Tag Archives: AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate level exam

AWS SWF, Beanstalk, EMR, Cloudfomation revision before the CSA exam

SWF

Max simultaneous workflows executions 1,00,000
C++ is not supported in SWF
There are three actors :
- activity workers
- workflow starters
- deciders
Each workflow runs in the domain which is a collection of tasks.
Workflows in different domains can not interact

Beanstalk

Scala, WebSphere is not available in Beanstalk
Its free service. You will be charged for resources it provisions for your application
Supported platforms :
- Java
- Ruby
- Python
- PHP
- Node.js
- .net
- Go
- Docker

Cloudfront

One AWS account can have 100 CF origin access identities at max.
Key pairs are only used for EC2 and CloudFront.
All CloudFront URL ends with cloudfront.net
Cloudfront origins can be S3 bucket, EC2, webserver in an on-premise datacenter
It can serve private content by S3 origin access identifiers, signed URLs, and signed cookies.
Limits :
- Req per sec per distribution : 1,00,000
- Transfer rate per distribution : 40 Gbps
- Origins per distribution : 25
- web distributions per account : 200

AWS Infra

Total availability zones currently are 42.
The total regions are 16.
First 3 services launched by AWS are SQS (2004), S3 (2006), EC2 (later in 2006)

AWS CloudFront, SNS, SQS revision before the CSA exam

AWS Cloudfront

Origin can be S3 bucket or CNAME of Elastic Load Balancer ELB
S3 bucket as the origin. URL will be bucket_name.s3-reagion.cloudfront.net
Private content sharing with signed URL with an expiration time limit
To serve a new object version, create a new distribution, or create invalidation of the old objects. Since invalidation costs, creating new distribution always helps.
Limits :
- 1,00,000 Requests per second per distribution
- 200 distributions per account
- 40Gbps speed per distribution
- 25 origins per distribution
- 20 GB max file size to serve
By default, object expiration is 24 hours. The minimum TTL is 0.

Amazon SNS

The latest addition to SNS is Lambda
SNS has two clients: Publishers and subscribers
Publishers communicate with subscribers by sending messages to the topic.
Protocol supported :
- HTTP
- HTTPS
- SMS
- email
- email-JSON
- Amazon SQS
- AWS Lambda
SNS Topic of the same name can be created after 30-60 seconds the previous topic deleted.

Amazon SQS

The default visibility timeout is 30 secs. The maximum is 12 hours.
Mainly used to decouple your application
The default period message stays in queue is 4 days. Min-Max periods are 1 min to 2 weeks.
The maximum SQS message size is 256KB.
Supports an unlimited number of queues and unlimited messages per queue.
Long polling can be done from 1 to 20 secs.

AWS VPC, Route53, IAM revision before the CSA exam

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Quick revision on topics AWS VPC, Route53, IAM before appearing AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam.

This article notes down a few important points about AWS (Amazon Web Services) VPC, Route53, and IAM. This can be helpful in last-minute revision before appearing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate level certification exam.

This is the second part of the AWS CSA revision series. Rest of the series listed below :

In this article, we are checking out key points about VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), Route53 (DNS Service) and IAM (Identity and Access Management).

Recommended read : AWS CSA exam preparation guide

Lets get started :

VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)

NACL (Network Access Control List) controls traffic security at the subnet level
Security groups control traffic security at the instance level
NACL is stateless (i.e. all traffic need to exclusively allow) while Security groups are stateful (i.e. response traffic is automatically allowed)
Only 1 Internet gateway per VPC is allowed.
VPC peering can be done between two AWS accounts or other VPS within the same region.
VPC peering is a direct network route between two VPC enabling sharing resources in different subnets.
Limits :
- 5 VPC per region
- 50 customer gateways per region
- 200 route table per region
- 50 entries per route table
- 5 elastic IP
- 5 security group per network interface
- 500 security groups per VPC
- 50 rules per security group
First 4 and last 1 IP of each subnet is reserved by AWS as below :
- x.x.x.0: Network IP
- x.x.x.1 : VPC router IP
- x.x.x.2: For VPC DNS
- x.x.x.3: For future use
- x.x.x.255: Broadcast IP

Route 53

Can register domain, act as DNS, Check health of resources.
Port 53 used to serve request by DNS hence the name route 53!
Primarily TCP used to serve DNS request but if the response is more than 512 bytes it will use TCP.
Currently supported records :
- A (address record)
- AAAA (IPv6 address record)
- CNAME (canonical name record)
- MX (mail exchange record)
- NAPTR (name authority pointer record)
- NS (name server record)
- PTR (pointer record)
- SOA (start of authority record)
- SPF (sender policy framework)
- SRV (service locator)
- TXT (text record)
Routing policies :
- Simple routing: Single resource serving traffic
- Weighted routing: Divert proportion wise traffic to multiple resources
- Latency routing: Returns result with the lowest latency to requestor origin
- Failover routing: Active-passive. One resource takes traffic when the other one is failed
- Geolocation routing: Returns DNS queries based on the geolocation of the user
Limits :
- 500 hosted zones per AWS account
- 50 domains per AWS account
Ideal TTL values for CNAME to the existing domain are 24 hours and CNAM to S3 or ELB is 1 hour.
There is no default TTL for any record type in Route 53. You have to specify TTL for your records.
Weights can be assigned as integer 0 to 255. 0 means no weight i.e. don’t route to that record. The probability of routing to be done to a particular record equals to the weight of that record/Sum of all record weights.

IAM (Identity and Access Management)

Never use the root account for login. Create an admin user and use it for administrative tasks
Created users, groups and roles are global and available across all regions in the same AWS account
Prebuilt policy for :
- Administrator – All access
- Power-user – Everything administrator has except IAM management access
- Read-only – Only view access (accounting purpose)
By default, the newly created user has normal deny on all AWS resources. Explicit allow will override normal deny.
Cross account roles can be defined. It assumes access of other users granted to another user.
The public key can be viewed in the account settings anytime. The private key visible only at the time of creation. If lost can not be retrieved and need to create fresh key pair to use.

AWS EC2, S3, RDS revision before the CSA exam

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

Its an AWS service that provides scalable virtual servers in cloud.
Pricing models are Reserved instances, On-demand instances, and spot instances.
Reserved are less costly since you reserve in advance by paying partial or full.
On-demand ones are costliest. But their launching depends on current available capacity in that zone
Spot instances are bidding unused instances in the Amazon marketplace (cheapest of all). They are allocated and withdrawn according to your bid price.
Max 20 running and 20 shut-down instances can exist per account.
AMI is Amazon Machine Image used to deploy/install the pre-configured OS on EC2 instances.
Instance store backed volumes are ephemeral storage and lost their data once the instance is off
EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes hold data permanently regardless of instance state.
EBS volume size: Min 1 GiB, Max 16384 GiB (16 Tib)
EBS volume can be attached to 1 instance at a time. It cannot be attached to an instance in a different availability zone.
EBS : 3 IOPS per GiB with a minimum of 100 IOPS, burstable to 3000 IOPS
EBS Provisioned IOPS. 50:1 ratio to be maintained.
RAID 5 and RAID 6 are not recommended for EBS by AWS.
IOPS are measures in chucks of 256KB or smaller.
EC2-Classic is a deprecated service. Exist in accounts before 24 Dec 2013.
The default session timeout for ELB is 60 sec.
5 Elastic IPs per region only.
Key pairs are used by EC2 and CloudFront only.
SAML URL https://signin.aws.amazon.com/saml
Maximum 2 key pairs can be kept per user.
Elastic Load Balancer ELB modes :
- Idle connection timeout
- Cross zone load balancing
- Connection draining
- Proxy protocol
- Sticky session
- Health checks
Auto Scaling plans :
- Current instant levels
- Manual scaling
- Dynamic scaling
- Scheduled scaling
ELB session timeout is 60 sec.
Timeout for connection draining in ELB is 1 sec to 3600 sec. The default is 300 sec.

S3 (Simple Storage Service)

objects (files) are stored in buckets. All root folders are buckets and must have a unique name across all AWS infra
Unlimited storage and high availability by default
99.999999999% (Eleven 9’s) durability and 99.99% availability for data stored on S3
User can enable AES-256 encryption for data at rest
Versioning can be enabled but can not be disabled. It can only be suspended then.
Life cycle policies can be defined for deletion or archival.
The glacier is a low-cost storage option for archiving data. Data in and out of Glacier takes hours or days.
Glacier costs 1 cent / 1 GB for a year.
Object size : min 0 bytes, max 5 TB
Object more than 100MB must use the multipart upload function
All regions support read after write consistency for PUTS (new object) and eventual consistency for PUTS (overwrite) & DELETE.
The object always stays within the region and synced across all availability zones.
The S3 infrequent access (S3-IA) storage class has object durability of 99.999999999% and availability of 99.90%
Max object size in a single put is 5GB.

RDS (Relation Database Service)

Its fully managed database service in the cloud.
Supported databases: Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL, Aurora (Amazon homegrown SQL DB)
Scale underlying hardware automatically
Support read replicas of SQL based DB
Disk space : min 5GB, max 3TB
Default database port: 3306
RDS backup retention policy : 0 days min (no backup) to 35 days max.

DynamoDB

Dynamodb supports in-place atomic updates
Dynamodb defaults in the US west Oregon region.
Max 1MB of data can be retrieved in the single query operation.

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