10.10.1: Review Questions

Review Questions

Multiple Choice

1. Which cloud pricing model offers the largest discount but can be interrupted by the provider?
   • a) On-demand instances
   • b) Reserved instances
   • c) Spot instances
   • d) Dedicated hosts
2. In a three-tier architecture, which tier typically uses auto-scaling to handle variable web traffic?
   • a) Data tier
   • b) Presentation tier and application tier
   • c) Only the data tier
   • d) None — three-tier architectures don't support auto-scaling
3. Which Infrastructure as Code tool is cloud-agnostic and works across AWS, GCP, and Azure?
   • a) AWS CloudFormation
   • b) Azure Resource Manager
   • c) Google Cloud Deployment Manager
   • d) Terraform

Short Answer

4. Explain the difference between high availability and disaster recovery. How do multi-AZ deployments and multi-region deployments address each?
5. Compare block storage, object storage, and file storage. For each, provide a use case where it is the best choice and name one cloud service example.
6. Describe how resource tagging supports cost management in cloud environments. What tagging strategy would you recommend for a company with 5 departments each running multiple projects?
7. What is Infrastructure as Code, and how does it improve upon manual infrastructure provisioning? Describe the benefits of version control, repeatability, and drift detection in IaC.

True/False

8. True or False: Spot instances are appropriate for mission-critical production databases that require continuous availability.
9. True or False: A multi-tier architecture improves fault isolation because a failure in one tier does not necessarily bring down the entire application.
10. True or False: Auto-scaling only scales resources up; it cannot automatically reduce resources when demand decreases.

Answer Key:

1. c
2. b
3. d
4. HA = minimizing downtime during normal operations (multi-AZ: redundant instances in separate data centers within a region). DR = recovering from catastrophic failures (multi-region: replicated systems in geographically separate locations). HA handles component failures; DR handles regional disasters.
5. Block: databases needing low-latency random I/O (Amazon EBS). Object: media files, backups, data lakes (Amazon S3). File: shared file access for legacy apps or collaborative work (Amazon EFS).
6. Tags = key-value metadata labels on resources. Enable cost allocation reports by department/project, automated governance policies, and resource lifecycle management. Recommended strategy: mandatory tags for Department, Project, Environment (dev/staging/prod), Owner, CostCenter.
7. IaC defines infrastructure in code files (Terraform, CloudFormation). Benefits: version control (track changes, rollback), repeatability (identical environments every time), drift detection (compare actual vs. desired state), automation (CI/CD for infrastructure), documentation (code IS the documentation).
8. False
9. True
10. False