DevOps Cloud Providers Syllabus

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.

Which database engines does Amazon RDS support?

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

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.

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.

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).

What is the difference between an IAM user, group, and role?

A user is an identity for a person/application with long-term credentials; a group is a collection of users sharing permissions; a role is an identity with temporary credentials that can be assumed by users, services, or applications.

What is an IAM policy and what format is it written in?

An IAM policy is a JSON document that defines permissions (Effect: Allow/Deny, Action, Resource, optional Condition). It is attached to users, groups, or roles to grant access.

What is the principle of least privilege in IAM?

Granting only the minimum permissions required to perform a task, and no more, to reduce the security attack surface.

What is the AWS root user and how should it be protected?

The root user is the account owner identity with full unrestricted access, created with the AWS account email. Best practice: enable MFA, avoid using it for daily tasks, and create IAM users/roles instead.

What is a Virtual Machine (VM)?

A software-based emulation of a physical computer that runs its own operating system and applications, sharing the underlying physical hardware through a hypervisor.

What is a hypervisor and what are its two types?

A hypervisor is software that creates and runs virtual machines by abstracting hardware. Type 1 (bare-metal) runs directly on hardware (e.g., ESXi, Hyper-V); Type 2 (hosted) runs on top of a host OS (e.g., VirtualBox).

What is the difference between a virtual machine and a container?

A VM virtualizes hardware and includes a full guest OS (heavier, more isolated); a container virtualizes the OS, sharing the host kernel and packaging only the app and dependencies (lighter, faster to start).

What is Azure Virtual Machines?

Microsoft Azure's IaaS offering that provides on-demand, scalable Windows or Linux virtual servers, giving full control over the OS and configuration, analogous to AWS EC2.

What is Azure Blob Storage?

Microsoft Azure's object storage service for storing massive amounts of unstructured data (text or binary) as blobs, accessible via HTTP/HTTPS; the Azure equivalent of AWS S3.

What are the three types of blobs in Azure Blob Storage?

Block blobs (text/binary files, up to ~190 TiB), Append blobs (optimized for append operations like logging), and Page blobs (random-access files up to 8 TiB, used for VHD disks).

What are the Azure Blob Storage access tiers?

Hot (frequent access, higher storage cost), Cool (infrequent access, 30+ days), Cold (rarely accessed, 90+ days), and Archive (rarely accessed, lowest cost, offline retrieval with rehydration latency).

What is Azure SQL Database?

A fully managed PaaS relational database engine based on Microsoft SQL Server, providing automatic patching, backups, scaling, and high availability without managing the underlying infrastructure.

What is the difference between Azure SQL Database and SQL Server on an Azure VM?

Azure SQL Database is a PaaS managed service (provider handles OS/patching/backups); SQL Server on an Azure VM is IaaS where you manage the OS and SQL Server installation yourself (more control, more overhead).

What purchasing/service models does Azure SQL Database offer?

DTU-based model (bundled compute, storage, I/O as Database Transaction Units) and vCore-based model (independently scale compute and storage; supports serverless and Hyperscale tiers).

What is Azure Active Directory (now Microsoft Entra ID)?

Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access management service that handles authentication and authorization for users and applications, supporting single sign-on (SSO), MFA, and conditional access.

How does Azure Active Directory differ from traditional on-premises Active Directory (AD DS)?

On-prem AD DS uses LDAP/Kerberos/NTLM and organizes resources in domains/OUs/forests for on-premises networks; Azure AD is a cloud identity service using HTTP/HTTPS protocols (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML) for web and SaaS applications.

What is Conditional Access in Azure AD?

A policy-based feature that enforces access controls (e.g., require MFA, compliant device, or specific location) based on signals/conditions when a user attempts to access a resource.

What is Google Compute Engine?

Google Cloud Platform's IaaS offering that provides configurable virtual machines running in Google's data centers; the GCP equivalent of AWS EC2 and Azure VMs.

What are preemptible/Spot VMs in Google Compute Engine?

Low-cost, short-lived VM instances that use spare Compute Engine capacity at a large discount but can be terminated (preempted) by Google at any time, ideal for fault-tolerant batch workloads.

What is a machine type in Google Compute Engine?

A predefined or custom specification of virtualized hardware resources (vCPUs and memory) for a VM instance, such as general-purpose, compute-optimized, or memory-optimized families.

What is Google Cloud Storage?

Google Cloud's object storage service for storing unstructured data in buckets, offering high durability and availability; the GCP equivalent of AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage.

Name the four storage classes in Google Cloud Storage.

Standard (frequent access/hot data), Nearline (access ~once a month), Coldline (access ~once a quarter), and Archive (access less than once a year, lowest cost).

What is Google Cloud SQL?

A fully managed relational database service on GCP supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server, handling backups, replication, patching, and failover automatically; the GCP equivalent of AWS RDS.

What is Google Cloud IAM?

Google Cloud Identity and Access Management lets administrators authorize who (identity) can take what action (role) on which resource, following the model 'who can do what on which resource'.

In Google Cloud IAM, what are the three types of roles?

Basic/Primitive roles (Owner, Editor, Viewer - broad), Predefined roles (granular, service-specific, managed by Google), and Custom roles (user-defined sets of permissions tailored to needs).

Map the equivalent compute, object storage, managed relational DB, and identity services across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Compute: EC2 / Azure VMs / Compute Engine. Object storage: S3 / Blob Storage / Cloud Storage. Managed relational DB: RDS / Azure SQL Database / Cloud SQL. Identity: IAM / Azure AD (Entra ID) / Cloud IAM.