AWS Certified Foundational Changed CLF-C02 Questions

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) is a service that provides fully managed message queues for asynchronous communication between microservices. It helps developers use loose coupling and reliable messaging by allowing them to send, store, and receive messages between distributed components without losing them or requiring each component to be always available1. Elastic Load Balancing is a service that distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a service that provides fully managed pub/sub messaging for event-driven and push-based communication between microservices. Amazon CloudFront is a service that provides a fast and secure content delivery network (CDN) for web applications.

An Application Load Balancer (ALB) is the best choice for distributing incoming HTTP/HTTPS traffic evenly across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It operates at the application layer (Layer 7 of the OSI model) and is specifically designed to handle HTTP and HTTPS traffic, which is ideal for web applications.

Here is why the ALB is the correct choice:

Layer 7 Load Balancing: The ALB works at the application layer and provides advanced routing capabilities based on content. It can inspect the incoming HTTP requests and make decisions on how to route traffic to various backend targets, which include Amazon EC2 instances, containers, or Lambda functions. This is particularly useful for web applications where you need to make routing decisions based on HTTP headers, paths, or query strings.

HTTP and HTTPS Support: The ALB natively supports HTTP and HTTPS protocols, making it the ideal load balancer for web-based applications. It can efficiently manage and route these types of traffic and handle tasks such as SSL/TLS termination.

Health Checks: The ALB can continuously monitor the health of the registered EC2 instances and only route traffic to healthy instances. This ensures high availability and reliability of the web application.

Path-based and Host-based Routing: The ALB can route traffic based on the URL path or host header. This feature allows the same load balancer to serve multiple applications hosted on different domains or subdomains.

Integration with Auto Scaling: The ALB can integrate seamlessly with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. As the number of EC2 instances increases or decreases, the ALB automatically includes the new instances in its traffic distribution pool, ensuring even distribution of incoming requests.

WebSocket Support: It also supports WebSocket and HTTP/2 protocols, which are essential for modern web applications that require real-time, bidirectional communication.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling: This service is used to automatically scale the number of EC2 instances up or down based on specified conditions. However, it does not provide load balancing capabilities. It works well with load balancers but does not handle the distribution of incoming traffic by itself.

C. Gateway Load Balancer: This is designed to distribute traffic to virtual appliances like firewalls, IDS/IPS systems, or deep packet inspection systems. It operates at Layer 3 (Network Layer) and is not ideal for distributing HTTP/HTTPS traffic to EC2 instances.

D. Network Load Balancer: This load balancer operates at Layer 4 (Transport Layer) and is designed to handle millions of requests per second while maintaining ultra-low latencies. It is best suited for TCP, UDP, and TLS traffic but does not provide advanced Layer 7 routing features required for HTTP/HTTPS traffic.

References:

AWS Application Load Balancer Documentation

Comparison of Elastic Load Balancing Options

According to the AWS shared responsibility model, the customer is responsible for security in the cloud, which includes the tasks of configuring the AWS provided security group firewall and classifying company assets in the AWS Cloud. A security group is a virtual firewall that controls the inbound and outbound traffic for one or more EC2 instances. The customer must configure the security group rules to allow or deny traffic based on protocol, port, or source and destination IP address2 Classifying company assets in the AWS Cloud means identifying the types, categories, and sensitivity levels of the data and resources that the customer stores and processes on AWS. The customer must also determine the applicable compliance requirements and regulations that apply to their assets, and implement the appropriate security controls and measures to protect them

 Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service on AWS. A graph database is a type of database that stores and queries data as a network of nodes and edges, representing entities and relationships. Graph databases are useful for applications that deal with highly connected data, such as social networks, recommendation engines, fraud detection, and knowledge graphs45. Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, and scalable graph database service that supports two popular graph models: property graphs and RDF. Amazon Neptune also supports two open standards for querying graphs: Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL. Amazon Neptune handles the heavy lifting of managing the database, such as provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, encryption, and replication456. References: 4: Managed Graph Database - Amazon Neptune - AWS, 5: Amazon Neptune – A Fully Managed Graph Database Service, 6: Working with AWS Neptune. Neptune is a fully-managed graph … - Medium