CLF flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Six advantages of cloud

Variable expense instead of capital expense, massive economies of scale, no capacity guessing, greater speed and agility, no data center maintenance spending, and the ability to go global in minutes.

Cloud deployment models

Cloud is fully hosted by a provider, on-premises keeps resources in your own facility, and hybrid connects cloud resources with on-premises infrastructure so workloads can span both.

IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

IaaS gives you virtualized infrastructure where you manage the OS upward; PaaS manages the platform so you deploy code; SaaS delivers a complete application you only configure and use.

Availability Zone

One or more discrete data centers within a Region, with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, isolated from other zones so a single failure does not affect the others.

Elasticity versus scalability

Elasticity automatically adds or removes capacity to match current demand, while scalability is the structural ability to grow, either by using larger resources or by adding more resources.

Well-Architected Framework pillars

Six pillars guide design reviews: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. The framework is used for workload assessments and improvement plans.

Fault tolerance versus high availability

Fault tolerance keeps a workload running despite component failure with no interruption, while high availability minimizes downtime and recovers quickly, typically across multiple Availability Zones.

Shared Responsibility Model

AWS secures the cloud itself, including facilities, hardware, and the virtualization layer. Customers secure what they put in the cloud, including data, identities, guest operating systems, and firewall rules.

IAM roles versus users

Users are long-term identities with credentials. Roles are assumed temporarily and issue short-lived credentials, which is preferred for applications, EC2 instances, and cross-account access.

Least privilege

Grant only the permissions needed for a specific task. Scope policies to specific actions and resource ARNs, add conditions, and avoid wildcards so a compromised identity has limited impact.

Security group versus network ACL

Security groups are stateful, attach to instances or ENIs, and only allow traffic. Network ACLs are stateless, attach to subnets, and can both allow and deny traffic.

AWS CloudTrail

A service that records API calls made in an AWS account, showing who did what, from where, and when. It supports auditing, security investigation, and compliance evidence.

AWS Artifact

A self-service portal that provides AWS compliance reports such as SOC and ISO certifications, plus online agreements. Customers use it to collect audit evidence for their own compliance programs.

AWS Shield

A managed distributed denial-of-service protection service. Shield Standard is automatic and free for all customers; Shield Advanced adds enhanced detection, response support, and cost protection.

Encryption at rest and transit

At rest protects stored data using keys such as S3 SSE-KMS or EBS encryption. In transit protects data moving over networks using TLS between clients and AWS services.

Amazon GuardDuty

A managed threat detection service that continuously monitors account activity, VPC flow logs, and DNS logs for malicious or unauthorized behavior and produces prioritized findings.

AWS Lambda

A serverless compute service that runs code in response to events, scales automatically, and charges only for requests and compute duration, so no servers are provisioned or managed.

Amazon EC2 purchasing options

On-Demand for flexible hourly use, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances for one- or three-year discounts, Spot for interruptible discounted capacity, and Dedicated Hosts for licensing or compliance.

S3 versus EBS versus EFS

S3 stores objects accessed over HTTP, EBS provides block storage for one EC2 instance, and EFS provides a shared elastic file system mountable by many Linux instances at once.

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive

The lowest-cost S3 storage class, designed for long-term retention of data accessed rarely, with retrieval times measured in hours and a minimum storage duration of 180 days.

Amazon RDS versus DynamoDB

RDS is a managed relational service for engines such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. DynamoDB is a serverless key-value NoSQL database built for single-digit millisecond performance at scale.

Amazon VPC

A logically isolated virtual network in AWS where you define IP ranges, subnets, route tables, and gateways to control how resources communicate internally and with the internet.

NAT gateway

A managed component in a public subnet that lets instances in private subnets initiate outbound internet traffic while preventing the internet from initiating inbound connections to them.

Amazon CloudFront

A content delivery network that caches content at edge locations worldwide, reducing latency for users and lowering load on origin resources such as S3 buckets or web servers.

Amazon Route 53

A managed DNS service that translates domain names to IP addresses and supports routing policies including simple, weighted, latency, failover, geolocation, and multivalue answers.

AWS Trusted Advisor

A service that inspects an account and gives recommendations across cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service quotas, with more checks on higher support plans.

AWS pricing fundamentals

Pay for what you use, pay less when you reserve capacity in advance, and pay less per unit as usage grows through volume and tiered pricing across many services.

AWS Free Tier types

Always-free offers that never expire, twelve-month free offers starting at account creation, and short-term trials. Usage beyond the limits is billed at standard on-demand rates.

AWS Support plans

Basic is free; Developer adds technical email support; Business adds 24/7 phone and chat with production guidance; Enterprise On-Ramp and Enterprise add faster response and a Technical Account Manager.

Consolidated billing

An AWS Organizations feature that combines usage across member accounts into one bill, enabling volume discounts and sharing of Reserved Instance and Savings Plan benefits.

AWS Cost Explorer

A tool that visualizes historical spend by service, account, or tag, and forecasts future costs, helping identify trends and decide where to optimize spending.

AWS Pricing Calculator

A web tool for estimating the monthly cost of an architecture before deployment by selecting services, Regions, usage amounts, and pricing models such as On-Demand or Reserved.