Tag Archives: Amazon

AWS Solutions Architect – The Default VPC

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VPC

A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a virtual network dedicated to your AWS account. It is logically isolated from other virtual networks in the AWS Cloud. You can launch your AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, into your VPC. You can configure your VPC by modifying its IP address range, create subnets, and configure route tables, network gateways, and security settings.

For the Solutions Architect – Associate exam, it is very important that you are familiar with your default VPC that Amazon creates for your in AWS. The idea here is to shield you from the complexities of networking in the cloud and get you up and running as quickly as possible with resources such as EC2 instances that require the underlying Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) infrastructure.

Keep these key facts in mind regarding your default VPC:

  • The default IPv4 addressing is private
  • The default CIDR range is /16
  • Each subnet must be associated with a route table, which specifies the allowed routes for outbound traffic leaving the subnet
  • The route table for the VPC has a default route entry that directs traffic to an Internet Gateway
  • AWS provides two features that you can use to increase security in your VPC: security groups and network ACLs; security groups control inbound and outbound traffic for your instances, and network ACLs control inbound and outbound traffic for your subnets; in most cases, security groups can meet your needs; however, you can also use network ACLs if you want an additional layer of security for your VPC
  • The default network ACL permits all traffic inbound and outbound
  • If you have a default VPC and don’t specify a subnet when you launch an instance, the instance is launched into your default VPC
  • You can launch instances into your default VPC without needing to know anything about Amazon VPC
  • Each instance that you launch into a default subnet has a private IPv4 address and a public IPv4 address; these instances can communicate with the internet through the internet gateway; an internet gateway enables your instances to connect to the internet through the Amazon EC2 network edge
  • A VPC spans all the Availability Zones in the region

Pearson Education (InformIT)

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate – Database Services

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aws database

Overview

Getting ready for your Solutions Architect Associate exam? Let’s review the main database services of AWS as you will encounter many questions regarding these in your exam. Note that things will not get too detailed, and you can answer many questions right out of this post. You should also note that many of these technologies are not explicitly called out on the exam blueprint.

The Services

  • Relational Database Service (RDS) – optimized with various EC2 instance types, this relational database service supports Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.
  • Database Migration Service – used to take existing databases that are on-prem or with other clouds to the RDS service.
  • Aurora – a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database for the cloud that seeks performance balanced with open source compatibility.
  • DynamoDB – a fast, flexible NoSQL database service for applications that need a single-second millisecond latency at small to large scale.
  • DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) – a highly available, in-memory cache that reduces DynamoDB response times even further.
  • ElastiCache – used to create in-memory data stores (caches) in the cloud. This technology provides performance unheard of for disk-based databases and supports two open-source memory engines – Redis and Memcached.
  • Redshift – a high-performance, fully-managed data warehouse that provides data analysis using standard SQL and Business Intelligence tools.
  • Redshift Spectrum – allows running SQL queries against exabytes of unstructured data in Amazon S3 storage.

Summary

Unless you work with these everyday, it can be fairly difficult to remember the key principles of each one. I recommend making some handy flashcards to assist you in such areas! Be sure to subscribe to the blog where I will present many practice quizzes for you!
Pearson Education (InformIT)