The Network Administrator Survival Kit

Amazon RDS is a managed Relational Database engine in the cloud. The database engines to choose from include : Amazon Aurora Oracle Microsoft SQL Server PostgreSQL MySQL MariaDB Amazon RDS handles routine database tasks such as provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, failure detection, and repair. High Availability using the Multi-AZ Deployment Option If you choose to run RDS with the Multi-AZ Deployment Option, it can failover automatically in case of disaster. You can also choose to replicate it to another region. Backups Amazon RDS backups are automatically turned on by default and enables point in time recovery of the database instance.   The database and transaction logs are backed up and stored for a user-specified retention period. This allows restoration of the database instance to any second during the retention period, up to the last five minutes. The automatic backup retention period can be configured to up to thirty-five days. Database Snapshots Dat

EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud. It is the equivalent of a virtual machine. A virtual machine in AWS is known as an EC2 instance. Here is an excerpt of the EC2 features:        Virtual computing environments, known as  instances         Preconfigured templates for your instances, known as  Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) , that package the bits you need for your server (including the operating system and additional software)        Various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity for your instances, known as instance types        Secure login information for your instances using  key pairs  (AWS stores the public key, and you store the private key in a secure place)        Storage volumes for temporary data that's deleted when you stop or terminate your instance, known as instance store volumes        Persistent storage volumes for your data using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), known as  Amazon EBS volumes        Multiple physical

With Amazon CloudWatch, in addition to monitoring the built-in metrics that come with AWS, you can monitor with your custom metrics. This new custom metrics feature can be used in two different ways: 1. You can add to the metrics collected for Amazon EC2 Instances, EBS Volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and Relational Database Service DB Instances. The metrics that you store can be technical (system performance indicators) or business-related (user activity over the monitoring period). 2. You can store metrics for any generic resource. You can use CloudWatch to create a single, integrated storage and aggregation point for all of the metrics that you want to watch and to monitor. In the exam (at least the test exam) you are asked to pick which ones are custom metrics. Therefore, go through the available AWS metrics so you will get an idea of which metric is likely to be a custom metric when you are asked the question. You can browse through the list of built-in metr