Cloud Computing Cloud Architecture and Design Syllabus

Cloud Architecture and Design syllabus — full chapter and topic list

Expand any chapter to see its topics and sub-topics. This is the whole examinable outline for Cloud Architecture and Design in Cloud Computing, not a summary of it.

1. 1

   Well-Architected Frameworks

   6 topics

   • Operational Excellence Pillar
   • Security Pillar
   • Reliability Pillar
   • Performance Efficiency Pillar
   • Cost Optimization Pillar
   • Sustainability Pillar
2. 2

   Scalability and High Availability

   4 topics

   • Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
   • Fault Tolerance and Redundancy
   • Multi-Region and Multi-AZ Deployments
   • Disaster Recovery Strategies
3. 3

   Microservices Architecture

   5 topics

   • Monolith to Microservices Migration
   • Service Decomposition
   • Inter-Service Communication
   • Service Mesh
   • API Gateways
4. 4

   Event-Driven and Messaging Patterns

   4 topics

   • Message Queues
   • Publish-Subscribe Systems
   • Event Streaming with Kafka and Kinesis
   • Decoupling and Buffering
5. 5

   Resiliency and Reliability Patterns

   4 topics

   • Circuit Breaker Pattern
   • Retry with Exponential Backoff
   • Bulkhead and Throttling
   • Chaos Engineering
6. 6

   Cloud Migration Strategies

   4 topics

   • The 7 Rs of Migration
   • Migration Assessment and Planning
   • Data Migration Tools
   • Hybrid and Phased Migration

Cloud Architecture and Design flashcards for Cloud Computing

25 of 50 cards from the Cloud Architecture and Design deck — real questions with worked answers.

1. What are the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework?

   1) Operational Excellence, 2) Security, 3) Reliability, 4) Performance Efficiency, 5) Cost Optimization, and 6) Sustainability.

2. What is the focus of the Operational Excellence pillar?

   Running and monitoring systems to deliver business value, and continually improving processes and procedures. Key ideas: perform operations as code, make frequent small reversible changes, anticipate failure, and learn from operational failures.

3. Name three design principles of the Operational Excellence pillar.

   Perform operations as code (infrastructure and operations defined/automated), make frequent small reversible changes, refine operations procedures frequently, anticipate failure (pre-mortems), and learn from all operational failures.

4. What is the focus of the Security pillar?

   Protecting data, systems, and assets. It covers identity and access management, detective controls, infrastructure protection, data protection (in transit and at rest), and incident response.

5. State the principle of least privilege in the Security pillar.

   Grant each user, service, or component only the minimum permissions required to perform its function, and no more — reducing the blast radius of compromised credentials.

6. What does 'defense in depth' mean in cloud security?

   Applying multiple layers of security controls (network, host, application, data) so that if one layer fails, others still protect the system.

7. What is the focus of the Reliability pillar?

   Ensuring a workload performs its intended function correctly and consistently, and can recover from failures (infrastructure or service disruptions) and dynamically acquire resources to meet demand.

8. Name key design principles of the Reliability pillar.

   Automatically recover from failure, test recovery procedures, scale horizontally to increase aggregate availability, stop guessing capacity, and manage change through automation.

9. What is the focus of the Performance Efficiency pillar?

   Using computing resources efficiently to meet requirements and maintaining that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve — selecting the right resource types/sizes, monitoring, and making informed tradeoffs.

10. What is 'mechanical sympathy' in the Performance Efficiency pillar?

    Understanding how a technology works internally and choosing the technology approach that best aligns with your workload's access patterns and goals.

11. What is the focus of the Cost Optimization pillar?

    Avoiding unnecessary costs — understanding spending, selecting the most appropriate and right-sized resources, scaling to meet needs without overspending, and using managed services to reduce cost of ownership.

12. Name key design principles of the Cost Optimization pillar.

    Adopt a consumption model (pay only for what you use), measure overall efficiency, stop spending on undifferentiated heavy lifting (use managed services), analyze and attribute expenditure, and implement cloud financial management.

13. What is the focus of the Sustainability pillar?

    Minimizing the environmental impact of running cloud workloads — maximizing utilization, using more efficient hardware/software, reducing downstream impact, and adopting managed services to improve resource efficiency.

14. Give three design principles of the Sustainability pillar.

    Understand your impact, establish sustainability goals, maximize utilization (right-size), anticipate and adopt new more efficient hardware/software, use managed services, and reduce the downstream impact of cloud workloads.

15. Compare horizontal scaling (scale out) versus vertical scaling (scale up).

    Horizontal scaling adds more instances/nodes to distribute load; vertical scaling increases the resources (CPU, RAM) of a single instance. Horizontal offers near-limitless scaling and better fault tolerance; vertical is simpler but limited by max machine size and creates a single point of failure.

16. What is a key limitation of vertical scaling compared to horizontal scaling?

    Vertical scaling is bounded by the maximum size of a single machine and usually requires downtime to resize; it also retains a single point of failure. Horizontal scaling has no hard upper bound and improves availability.

17. Define fault tolerance.

    The ability of a system to continue operating correctly (possibly at reduced capacity) even when one or more of its components fail, typically achieved through redundancy and failover.

18. Define redundancy in system design.

    Duplicating critical components or data so that a backup can take over if the primary fails, eliminating single points of failure.

19. What is the difference between active-active and active-passive redundancy?

    In active-active, all redundant nodes serve traffic simultaneously (load shared, instant failover). In active-passive, a standby node stays idle until the active node fails, then takes over — cheaper but with failover delay.

20. What is a single point of failure (SPOF)?

    A component whose failure causes the entire system to stop functioning. Eliminating SPOFs through redundancy is central to reliable architecture.

21. What is an Availability Zone (AZ)?

    One or more discrete, isolated data centers within a region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking, connected via low-latency links. Multi-AZ deployment protects against data-center-level failures.

22. What is the difference between Multi-AZ and Multi-Region deployment?

    Multi-AZ spreads resources across isolated data centers within one region for high availability and low-latency failover. Multi-Region spans geographically separate regions for disaster recovery, lower global latency, and protection against region-wide outages, but adds complexity and data-replication cost/latency.

23. Why does cross-region replication introduce challenges that multi-AZ does not?

    Regions are far apart, so replication incurs higher network latency, data-consistency tradeoffs (often eventual consistency), higher cost, and data-sovereignty/compliance considerations.

24. What are the four common Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies, ordered by cost and recovery speed?

    1) Backup and Restore (cheapest, slowest), 2) Pilot Light, 3) Warm Standby, 4) Multi-Site Active/Active (most expensive, fastest). Speed and cost increase from backup/restore to active/active.

25. Define RTO (Recovery Time Objective).

    The maximum acceptable time to restore a system to operation after a disruption — i.e., how long you can afford to be down.

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