Day 49: Theory Question on AWS

Today I have covered Question Set on AWS.

Questions:

Name 5 aws services you have used and what are the use cases?

• EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud - It is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing it easier for developers. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.

• S3 - Simple Storage Service - It is a web service offered by Amazon Web Services that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its global e-commerce network.

• RDS - Relational Database Service - It is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.

• Lambda - It is a serverless computing service provided by AWS. It is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda runs your code only when needed and scales automatically, from a few requests per day to thousands per second.

• CloudFront - It is content delivery network offered by AWS. It is a global content delivery network service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to your viewers with low latency and high transfer speeds.

What are the tools used to send logs to the cloud environment?

• CloudWatch - It is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers.

• CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.

• CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers.

What are IAM Roles? How do you create /manage them?

• IAM - Identity and Access Management - It is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources for your users. You use IAM to control who can use your AWS resources (authentication) and how they can use resources (authorization).

• IAM Roles - It is an IAM identity that you can create in your account that has specific permissions. It is not associated with a specific user or group, and it is not permanent. It is a temporary identity that can be used by applications, services, or users assuming a role to perform an operation.

• How to create IAM Roles?

• Step 1: - Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the IAM console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/.

• Step 2: - In the navigation pane, choose Roles, and then choose Create role.

• Step 3: - Choose the service that will use this role. In this case, choose EC2, and then choose Next: Permissions.

• Step 4: - On the Attach permissions policies page, choose the permissions to attach to the role. In this case, choose AmazonS3FullAccess, and then choose Next: Tags.

• Step 5: - On the Add tags page, add any tags that you want to use to identify this role, and then choose Next: Review.

• Step 6: - On the Review page, type a name for the role, and then choose Create role.

Link For Learning More About IAM Roles: https://devops-rohit.hashnode.dev/day-38-cloud-security-aws-iam

How to upgrade or downgrade a system with zero downtime?

• Upgrading or downgrading a system with zero downtime in AWS can be achieved using various strategies and services provided by AWS. The process involves carefully planning and implementing the changes to minimize any impact on the system availability. Here are some steps and techniques you can use to achieve zero-downtime upgrades or downgrades:

• Elastic Load Balancers (ELB): Deploy your system behind an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) to distribute incoming traffic across multiple instances. During the upgrade or downgrade, you can take instances out of service one at a time, update them, and then add them back to the ELB.

• Auto Scaling Groups: Deploy your instances within an Auto Scaling Group (ASG) so that it automatically replaces instances with the new version while maintaining the desired capacity. This way, you can perform rolling updates with zero downtime.

• Blue/Green Deployment: Create a new environment ("Blue") with the updated version of your system alongside the existing environment ("Green"). Use Route 53 or an ELB to switch traffic gradually from the old environment to the new one.

• AWS CodeDeploy: Utilize AWS CodeDeploy, which allows you to automate application deployments to EC2 instances or on-premises instances. CodeDeploy supports both rolling updates and blue/green deployments.

• Amazon Elastic Beanstalk: If your system is built on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, it provides seamless updates to the underlying instances while maintaining the application's availability.

• Database Replication: If the upgrade or downgrade involves changes to the database, consider using database replication (e.g., Amazon RDS Multi-AZ or read replicas) to maintain a redundant copy of the database during the update process.

What is infrastructure as code and how do you use it?

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) means using code to define and manage your IT infrastructure instead of manually setting it up. This code describes what resources you need (like servers, networks, and databases) and how they should be configured. By doing this, you can automate the process of creating and updating your infrastructure, making it faster, more consistent, and easier to manage. It also allows you to version control your infrastructure, collaborate with others, and ensure that everyone is working with the same setup. Overall, Infrastructure as Code brings efficiency and reliability to infrastructure management.

What is a load balancer? Give scenarios of each kind of balancer based on your experience.

• Load Balancer - It is a device that acts as a reverse proxy and distributes network or application traffic across a number of servers. Load balancers are used to increase capacity (concurrent users) and reliability of applications.

• They improve the overall performance of applications by decreasing the burden on servers associated with managing and maintaining application and network sessions, as well as by performing application-specific tasks.

• Types of Load Balancers:

• Application Load Balancer (ALB) - It is a layer 7 load balancer that routes traffic based on advanced application-level information, such as the content of the request. It is best suited for load balancing of HTTP and HTTPS traffic and provides advanced request routing targeted at the delivery of modern application architectures, including microservices and containers.

• Network Load Balancer (NLB) - It is a layer 4 load balancer that routes traffic based on network-level information, such as IP addresses and ports. It is best suited for load balancing of TCP, UDP, and TLS traffic where extreme performance is required.

• Classic Load Balancer (CLB) - It is a legacy load balancer that routes traffic based on layer 4 information, such as IP addresses and ports, and layer 7 information, such as HTTP headers, cookies, and query strings. It is best suited for simple load balancing of HTTP and HTTPS traffic.

What is CloudFormation and why is it used for?

• AWS CloudFormation is a service that lets you define your AWS infrastructure as code using templates. With this CloudFormation, you can automate the creation, updating, and deletion of AWS resources. It helps maintain consistent and repeatable infrastructure configurations across different environments and simplifies the management of complex architectures. CloudFormation is useful for automating resource provisioning and ensuring that your infrastructure follows best practices and is easy to scale.

Difference between AWS CloudFormation and AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

• AWS CloudFormation is an Infrastructure as Code service that allows you to provision and manage AWS resources using templates, giving you full control over infrastructure management.

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform as a Service offering focused on simplifying the deployment and management of applications, abstracting away much of the infrastructure complexity for developers.

• Choosing between CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk depends on your specific use case. If you need fine-grained control over your infrastructure and want to manage the entire stack, CloudFormation is a better fit. On the other hand, if you want a managed platform for deploying applications without worrying about infrastructure details, Elastic Beanstalk is a more suitable choice.

What are the kinds of security attacks that can occur on the cloud? And how can we minimize them?

• Common types of security attacks on the cloud include data breaches, DoS/DDoS attacks, MitM attacks, insider threats, data loss, account hijacking, injection attacks, XSS, CSRF, and SSRF.

• To minimize these attacks:

• Implement strong access controls and encryption.

• Monitor and audit cloud activities regularly.

• Keep software up to date with security patches.

• Use firewalls and security groups to control traffic.

• Deploy intrusion detection/prevention systems.

• Conduct security testing and training for employees.

• Backup critical data and have a disaster recovery plan.

• Leverage cloud provider security services.

Can we recover the EC2 instance when we have lost the key?

• Yes, we can recover the EC2 instance when we have lost the key. We can do this by creating a new key pair and attaching it to the instance. We can also create an AMI of the instance and launch a new instance from the AMI with a new key pair.

What is a gateway?

• A gateway is a network node that connects two networks using different protocols together. It is a device that translates the protocols used by two different networks that are not directly connected. It is also known as a protocol converter.

What is the difference between Amazon RDS, Dynamodb, and Redshift?

• Amazon RDS: Managed relational database service for traditional databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. Suitable for applications with structured data and SQL queries.

• DynamoDB: Fully managed NoSQL database for high-performance, low-latency, and scalable applications, ideal for real-time and IoT use cases.

• Redshift: Managed data warehousing service optimized for running complex analytical queries on large datasets, best suited for data warehousing and business intelligence.

Do you prefer to host a website on S3? What's the reason if your answer is either yes or no?

• Yes, I would prefer to host a website on S3. It is a cost-effective and scalable solution for static websites. It also provides high availability and reliability with 99.99% uptime. S3 also supports custom domain names and SSL/TLS certificates, which are essential for hosting websites.

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Happy Learning :)