Asset planning

Can you describe the role of AWS Organizations in centralizing control over multiple AWS accounts for asset planning?

AWS Organizations is a service that allows you to manage and control multiple AWS accounts from a single central account. This enables more effective asset planning by facilitating consolidated billing, sharing resources, applying service control policies for compliance, and simplifying the process of deploying AWS services across various accounts.

How do you manage the life cycle of assets deployed in AWS, such as EC2 instances or RDS databases?

AWS provides various services that can be used to manage the lifecycle of assets. For EC2, AWS offers EC2 Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing to manage instance scaling and availability. For RDS databases, you can implement automated backups, read replicas, and multi-AZ deployments for high availability and disaster recovery. AWS also provides the AWS Systems Manager for centralized management and AWS Config for resource inventory and change management.

Explain how you might leverage AWS Cost Explorer for asset planning and cost optimization.

AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that allows you to visualize and manage AWS spending. It can be used for asset planning by identifying trends in usage, uncovering cost drivers, and predicting future costs. It helps in optimizing costs by providing recommendations for reserved instances, identifying underutilized resources, and enabling you to adjust your resource consumption based on actual usage data.

What is the role of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances in asset planning, and what are the considerations you need to make before purchasing them?

Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances provide a discounted hourly rate and capacity reservation for EC2 instances, which is beneficial in asset planning for predictable workloads. Before purchasing, considerations include the instance type, region, term commitment (1-year or 3-year), payment option (All upfront, Partial upfront, or No upfront), and tenancy. They help to significantly reduce the compute costs compared to on-demand instances.

Describe a scenario where you might use AWS Spot Instances as part of your asset planning strategy.

AWS Spot Instances can be used when you have flexible workloads that are tolerant to interruption, such as batch processing, background processing, or non-critical, stateless applications. Spot Instances offer up to a 90% discount compared to on-demand prices, making them an attractive option for cost-effective asset planning if the workloads can handle the potential of being interrupted.

How can you plan for disaster recovery of your AWS assets to ensure minimal downtime?

Disaster recovery planning in AWS involves using services such as Amazon S3 and Glacier for backup storage, multi-region deployment with Route 53 for DNS failover, RDS for multi-AZ and cross-region snapshot capabilities, and CloudFormation for infrastructure as code to quickly recreate environments in a different region.

What is AWS Service Catalog, and how does it assist with asset planning?

AWS Service Catalog is a service that allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS. This supports asset planning by streamlining the deployment of pre-configured resources, ensuring compliance with organizational standards, and reducing the time and effort required to manage AWS resources.

What strategies would you implement using AWS for ensuring high availability and fault tolerance of assets?

To ensure high availability and fault tolerance, you would design multi-AZ and multi-region deployments, utilize services like Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon Route 53 for traffic distribution and failover. Additionally, leveraging services like Amazon RDS and Amazon S3 with their built-in redundancy and backup capabilities is essential for maintaining high availability.

In asset planning, what considerations should you make when deciding between using Amazon EBS-backed instances versus instance store-backed instances?

When deciding between EBS-backed and instance store-backed instances, your considerations should include data persistence (EBS-backed volumes persist independently of the life of the instance), performance requirements (instance store provides high I/O performance), and cost (instance store volumes come at no additional cost). EBS is generally preferred for most use cases due to its durability and versatility.

How do you assess the trade-offs between different storage options like Amazon S3, EFS, and Glacier when planning for asset storage?

Asset storage planning requires consideration of factors such as access frequency, data retrieval times, and costs. Amazon S3 is suitable for frequently accessed data, EFS is ideal for shared file system use cases, and Glacier is cost-effective for long-term archival with infrequent access needs. The trade-offs between these services revolve around performance, scalability, and pricing.

What role does Amazon CloudFront play in asset planning for content delivery?

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates the delivery of websites, APIs, video content, and other web assets. It is used in asset planning to reduce latency, increase transfer speeds to global clients, and offload traffic from origin servers, ultimately providing a better user experience and reducing infrastructure costs.

How can AWS Trusted Advisor assist you in the asset planning process?

AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. During the asset planning process, it can assist by offering recommendations regarding cost optimization, performance, security, and fault tolerance, allowing you to optimize your AWS environment effectively.