Question : What is one key difference between an Amazon EBS-backed and an instance-store backed instance?
1. store backed instances can be stopped and restarted 2. Auto scaling requires using Amazon EBS - backed instances 3. Access Mostly Uused Products by 50000+ Subscribers 4. Virtual Private Cloud requires EBS backed instances
Explanation: You can stop and restart your instance if it has an Amazon EBS volume as its root device. The instance retains its instance ID, but can change as described in the Overview section. When you stop an instance, we shut it down. We don't charge hourly usage for a stopped instance, or data transfer fees, but we do charge for the storage for any Amazon EBS volumes. Each time you start a stopped instance we charge a full instance hour, even if you make this transition multiple times within a single hour. While the instance is stopped, you can treat its root volume like any other volume, and modify it (for example, repair file system problems or update software). You just detach the volume from the stopped instance, attach it to a running instance, make your changes, detach it from the running instance, and then reattach it to the stopped instance. Make sure that you reattach it using the storage device name that's specified as the root device in the block device mapping for the instance. If you decide that you no longer need an instance, you can terminate it. As soon as the state of an instance changes to shutting-down or terminated, we stop charging for that instance.
Question :
You run an ad-supported photo sharing website using S3 to serve photos to visitors of your site. At some point you find out that other sites have been linking to the photos on your site, causing loss to your business. What is an effective method to mitigate this?
1. Use CloudFront distributions for static content. 2. Remove public read access and use signed URLs with expiry dates. 3. Access Mostly Uused Products by 50000+ Subscribers 4. Store photos on an EBS volume of the web server.
referring to the signed urls for private data stored on Amazon S3.
If files are publicly accessible they can be accessed with a simple url to the file:
eg http://s3.amazonaws.com/[bucket]/[key]
However, they can be set to private in which case you need to provide a signed url to access the file. This url is created using your public and secret keys, and its this url that has an expiry time. eg
http://[bucket].s3.amazonaws.com/[key]?AWSAccessKeyId=[AWS_Public_Key]&Expires=1294766482&Signature=[generated_hash] As per your question, for web graphics, you might re-use the same generated url with the expiry time set far into the future so that browsers can cache the file, whereas for file downloads you'd probably create a new url for each request with the url set to expire only a day in advance to protect your data.
This DOES NOT expire/delete/remove your data stored on S3. It only affects the url to the file and you can generate as many urls with different expiry dates as you require.
You can also invalidate all URLs pointing to an object on S3 by renaming or moving or deleting the object. That's pretty obvious once you understand that the URLs you make are just that - they point to a file on your S3 account, and amazon does not even know when you make one - you don't need an internet connection to make a signed URL.
Question :
Your application is trying to upload a 6 GB file to Simple Storage Service and you receive a "Your proposed upload exceeds the maximum allowed object size." error message. What is a possible solution for this?
1. API for this object Contact support to increase your object size limit 2. API for this object Use the large object upload 3. Access Mostly Uused Products by 50000+ Subscribers 4. None, Simple Storage Service objects are limited to 5 GB
Explanation: AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) allows a maximum object size of 5TB. However, objects 5GB or larger are required to be uploaded using the multi-part upload API.