinking parallel is similar to decoupling, but you're looking at how you can divide a job into its simplest form, and then distribute that load to multiple components to handle the demand.

Which of the following is an AWS Cloud architecture design principle?

A, Implement single points of failure.

B, Implement loose coupling.

C, Implement monolithic design.

D, Implement vertical scaling.

Answer: B

Implement single points of failure: an anti-pattern of the concept to avoid single points of failure.

Implement monolithic design: the anti-pattern of the design principle to decouple and avoid monolithic designs.

Implement vertical scaling: the principle recommends implementing horizontal scaling whenever possible, and not vertical.

4. Domain Notes: Cloud Concepts

This credential helps organizations identify and develop talent with critical knowledge related to implementing cloud initiatives. Earning AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner validates cloud fluency and foundational knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

To learn more, see:AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

To earn this certification, you need to take and pass the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. The exam features a combination of two question formats: multiple choice and multiple response. Additional information, such as a detailed exam content outline, is in the exam guide.

To learn more, see:AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide

Cloud computing provides a simpler way to access servers, storage, databases and a broad set of application services over the internet. A cloud services provider, such as AWS, owns and maintains the network-connected hardware required for these application services, while you provision and use what you need via a web application. This style of computing offers many benefits that can help your business.

To learn more, see:Six Advantages of Cloud Computing

When you first start, AWS can seem overwhelming. A cloud-native paradigm of building infrastructure can be a radical departure from the traditional on-premises way of doing things. And regardless, if this is your first time working with infrastructure—or you've been tuning Linux kernels for the last decade—it can be hard to know where to start.

To learn more, see:AWS Fundamentals - Core Concepts

AWS Cloud Economics developed the Cloud Value Framework to help organizations build a comprehensive business case for cloud by measuring and tracking progress against four key dimensions of value: cost savings, staff productivity, operational resilience, and business agility. This paper shares how the AWS Cloud is transforming business and provides an analysis of these four aspects of business value.

To learn more, see:Business Value on AWS

AWS offers a couple of tools geared towards cost and pricing evaluation. If the workload details and services to be used are identified, the AWS Pricing Calculator can help you calculate the total cost of ownership. Migration Evaluator helps you inventory your existing environment, identify workload information, and design and plan your AWS migration.

To learn more, see:AWS Pricing/TCO Tools

Rightsizing is the process of matching instance types and sizes to your workload performance and capacity requirements at the lowest possible cost. It’s also the process of looking at deployed instances and identifying opportunities to remove or downsize them without compromising capacity or other requirements, which results in lower costs.

To learn more, see:Optimizing your cost with Rightsizing Recommendations

AWS Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. Based on five pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization—AWS Well-Architected provides a consistent approach for customers and AWS Partners to evaluate architectures, and implement designs that can scale over time.

To learn more, see:AWS Well-Architected

When you architect technology solutions on AWS, if you neglect the five pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization, it can become challenging to build a system that delivers on your expectations and requirements. Incorporating these pillars into your architecture helps produce stable and efficient systems. You can then focus on the other aspects of design, such as functional requirements.

To learn more, see:The 5 Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework

Link to Week 2: https://www.douban.com/note/839411170/?_i=58780557wHuhfS