DevOps Cloud Providers Syllabus

Cloud Providers syllabus — full chapter and topic list

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

1. 1

   Introduction to Cloud Computing

   2 topics

   • Cloud Concepts and Practices
   • Benefits of Cloud Computing
2. 2

   AWS Basics

   4 topics

   • EC2
   • S3
   • RDS
   • IAM
3. 3

   Azure Basics

   4 topics

   • Virtual Machines
   • Blob Storage
   • Azure SQL Database
   • Azure Active Directory
4. 4

   Google Cloud Basics

   4 topics

   • Compute Engine
   • Cloud Storage
   • Cloud SQL
   • Cloud IAM

Cloud Providers flashcards for DevOps

25 of 51 cards from the Cloud Providers deck — real questions with worked answers.

1. What is cloud computing?

   The on-demand delivery of IT resources (compute, storage, databases, networking, software) over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing, instead of owning and maintaining physical data centers and servers.

2. What are the three main cloud service models?

   IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) - raw compute/storage/networking; PaaS (Platform as a Service) - managed platform for building apps; SaaS (Software as a Service) - fully managed applications delivered over the internet.

3. What are the four main cloud deployment models?

   Public cloud (shared, provider-owned), Private cloud (dedicated to one organization), Hybrid cloud (mix of public and private), and Community/Multi-cloud (shared by several organizations or spanning multiple providers).

4. In the shared responsibility model, who secures what?

   The cloud provider is responsible for security OF the cloud (hardware, infrastructure, facilities); the customer is responsible for security IN the cloud (data, access management, OS/app configuration, encryption).

5. What is the difference between vertical and horizontal scaling?

   Vertical scaling (scaling up) means adding more power (CPU/RAM) to an existing machine; horizontal scaling (scaling out) means adding more machines/instances to distribute load.

6. What is elasticity in cloud computing?

   The ability to automatically acquire and release resources to match demand in real time, so you only use (and pay for) what you need at any given moment.

7. List the six key benefits of cloud computing (AWS framing).

   1) Trade capital expense for variable expense, 2) Benefit from massive economies of scale, 3) Stop guessing capacity, 4) Increase speed and agility, 5) Stop spending money running/maintaining data centers, 6) Go global in minutes.

8. What is the difference between CapEx and OpEx in the cloud context?

   CapEx (capital expenditure) is upfront spending on owned hardware/data centers; OpEx (operational expenditure) is ongoing pay-as-you-go spending. Cloud shifts IT costs from CapEx to OpEx.

9. What does high availability mean and how does the cloud achieve it?

   High availability is keeping a system operational with minimal downtime. The cloud achieves it through redundancy across multiple Availability Zones/regions, load balancing, and automatic failover.

10. What is the difference between a Region and an Availability Zone?

    A Region is a separate geographic area; an Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers within a Region, isolated for fault tolerance but connected by low-latency links.

11. What is AWS EC2?

    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is an IaaS service providing resizable virtual servers (instances) in the cloud, giving full control over compute capacity, OS, and configuration.

12. What is an AMI in EC2?

    An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a template containing the OS, application server, and applications used to launch an EC2 instance. It defines the software configuration of the instance.

13. Name the main EC2 instance purchasing options.

    On-Demand (pay per second/hour, no commitment), Reserved Instances/Savings Plans (1-3 year commitment for discount), Spot Instances (spare capacity at deep discount, can be interrupted), and Dedicated Hosts (physical server dedicated to you).

14. When are EC2 Spot Instances most appropriate, and what is their risk?

    Best for fault-tolerant, flexible, stateless workloads (batch jobs, CI/CD, big data). Risk: AWS can reclaim them with a 2-minute warning when capacity is needed, so they may be interrupted.

15. What is a Security Group in EC2?

    A virtual stateful firewall that controls inbound and outbound traffic to EC2 instances at the instance level. Stateful means return traffic is automatically allowed.

16. What is AWS S3?

    Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an object storage service offering virtually unlimited, highly durable storage of data as objects within buckets, accessible over HTTP/HTTPS.

17. What durability does Amazon S3 provide for objects?

    S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (eleven 9's) durability of objects across multiple Availability Zones.

18. What is the difference between an S3 bucket and an object?

    A bucket is a container (with a globally unique name) that holds objects; an object is the actual file/data plus its metadata and a unique key (name) within the bucket.

19. Name three Amazon S3 storage classes and their use cases.

    S3 Standard (frequent access), S3 Standard-IA / One Zone-IA (infrequent access, lower cost), and S3 Glacier / Glacier Deep Archive (long-term archival, lowest cost, slower retrieval). S3 Intelligent-Tiering auto-moves data between tiers.

20. What is S3 versioning?

    A feature that keeps multiple variants of an object in the same bucket, allowing you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version, protecting against accidental deletion or overwrites.

21. What is Amazon RDS?

    Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a managed service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale relational databases, handling patching, backups, and replication automatically.

22. Which database engines does Amazon RDS support?

    Amazon Aurora, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.

23. What is the difference between RDS Multi-AZ and Read Replicas?

    Multi-AZ provides high availability/failover with a synchronous standby copy in another AZ (not for reads); Read Replicas provide read scalability with asynchronous copies you can direct read traffic to.

24. What is Amazon Aurora?

    A MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, offering up to 5x the throughput of standard MySQL with automatic storage scaling, replication, and high durability.

25. What is AWS IAM?

    AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a service for securely controlling access to AWS resources by managing users, groups, roles, and permission policies (authentication and authorization).

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