AWS Databases and Cache Overview

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Questions and Answers

What is the primary function of ElastiCache in an AWS architecture?

ElastiCache serves as an in-memory database that provides high performance and low latency, helping to reduce the load on databases for read-intensive workloads.

In what way does DynamoDB differ from traditional relational databases?

DynamoDB is a NoSQL key/value database, which means it does not rely on a fixed schema like traditional relational databases do.

How does DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) enhance performance for DynamoDB?

DAX significantly improves performance by providing a fully managed in-memory cache, reducing latency from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds.

What key feature distinguishes Amazon Redshift from other AWS databases?

Redshift is an OLAP (online analytical processing) data warehouse designed for analytics, as opposed to OLTP (online transaction processing) which is used for real-time transactions. Signup and view all the answers

Which components support the elasticity and performance of AWS applications using caches?

Components like Elastic Load Balancer, EC2 instances, and ElastiCache facilitate the elasticity and performance of AWS applications. Signup and view all the answers

What are the storage capabilities of DynamoDB?

DynamoDB can scale to handle trillions of rows and hundreds of terabytes of storage. Signup and view all the answers

Explain the security features associated with DynamoDB.

DynamoDB integrates with IAM (Identity and Access Management) for security, authorization, and administrative tasks. Signup and view all the answers

Why is Amazon RDS considered slower compared to ElastiCache?

Amazon RDS is a traditional SQL relational database which tends to have slower read/write speeds compared to the rapid access provided by ElastiCache's in-memory architecture. Signup and view all the answers

What are the main advantages of using Amazon Aurora over MySQL on RDS?

Amazon Aurora offers 5x performance improvement over MySQL on RDS and is optimized for AWS cloud infrastructure. Signup and view all the answers

What distinguishes Multi-AZ deployments from Read Replicas in RDS?

Multi-AZ deployments provide high availability by failing over to a standby instance during outages, while Read Replicas are used to scale the read workload. Signup and view all the answers

How does Amazon Aurora handle storage, and what is its maximum capacity?

Amazon Aurora storage automatically grows in increments of 10GB, with a maximum capacity of 64 TB. Signup and view all the answers

Explain the purpose of Multi-Region Read Replicas in Amazon RDS.

Multi-Region Read Replicas aid in disaster recovery and provide local performance improvements for global reads. Signup and view all the answers

What is Amazon ElastiCache, and what types of databases does it manage?

Amazon ElastiCache is a managed service that supports Redis and Memcached for in-memory data caching. Signup and view all the answers

What does EMR stand for and what is its primary purpose?

EMR stands for Elastic MapReduce, and its primary purpose is to create Hadoop clusters for processing vast amounts of data. Signup and view all the answers

How does Amazon Athena enable users to query data?

Amazon Athena allows users to query data stored in S3 using SQL capabilities in a serverless manner. Signup and view all the answers

Describe a key feature of Amazon QuickSight that supports business intelligence.

A key feature of Amazon QuickSight is its capability to create interactive dashboards powered by machine learning. Signup and view all the answers

What is DocumentDB designed for and how does it relate to MongoDB?

DocumentDB is designed for storing, querying, and indexing JSON data, similar to how MongoDB operates. Signup and view all the answers

What type of database is Amazon Neptune, and what is one of its common use cases?

Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database, commonly used for applications like social networking. Signup and view all the answers

Explain what QLDB stands for and its main function.

QLDB stands for Quantum Ledger Database, and its main function is to record and manage financial transactions in a ledger format. Signup and view all the answers

What are the benefits of using EMR for big data applications?

Using EMR for big data applications provides auto-scaling capabilities and simplifies provisioning and configuration. Signup and view all the answers

What security measures does Amazon Athena employ for accessing data?

Amazon Athena secures data access through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Signup and view all the answers

What are the key benefits of running apps in containers instead of traditional virtual machines?

Key benefits include consistent behavior across environments, reduced compatibility issues, and easier maintenance and deployment. Signup and view all the answers

Where are Docker images stored and what are the differences between public and private repositories?

Docker images are stored in Docker Repositories, with public images available on Docker Hub and private images stored in Amazon ECR. Signup and view all the answers

How does ECS differ from Fargate in terms of infrastructure management?

ECS requires users to provision and manage the underlying EC2 instances, while Fargate abstracts this away, allowing AWS to manage infrastructure automatically. Signup and view all the answers

Explain the role of Elastic Container Registry (ECR) in the AWS ecosystem.

ECR serves as a private Docker registry on AWS, where users can store and manage their Docker images for use with ECS and Fargate. Signup and view all the answers

What advantage does Docker provide in terms of resource usage compared to traditional virtualization?

Docker allows for shared resources with the host system, enabling multiple containers to run on a single server efficiently. Signup and view all the answers

What are the main features of Amazon QLDB?

Amazon QLDB is an immutable system that provides a cryptographically verifiable ledger of financial transactions, allowing for a comprehensive history of changes made to application data over time. Signup and view all the answers

How does Amazon Managed Blockchain differ from traditional blockchain solutions?

Amazon Managed Blockchain allows users to join public blockchain networks or create private networks, but lacks a decentralization component to comply with financial regulations. Signup and view all the answers

What role does AWS Glue play in data preparation?

AWS Glue is a serverless ETL service that helps in preparing and transforming data for analytics, while maintaining a Glue Data Catalog for dataset management. Signup and view all the answers

Describe the function of AWS DMS.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) facilitates the migration of databases to AWS securely and quickly, allowing the source database to remain available during the migration process. Signup and view all the answers

What are the key differences between relational databases like RDS and warehouse solutions like Redshift?

Relational databases like RDS are optimized for OLTP transactions, whereas Redshift is designed for OLAP, focusing on high-performance analytics and data warehousing. Signup and view all the answers

Why is Amazon DynamoDB considered a serverless key/value database?

DynamoDB is serverless because it automatically scales to accommodate workload demands without the need for manual provisioning of resources. Signup and view all the answers

How does ElastiCache improve database performance?

ElastiCache enhances database performance by providing an in-memory cache, reducing database load and improving data retrieval speeds. Signup and view all the answers

What does the Glue Data Catalog do?

The Glue Data Catalog serves as a centralized repository for metadata about datasets, allowing integration with other services like Athena, Redshift, and EMR. Signup and view all the answers

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Study Notes

RDS Solution Architecture

RDS uses an Elastic Load Balancer for distribution
Behind the balancer are EC2 instances which can include an Auto Scaling Group (ASG)
The instances interact with a Read/Write layer
The Read/Write layer interacts with an Amazon RDS SQL (relational) Database

Amazon Aurora

Aurora is a proprietary, not open-source, technology from AWS
It supports PostgreSQL and MySQL
It's optimized for the AWS cloud, achieving 5x performance increases compared to MySQL on RDS, and 3x over Postgres on RDS.
Aurora storage automatically extends in 10GB increments up to 64TB.
Aurora costs more than RDS(approximately 20%) but offers better efficiency.
It is not included in the free tier.

RDS Deployments: Read Replicas, Multi-AZ

Read Replicas:
- Scale the read workload for a database.
- Up to 15 read replicas are possible
- Data is written only to the main database
Multi-AZ:
- Provides high availability through failover in case of Availability Zone (AZ) outage.
- Data is written to, and only read from/written to, the primary database.
- Only one other AZ is allowed as a failover.

RDS Deployments: Multi-Region

Multi-Region deployments utilize Read Replicas for disaster recovery and improved local performance for global reads.
Replication is possible across different AWS regions.

Amazon ElastiCache Overview

ElastiCache provides managed Redis or Memcached in-memory databases for high performance and low latency.
It reduces the read load on the primary database.
AWS handles all OS maintenance and other management, such as backups, configuration and failure recovery.

ElastiCache Solution Architecture - Cache

EC2 instances, possibly in an ASG, interact with ElastiCache.
ElastiCache is used as a cache between the Elastic Load Balancer and the Amazon RDS SQL relational database.
Requests are directed first to ElastiCache for a fast read/write operation.
Slow read/write requests from ElastiCache are then directed to Amazon RDS.

DynamoDB

A fully managed, high availability database with replication across 3 Availability Zones.
It's a NoSQL database, not relational.
It scales to massive workloads through a distributed serverless architecture.
Delivers millions of requests per second, supporting data volumes up to hundreds of terabytes.
Its single-digit millisecond latency offers extremely low retrieval latency.
Integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for secure authorization.
It’s cost-effective and auto-scalable.

DynamoDB - Type of Data

DynamoDB is a key-value database.
Data is organized using primary and partition keys.
Data is structured using schemas, and attributes must be defined.

DynamoDB Accelerator - DAX

A fully managed, in-memory cache designed for DynamoDB.
It improves performance significantly, reducing latency from single digits to microseconds.
Provides scalability and high availability.
Designed for use only with DynamoDB, unlike ElastiCache.

Redshift Overview

Redshift is an analytic database service based on PostgreSQL, though not for OLTP.
It's used for online analytic processing (OLAP).
Data loading happens periodically (hourly rather than every second).
Superior performance compared to other data warehouses, supporting petabytes of data.
It uses columnar storage for efficiency.
It features massively parallel query execution (MPP) for high availability.
Its pay-per-use model is based on provisioned instances.
Supports standard SQL queries and integrates with business intelligence (BI) tools like QuickSight and Tableau.

Amazon EMR

EMR stands for Elastic MapReduce.
Creating Hadoop clusters for analyzing large datasets.
It supports various tools and technologies.
It handles the provisioning and setup of clusters, and offers auto-scaling and Spot Instances.
Used for big data processing, machine learning, and web indexing.

Athena Overview

A fully serverless database, with SQL capabilities, used for querying data in Amazon S3.
Querying is pay-per-query.
Results are stored in S3 and secured through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).
Used for ad-hoc SQL queries and serverless queries on S3, including for log analytics.

Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is a serverless machine learning-powered business intelligence service.
It generates interactive dashboards and visualizations.
It's fast, automatically scalable, and priced per session.
It provides diverse use cases, including business analysis, visualizations, ad-hoc analysis and extracting business insights using data.
It integrates with various AWS services including RDS, Aurora, Athena, Redshift, and S3.

DocumentDB

Aurora is an implementation of Postgres/MySQL…
DocumentDB is a NoSQL database similar to MongoDB (stores, queries and indexes JSON data).
It's fully managed, highly available via replication across 3 Availability Zones.
Auto-scaling to handle millions of requests per second.
Uses 10GB increments for storage extending up to 64 TB.

Amazon Neptune

Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database.
Suitable for datasets like social networks.
Highly available in 3 Availability Zones (with 15 read replicas).
Processes billions of relationships with millisecond latency.
Suitable for knowledge graphs, fraud detection, recommendations, and more.

Amazon QLDB

QLDB ("Quantum Ledger Database") is a ledger, essentially a log, for financial transactions.
A completely managed, serverless, and highly available service that provides ledger storage and change history recording that is cryptographically verifiable.
Immutable journal ensures that data cannot be corrupted, removed or modified, and offers better data integrity.
Replicates across 3 zones, suitable for financial applications and systems requiring data integrity.
Uses an SQL-based query language.

Amazon Managed Blockchain

Blockchain technology lets many parties conduct transactions without a central authority.
Amazon Managed Blockchain is a service managing this infrastructure.
Facilitates creation of private and public blockchain networks using well-known blockchain frameworks (like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum).

AWS Glue

A managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service.
Prepares and transforms data for analytics.
It's serverless.
Features a Data Catalog cataloging datasets.
Can be used with services like Athena, Redshift, and EMR.

DMS - Database Migration Service

Quickly and securely migrates databases to AWS.
Maintains Availability of the source database during the migration.
Supports homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations (e.g., Oracle to Oracle, SQL Server to Aurora).

Databases & Analytics Summary in AWS

Summary details for different types of databases & analytics options available (e.g., relational, in-memory, key-value, data warehousing)

Other Compute Section

[No specific details]

What is Docker?

Docker is a software platform for deploying applications.
Applications are packaged into containers, ensuring consistency across different systems.
The application runs equally regardless of the underlying OS. Offers no compatibility issues.
Docker is simpler to implement and maintain than traditional virtual machines, and it supports numerous technologies and languages.
Scalable; containers can be easily adjusted up or down.

Docker on an OS

Docker containers run on servers.

Where Docker Images are Stored

Docker images are stored in repositories.
Public repositories (like Docker Hub) provide standard image access.
AWS ECR (Elastic Container Registry) stands as private repository option.

Docker versus Virtual Machines

Docker is similar to virtualization, with containers sharing resources with the host server.

ECS

ECS (Elastic Container Service) automates and simplifies the process of deploying Docker containers.
ECS handles the provisioning, operations and management of the EC2 instances required to run the containers.
Allows easier integration with other AWS services (e.g., Application Load Balancer).

Fargate

Fargate is a serverless compute option for running containers within AWS.
Fargate eliminates the need to handle the underlying EC2 infrastructure for running Docker containers.
The AWS infrastructure manages the underlying server resources which eliminates the burden of operations and scaling of the virtual server, making it suitable for quick setup.

ECR

ECR (Elastic Container Registry) is an AWS service that acts as a private repository for Docker images.
ECR manages the storage and retrieval of your Docker images, facilitating use of Docker containers in other AWS services.

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Description

This quiz covers the primary functions and features of AWS databases and caching solutions, including ElastiCache, DynamoDB, and Amazon RDS. Test your understanding of how these services differ, their performance enhancements, and unique characteristics. Perfect for anyone looking to deepen their knowledge of AWS architecture.