Section 3.3 - AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide

This series is intended to be a personal study guide. Information may not be comprehensive or accurate. I am sharing it in case others find it useful. Please feel free to comment if any information is inaccurate.

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3.3 Identify the core AWS services

Describe the categories of services on AWS

• Compute - instances, containers, serverless computing
• Storage- scalable, reliable, secure, fast-access
• Network - VPCs, connections to other cloud resources and the internet
• Database - managed database services cover a wide range of database types and use cases

Identify AWS compute services

• Recognize there are different compute families
  • Each instance type offers different compute, memory, and storage capabilities, and is grouped in an instance family based on these capabilities
• Recognize the different services that provide compute
  • Lambda
    • Run code without provisioning infrastructure
    • Respond to code execution requests
    • Pay per millisecond
  • Elastic Container Service (ECS)
    • Fully managed container orchestration service
    • Launch containers with preferred CI/CD and automation tools
  • EC2
    • Offers complete control over compute resources with choice of processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model
• Recognize that elasticity is achieved through auto-scaling
  • Compute services automatically adjust to meet workload demands
• Identify the purpose of load balancers
  • Distribute network traffic to improve application scalability

Identify the different AWS storage services

• Describe S3
  • Object storage with eleven 9s of durability (99.999999999%)
  • Multiple storage classes to reduce cost
    • Standard
    • Intelligent Tiering - optimizes storage costs by monitoring access patterns
    • Standard Infrequent Access - data accessed less frequently but needed quickly
    • One Zone Infrequent Access - similar to standard, but for workloads that don’t require availability
    • Glacier - archive storage
    • Glacier Deep Archive - long-term archive storage
  • Data stored in Buckets
  • Charges for storage and for retrieval
• Describe S3 Glacier
  • S3 storage class designed for archive storage
  • Data transfer takes minutes to hours
  • Glacier Deep Archive is lowest-cost storage class
• Describe Elastic Block Store (EBS)
  • Block storage service designed for EC2
  • Multiple volume types to optimize performance and cost
  • SSD for transactional workloads
  • HDD for throughput intensive workloads
• Describe Snowball
  • Edge computing, data migration, and edge storage device
  • Storage Optimized - block and object storage suitable for local storage and data transfer
  • Compute Optimized - more CPUs and an optional GPU for added compute
• Describe Elastic File System (EFS)
  • File system that automatically grows and shrinks as files are added and removed
  • Provisioning and maintenance are not required
  • Share file data between applications
• Describe Storage Gateway
  • Hybrid cloud services that connect on-prem applications with cloud storage
  • Move backups to the cloud, cache data locally for low-latency

Identify AWS networking services

• Identify VPC - isolate cloud resources by building a virtual network environment
• Identify security groups - virtual firewall for instance in a VPC
• Identify the purpose of Route 53 - DNS service for routing users to applications
• Identify VPN, Direct Connect
  • VPN - build a cloud-based VPN on the Amazon network
  • Direct Connect - bypass public internet and connect to AWS resources directly through the AWS network

Identify different AWS database services

• Install databases on EC2 compared to managed databases
  • Choosing between Amazon RDS, Amazon EC2 or VMware Cloud on AWS for Your Oracle Database
  • Managed are easier to setup, manage, and maintain
  • EC2 databases offer more control and flexibility
• Identify RDS
  • Relational Database Service
  • Managed relational database service
  • Multiple database engines available (Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server)
• Identify DynamoDB
  • NoSQL key-value database
  • Single-digit millisecond performance and near infinite throughput
  • Easily integrates with other AWS services
• Identify Redshift
  • Data warehouse
  • Connect to data storage and to analytics tools
  • Uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across multiple sources

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