Contents

AWS SysOps Administrator (SOA) study notes

Contents

Hello, world. Penned down some keywords after passing my recent AWS SOA exam, and then expanded on ’em below. Perhaps you’ll find ’em useful then.

EBS

RAID 0 (striped) vs. 1 (mirrored); i.e., the lower the number, the higher the risk, see https://www.diffen.com/difference/RAID_0_vs_RAID_1.

Just like EC2 instances, EBS volumes reside in a specific AZ of a Region; i.e., they can only be attached to a running instances within the same AZ. To switch AZs, use snapshots, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/AmazonEBS.html.

EC2

AMIs can be referred to as being backed by EBS, or ephemeral/instance store. Ephemeral/instance AMIs are stored in S3; i.e., terminating an EC2 instance running the S3-based AMI means that data in the root volume is gone forever, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ComponentsAMIs.html.

EBS optimized; i.e., minimizing contention between EBS I/O and other traffic from your EC2 instance, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSOptimized.html.

Cluster-type placement groups: low-latency grouping (of EC2 instances) within a single AZ, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/placement-groups.html.

RDS

Automated Backups allow users to restore to data within about 5 minutes of the current time, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_PIT.html.

S3

TA, as its name suggests, allows users to accelerate file transfers to S3, for when users are underutilizing available Internet bandwidth at upload time, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/transfer-acceleration.html.

VPC

Tenancy is typically default (i.e., shared) tenancy. Users cannot change from default to dedicated/host, and vice-versa, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/dedicated-instance.html#change-tenancy-vpc.

IPv4 CIDR blocks can range from large (/16 netmask, 65k addresses) to small (/28 netmask, 16 addresses), see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Subnets.html.

Direct Connect, use private (virtual interface) to connect to your VPC, public for services that aren’t in a VPC (e.g., Glacier), see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/directconnect/latest/UserGuide/WorkingWithVirtualInterfaces.html.

Within VPCs, there is a “local” route allowing communication between subnets using private IP addresses only, see <https://medium.com/@mda590/aws-routing-101-67879d23014d, https://acloud.guru/forums/aws-certified-solutions-architect-professional/discussion/-KGl5vgVKjHuXcpWM0S6/communication_between_subnets>.

Windows

Active Directory and AWS, see <https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-connect-your-on-premises-active-directory-to-aws-using-ad-connector/, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/directoryservice/latest/admin-guide/ms_ad_tutorial_setup_trust.html>.

Windows EC2 instances can be configured using EC2Config (2.2.10+) to export data to CloudWatch, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/ec2config-service.html.