Amazon Web Services
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What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
AWS is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform provided by Amazon. It offers over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally, enabling scalable, reliable, and inexpensive computing. AWS spans infrastructure technologies like computing power, storage, and networking, and supports organizations in achieving high performance.
What are the main services provided by AWS?
AWS provides core services like Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), Amazon Lambda, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). These services help in computing power, storage, databases, and network management in the cloud.
How does Amazon RDS differ from Amazon EC2?
Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service that automates administration tasks like hardware provisioning, while Amazon EC2 offers scalable compute capacity in the cloud. RDS is for database management, whereas EC2 is used for running applications on virtual servers.
What is Amazon S3 used for?
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a scalable cloud storage service that provides secure, durable, and highly-scalable object storage. It is used for storing and retrieving any amount of data from websites, mobile apps, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics.
What is AWS Lambda?
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You only pay for the compute time you consume, and Lambda automatically scales from a few requests per day to thousands per second, ideal for real-time file processing and data validation.
How does AWS support machine learning?
AWS offers a comprehensive machine learning platform that includes services like Amazon SageMaker for building, training, and deploying models at scale. It also provides pre-trained AI Services, frameworks, and infrastructure, enabling businesses to automate data analysis and make predictions.
What is Amazon IAM?
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables secure control over access to AWS services and resources. It allows users to create and manage AWS users and groups, and use permissions to grant or deny their access to AWS resources, enhancing security and managing identities effectively.
How do AWS Availability Zones work?
AWS Availability Zones are isolated locations within AWS regions that offer high availability and fault tolerance with low-latency network connectivity. They allow customers to operate production applications and databases that are more reliable, fault-tolerant, and scalable.
What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services. It supports several programming languages and frameworks, allowing developers to upload their code. Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles deployment details, including capacity provisioning and load balancing.
How is data security maintained in AWS?
AWS ensures data security through a combination of security services, compliance certifications, encryption, identity management, and continuous monitoring. Features include encryption in transit and at rest, network firewalls, automated security management, and real-time threat detection using AWS Security Hub.
What is the AWS pricing model?
AWS pricing is based on a pay-as-you-go model, offering flexibility with no upfront costs or long-term commitments. Billing aligns with actual usage in terms of compute hours, data transfers, and storage space, allowing customers to scale costs with business needs and optimize expenditure.
What is Amazon CloudFront?
Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally. It integrates with AWS services to optimize performance, improve security, and reduce latency by caching content closer to users.
How does AWS support hybrid cloud solutions?
AWS supports hybrid cloud solutions through services like AWS Outposts and AWS VPN. These services enable integration between on-premises data centers and AWS infrastructure, offering consistent API operations, enhanced migration capabilities, and seamless extension of data center operations to the AWS cloud.
What is AWS CloudFormation?
AWS CloudFormation is a service that provides templates for creating and managing AWS resources. By automating infrastructure-as-code processes, it helps automate the configuration and management of AWS resources, allowing users to build complex applications with reliable, version-controlled infrastructure setups.
What are AWS Regions?
AWS Regions are geographical clusters of data centers. Each region is independent and contains multiple availability zones. Organizations choose regions based on compliance, redundancy, and operational efficiency considerations, optimizing data residency and latency for specific requirements.
What is the purpose of Amazon Kinesis?
Amazon Kinesis is a platform for real-time data streaming, enabling collection, processing, and analysis of streaming data. It supports use cases like real-time analytics, monitoring applications, and log and event data processing, making it crucial for time-sensitive data streams.
How does AWS handle compliance?
AWS compliance is achieved through rigorous security and privacy standards, with certifications including ISO 27001, SOC 1/2/3, and FedRAMP. AWS provides tools to help customers meet shared responsibility for compliance, ensuring both security and adherence to global regulatory frameworks.
What is Amazon VPC?
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) enables the provisioning of logically isolated cloud resources, providing control over a virtual networking environment. Users can define IP addresses, subnets, route tables, and network gateways, effectively designing secure network environments in the cloud.
How do AWS Service Level Agreements (SLAs) work?
AWS Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define the level of service availability that AWS guarantees for services. SLAs state commitments to covering issues by offering service credits to customers, reinforcing reliability assurances for cloud service availability and performance metrics.
What is AWS Direct Connect?
AWS Direct Connect is a cloud service solution to establish a dedicated network connection between a user’s on-premises infrastructure and AWS. This connection helps reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience compared to internet-based connections.
What is Amazon DynamoDB?
Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service offering fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. It supports key-value and document data models, making it suitable for applications requiring high throughput and low latency in gaming, IoT, and mobile apps.
How does AWS assist in DevOps practices?
AWS provides a suite of DevOps tools to facilitate automation, integration, and continuous deployment practices. Services include AWS CodePipeline for automation, AWS CodeBuild for continuous integration, and AWS CodeDeploy for software deployment, streamlining the DevOps lifecycle.
What is Amazon EBS?
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) offers persistent block-level storage volumes for use with EC2 instances. Providing high performance and availability, EBS supports various workloads and ensures data durability through snapshots, making it ideal for databases, data warehousing, and big data analytics.
What is the function of AWS CloudTrail?
AWS CloudTrail enables governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of an AWS account. It records AWS API calls and events across services, helping users monitor changes to AWS resources and ensuring security through detailed user activity logs.
What are Amazon EC2 instance types?
Amazon EC2 offers various instance types optimized for different use cases, such as general purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, storage-optimized, and accelerated computing. Each type provides different combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity to efficiently support diverse workloads.
What is Amazon Route 53?
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It enables developers to route end-user requests to internet applications hosted on AWS, offering reliable access, zone mapping, DNS failover, and domain registration services.
What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides architects with best practices and guidance for building secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for applications. It assesses architectures against best practices in operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.
What is Amazon EMR?
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) is a cloud big data platform for processing large data sets using open-source tools like Apache Hadoop, Spark, and Hive. It simplifies the setup, operation, and scaling of big data environments, making large data analyses faster and more cost-effective.
How does AWS Glacier facilitate data archiving?
Amazon S3 Glacier provides secure, durable, and extremely low-cost cloud storage for data archiving. It is designed for infrequent access, offering long-term data retention with retrieval options balancing cost with access time, ideal for archiving critical data affordably.
What is the role of the AWS Management Console?
The AWS Management Console provides a simple, intuitive web-based user interface for managing AWS services. It offers a centralized view to manage cloud resources, from launching services to monitoring and billing, facilitating interactive management and customization of AWS environments.
How does AWS support Internet of Things (IoT) applications?
AWS IoT services enable secure device connectivity, integration, and analytics, supporting scalable IoT applications. Services like AWS IoT Core and AWS Greengrass manage device communication, data processing, and actionable insights, optimizing IoT solutions across industries like healthcare, agriculture, and smart homes.
What is AWS OpsWorks?
AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that facilitates automated deployments using Chef or Puppet. It helps developers manage applications and servers at scale while maintaining automation in configuration management and infrastructure to optimize application uptime and efficiency.
What is the function of AWS Snowball?
AWS Snowball is a data transport solution designed to move large amounts of data into and out of AWS efficiently and securely. It addresses challenges related to large-scale data transfer, leveraging portable storage devices for petabyte-scale transfers, reducing network costs and times.
What is Amazon Redshift?
Amazon Redshift is a fast, managed data warehouse service that simplifies and accelerates data analyses using SQL-based queries. It allows the execution of complex analytics across petabytes of structured data, ideal for business intelligence, reporting, and data warehousing applications.
How does AWS Fargate support container management?
AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers, enabling scalable, worry-free container management. By abstracting the underlying server infrastructure, Fargate allows deployment without provisioning EC2 instances, facilitating easy process management and cost efficiencies in containerized applications.
What is Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service for AWS cloud resources and applications. It collects and tracks metrics, monitors log files, sets alarms, and auto-reacts to changes in AWS resources, enhancing operational observability and response times.
What is Amazon SQS?
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables decoupling and scaling of microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. It supports asynchronous message queueing, ensuring reliable communication between software components within cloud architectures.
How does AWS promote application autoscaling?
AWS allows applications to dynamically adjust computing resources with Auto Scaling, enabling scalability based on load demands. This adaptability ensures applications run efficiently, maintaining cost control and optimizing performance through automated instance management in response to changing demands.
What is AWS Elastic File System (EFS)?
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a scalable, fully managed file storage service designed to be easily integrated with AWS compute services. It supports large-scale data sharing across applications, providing automatic scaling and enabling concurrent application access with low latency.
What is Amazon QuickSight?
Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-powered business intelligence (BI) service used for data analysis and visualization. It enables users to create and publish interactive dashboards derived from key insights, improving data-driven decision-making through powerful, easy-to-understand visualization tools.
How does AWS Glue support data integration?
AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service for cataloging, cleaning, and transforming data. It prepares data for machine learning and analytics, automating time-consuming data integration tasks, empowering rapid data preparation and enrichment for business intelligence.
What is the purpose of AWS Cloud9?
AWS Cloud9 is an integrated development environment (IDE) that facilitates rapid and efficient cloud development. It offers pre-packaged tools, supports multiple programming languages, and allows for code collaboration within a web-based workspace, accelerating the development and deployment cycle of applications.
What is AWS CodeCommit?
AWS CodeCommit is a secure and scalable source control service that hosts Git repositories. It assists teams in securely storing and managing code, maintaining versioning, and enabling collaborative development processes within fully managed cloud environments.
How does Amazon ElastiCache enhance application performance?
Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed, in-memory caching service that supports Redis and Memcached. It enhances application performance by boosting response times and throughput for querying data from databases, providing low-latency data access and scalable operations.
What is AWS Secrets Manager?
AWS Secrets Manager is a service for managing and automating access to secrets, like API keys and database credentials. It offers secure storage and rotation of secrets, reducing the risk of credentials exposure and improving application security.
How does AWS VPN support connectivity?
AWS VPN provides secure connections between on-premises networks and AWS using the internet. With AWS Managed VPN, organizations can establish encrypted tunnels for network traffic, enabling data protection and remote network access without the need for physical leased lines.
What is the role of AWS Artifact?
AWS Artifact is a comprehensive tool that provides access to AWS's security and compliance documents. It offers self-service access to AWS compliance reports and agreements, aiding customers in understanding security standards, auditing practices, and leveraging AWS’s shared responsibility model for compliance.
What is AWS Shield?
AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service. It safeguards applications operating on AWS by minimizing application downtime and latency through continuous detection and automatic inline protections, providing effective DDoS attack mitigation strategies.
How does AWS Backup facilitate data protection?
AWS Backup is a centralized backup service that simplifies and automates data protection across AWS services. It offers policy-driven backup management and compliance, supporting data backups for applications, databases, and storage resources, ensuring data durability and recovery in disaster scenarios.
What are AWS Reserved Instances?
AWS Reserved Instances provide a significant discount over On-Demand instances when you commit to using EC2 instances for a one- or three-year term. They offer flexibility in terms of instance size, OS, reporting, and optional capacity reservation, optimizing costs for predictable usage.