Ch13-02_Transcript_Question Breakdown_ Cloud Concepts.txt

Hello, Cloud Gurus, and welcome to this Question Breakdown. In this lesson, we're going to talk about the questions you might see as part of the Cloud Concepts domain in the exam. This domain accounts for 24% of your score toward passing the exam. Before we dive into questions, I wanted to c...

Hello, Cloud Gurus, and welcome to this Question Breakdown. In this lesson, we're going to talk about the questions you might see as part of the Cloud Concepts domain in the exam. This domain accounts for 24% of your score toward passing the exam. Before we dive into questions, I wanted to cover a strategy for taking questions on these AWS Certification exams, and I like to call it The 4 E's. The 4 E's are four steps that you can use to greatly increase your chances of getting a question correct on an AWS Certification exam. The very first thing you wanna do is examine the question and all of its options. Then you want to extract the most relevant information from the question itself. Next, you're going to want to go through your answers one by one and eliminate the obviously incorrect answer. If you've eliminated all but one answer, then you have your answer. If you have multiple answers remaining, then you can evaluate those remaining answers to figure out which one best fits the question. Let's see if we can apply this to some questions around Cloud Concepts. Question 1, which of the following scenarios are examples of scaling an IT architecture vertically? And this is a multiple answer question where you're going to be choosing two of the answers. Is it A, adding two more EC2 instances, B, resizing an RDS instance type from db.r5.large to db.r5.2xlarge, is it adding two more RDS instances, or is it resizing an EC2 instance type from a1.medium to a1.xlarge for more CPU and memory? If you want to take a stab at this question yourself, you can pause now. Otherwise, let's continue to walk through this question. So now that we have examined the question and the options, let's extract the important details from the question itself. This question is asking for examples of scaling vertically. What does it mean to scale vertically? Now let's see if we can eliminate one or more of the options on the right. Well, looking at these options, I can sort of see two pairs of similar answers. We've got two answers where we are resizing instances, and we've got two answers where we're adding more instances. So just by identifying these pairs, we've already increased our chances of getting this correct to 50%. Getting the correct answer is all about knowing the difference between vertical scaling and horizontal scaling. Increasing the size of instances is considered vertical scaling, while adding instances or scaling out is considered horizontal scaling. So if the answers you chose were B and D, you are correct. Let's move on to Question 2. Your application is highly available in one Region and is completely down. What could be the cause of this? Could it be A, a local zone experiencing an outage, B, a Region experiencing an outage, C, an Availability Zone experiencing an outage, or D, an edge location experiencing an outage? Don't forget, if you wanna try this one alone, pause now. Let's start by extracting the most relevant information. Our application is highly available in one Region and can't be accessed at all. What could cause this type of outage? Well, if you're familiar with the basic anatomy of the AWS network, you know that Regions are made up of Availability Zones, and anything that's highly available spans across multiple Availability Zones. So a single Availability Zone experiencing an outage could not be the cause of this issue. Edge locations are used by CloudFront to get static resources closer to end users, and these are highly available by design, so if a single edge location is down, we know that this wouldn't cause an application outage. Looking at these last two answers, we know that a total Regional outage would certainly cause an application to go down, even if it were highly available within that Region. You would need Multi-Region high availability in order for that application to stay up. So even if we don't know what a local zone is, I think we can safely eliminate that answer. Local zones are like Availability Zones but with a highly reduced set of services that are available, and these are often located in big cities where you want to get your applications super close to the end users. So if you chose B, you are correct. A Regional outage could cause a highly available application in one Region to go down. Let's move on to our final question. Question 3, which of the following is a design principle of the AWS Well-Architected Framework? We have A, disregard the business requirements, B, architect for failure, C, only build in one Availability Zone, or D, minimize experimentation. Pause now if you want to go it alone. Let's start by extracting some important information. We're looking for a principle of the Well-Architected Framework. This is different from the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. This is talking about one of the design principles. I think there are some pretty easy ones to eliminate in this question. AWS and cloud in general is all about experimentation. I don't think minimize experimentation is among the correct answers here. Also, you should never disregard the business requirements. Architecting for failure and only building in one Availability Zone are kind of at odds with each other. We know that to endure failure, you often want to build across multiple Availability Zones, so we can also safely eliminate C. If you chose B, you are correct. So I hope you find this idea of The 4 E's to be a helpful way to navigate these often tricky and wordy AWS exam questions. Don't be afraid to go back and review a lesson or two if you had any trouble with one or more of these questions. If you're feeling confident, let's move on to the next one. This has been David Blocher, and I'll see you there.