Advanced features of EC2 instances CSCS405 Assessment

Program: CS

Course: Cloud Security

Assignment 5: Advanced features of EC2 instances

Name: ___________________________________

Part A: Auto-scaling

1. Auto-scaling uses templates. What does a launch template contain?


2. Consider the command below. How many instances would be launched initially? Why? aws autoscaling create-auto-scaling-group --auto-scaling-group-name my-asg --instance-id i-0e69cc3f05f825f4f --min-size 1 --max-size 5 --desired-capacity 3


3. What would happen if there was a sustained peak workload and 5 instances could not keep up with the demand?


4. What would happen some time after operations return to normal?


5. Xmas-Shines is a local company delivering gifts all year round, but for obvious reasons there is a high demand for the Christmas holidays. What auto scaling policy would better suit Xmas-Shines needs and why?

Part B: Load balancing

6. James has created 4 EC2 instances and a load balancer to distribute the workload among them. What else does James need to create?

7. James EC2 instances are used for a distributed mail service which uses encrypted SMTP traffic. What type of load balancer should have James chosen? Why?

8. What specific component of the load balancer will check for SMTP connection requests from clients?

9. What the default action for this load balancer component is? How does it relate to James EC2 instances?

10. For each statement below, indicate if it is true or false.

1. An Application Load Balancer cannot be a target for a Network Load Balance.


2. A load balancer cannot distribute traffic beyond its Availability Zone (AZ).


3. A target group with just one node responding positively to health checks would be considered healthy.


4. If a target is stopped, its health check will become unavailable.

Part C: Serverless code

Read the tutorial below. You are encouraged to try it out in your free tier AWS subscription, but it is not strictly necessary.

Tutorial: https://aws.amazon.com/tutorials/run-serverless-code/

11. If you created a Lambda code to access a S3 bucket to retrieve some files, how would you ensure the code has the right privileges?

12. What is the handler in the Lambda code?

13. In real-case scenarios, the code would be triggered with events such as a new file being uploaded to a S3 bucket. However, the tutorial used a different approach. Explain it.

14. Indicate which metric would help you check how often a Lambda code is being triggered. Where would you find this information in the AWS dashboard?