CompTIA Cloud+ CV0-003 – Domain 1.0 Configuration and Deployment Part 3

9. Cloud Automation

Automation and workflows Let’s proceed and talk about why automation and having workflows are important to your cloud architecture. Automation is the completion of a single task without human intervention. So just be aware that automation does play a very important role when it comes to cloud services. Automation is essentially software, which is typically going to be what? A number of scripts or programmers are written to ensure that, for example, the deployment or monitoring of your cloud services is done correctly. Orchestration, on the other hand, is the arranging of the initiation of automated tasks.

So orchestration basically takes all the individual tasks and puts them together. And this is important because we need to create what’s called a workflow. Now, when it comes to use cases for automation and orchestration, it could be just about anything you can think of in the cloud. anything from storage provisioning to API collections to automating the monitoring of resources to messaging to end-to-end data flows So let’s make sure that you understand what a workflow is. A workflow is used to create an automated and organised sequence of service initiation processes, et cetera. Now, an example of this would be the simple Amazon Web Services workflow. And the goal of having a workflow is to make sure that things happen in the proper order, essentially.

So again, it’s a sequence. It’s an order. Just be aware that on the exam you’ll likely see something around automation workflows and orchestration. When it comes to workflows, just make sure that you understand that the workflows are generally going to be called differently by different providers. For example, Amazon has a simple workflow. Microsoft Dessert and Google Cloud have slightly different names for those services. So just be aware of that. Understand the difference between automation and orchestration. So once again remember that automation is going to take a single task and make that behave in a certain way, and orchestration is going to take those automated tasks and make sure that they happen in a sequence, which is essentially what a workflow is. And this is pretty much just what you want to know for the exam. Very simply put, just be aware that these are common terms you’re going to hear from every cloud provider. They might call them something a little different or have a different approach, but from the CompTIA perspective, this is what you want to know. Let’s proceed.

10. Testing Analysis

Let’s talk about analyzing your environment, your performance results from testing, et cetera, around what you may want to know for this exam. Now, when it comes to testing your cloud implementation, it is critical to establish a baseline. And again, we had talked about a baseline earlier. Remember, a baseline is going to give you that initial starting point. So you can compare today with maybe three weeks down the road, when you may have some issues. For example, what happens when a developer makes a change to an application, right? How do you know what has changed in that application from a performance perspective in three weeks from now? Without a baseline, it’s pretty hard to do that. So that’s why you want a baseline. So testing should also be holistic. So holistic means that you’re going to look at the analysis from many different angles.

So here’s an example: Let’s say, for example, you use AWS Web Services for your cloud, okay? The issue with AWS is that it can be a little bit, and I suppose a lot of it depends on your location. So one of the things that you can do is, let’s just say you’re in Northern Virginia, and Amazon has a Northern Virginia data centre over in Ashburn, pretty much right off of Wax pool Road over that way. Now you would think that if you’re in Northern Virginia, let’s say in Fairfax, that going to the AWS datacenter in Ashburn, Virginia would actually get better performance than if you went to the AWS data centre on the Pacific Coast in Oregon, let’s say. That is, after all, what you would think would be logical. However, is it possible that the location that you want to use for your cloud services may not actually be the best location for using your cloud services? and some of that could be based on many different factors. The most common reason I run into it is that the service provider, your network service provider, is essentially routing you in an indirect manner. And a lot of that can be figured out really easily with tools from a networking perspective. So for example, let’s say you want to determine if your ports are up and listening. You could use a command like Netstat to do that. Now, not so much in this domain, but in the troubleshooting domain and the management domain, we’re going to talk a lot more about tool sets. We’ll cover everything from Netstat to Ping, trace routes to DNS, queries, and everything in between. So we’re going to do a lot more around those technical areas, much more in detail. But for this module, we just want to make sure that you think about ways to validate your configuration. Validation is more important than troubleshooting. Everything is exactly the way it needs to be.

But just to make sure that you have the right configuration at a high level, Now there are OS tool sets that are available, and some of the cloud vendors have some pretty cool tool sets as well. For example, Google Cloud has a nice tool that you could use to validate your security configuration. It’s basically a security assessment tool that you can go ahead and use as well. You could also look for routing and IP configurations. Again, you want to take some time to atleast understand your config from a high level.When it comes to networking, you want to use the right tools for your network testing. We’re going to talk a lot more about that. But again, I don’t want to redundantly talk about things. So that’s why I’m sort of holding off on getting too deep into network testing. We’re going to talk, like I said, quite a bit about network configurations. We’re going to talk more about pinging. We’ll talk a lot more about other tool sets in the future, particularly Netstat. We’re going to talk about how to, for example, look at Netflix’s network protocols more in detail as well. And the list goes on and on. Okay, so Netstat is again a tool you can use to help validate network statistics. For example, let’s proceed to the next module and talk about some considerations.

11. Demo – Cloudharmony

I’m over here at Cloud Harmony. This is a fantastic website, at least from my perspective as an architect and trainer. I use this site quite a bit because it really does a lot of simple initial scoping for the customer pretty efficiently in a lot of respects. And I’m going to walk you through how that is. So just to make sure you don’t need to know anything for this exam, you don’t need to know anything about Cloud Harmony. This is just a value-added sort of demo just to show you some simple tools to make your life easier, especially if you’re scoping out a new service. Even if you’re already using AWS, how do you know which region to go to? Customers have used this despite the fact that the other data centre is physically closer. It turned out that perhaps the routing was just incorrect and the latency was just so much higher than expected. And so they were able to contact their service provider to look at their routing and improve their latency, for example. As a result, Cloud Harmony’s goal is a free service. The service providers that are listed here all essentially agree to have APIs or agents installed at their point of presence in the data center. Furthermore, it is linked to CDN networks as well as edge areas. So, in a sense, the Internet has also gone the extra mile. So pretty cool capability here.

That is free. You don’t even have to sign up. So let’s go ahead and just walk you through a few things. Play around with this because, again, I think you’ll find it pretty useful down the road if not now. So you basically have service status here. Now, the service status This essentially just displays the status of the cloud providers. Are they down? Is this service up or down? So you can see Amazon EC two. I didn’t know that. It looks like they had a small outage. It’s amazing. When was that? Oh, no kidding. Stopped yesterday. Okay, see again; this is a great way for you to know. I was wondering why I couldn’t get to it. Nothing was on the dashboard, but again, it’s pretty interesting to see. So, for example, you can see CenturyLink. CenturyLink has numerous data centers. A lot of these data centres are, of course, geographically located throughout the US and the world, as you can see. Now, a lot of these data centres are also former Sabbath data centers. Now, CenturyLink typically always has an issue somewhere. That’s just sort of what I see, and chances are you’ll see the same thing. So you can see CenturyLink has some kind of outage, and let’s go take a look. Ten minutes later, there will be 30 minutes.

So let’s see downtime at these times. And you can see undernotes, sometimes under Notes, where the service provider will make a note saying, “Oh, we had unexpected maintenance or the connection was dropped because of a failed part.” Whatever the situation is, there are no notes there. Scroll down and let’s check out Google Cloud to see if there are any issues. Okay, so nothing is going on with the Google Compute Engine. Just one more note. You could also see that it has “Compute” selected. Now I could go over here. I’m going to select North America. So let’s go ahead and narrow this down. I don’t want to see what’s going on in Brazil or Singapore. Let’s go and narrow it down to the US or Canada, North America, and Mexico. Now I’d like to take a look at, let’s say, DNS. Now, DNS is pretty critical.

If you don’t have DNS services working well, you’re probably not going to get to your web application probably. So let’s see if there are any outages. So there are no outages today. Awesome. Great news. Let’s go over here. Now let’s check out content delivery. So content delivery could be critical to your business. Let’s say you’re serving up files. Let’s say you’ve got archive files. Let’s say you’re a newspaper, and you’ve got archives of those files that you have a subscription service to. And are you down or not? You want to look at these items. So you can see that this company called Quantil had an outage. It’s a small amount. 34 seconds is not a big deal, but it could be a big deal. Could you lose a customer in 34 seconds? Absolutely. and you can scroll up. Nothing is going on. Okay, so let’s go over to Compute again. Now I’m over in computation. You could see that EC2 again had an instance, and then let’s go to CenturyLink, of course. And let’s see the faction cloud. I never heard of them, but they’re there. Go Daddy is actually up. That’s great. Let’s go over to see Microsoft’s dessert. Microsoft appears to have earned a minor squabble in what is most likely North Central. So I chose that, and the downtime was one minute and 35 seconds. And you can see that in the notes here. So let’s go see what it says. It says that the infrastructure did have an impact. It says that there were difficulties connecting to resources hosted in Azure, and the services that were affected were the virtual machines, Visual Studio, Key Vault, et cetera.

So most of the providers do a really good job of trying to be transparent because you can’t expect them to be up all the time. So the ones that give you notes are typically a good thing because they’re just being honest and letting you know that something’s going on. Now you can see the soft layer. So this is IBM. It looks like San Jose, California. And it does appear that they’ve got a maintenance issue. And it says “undefined,” a maintenance reboot. Okay, well, so they had the reboot—probably not a whole rack or row. I don’t know what the gig is. But they did have some issues there. CDN, again, you can see pretty much everything’s up. Quantil had an issue. So this is called Cloud Square. This is a service status. This is how the monitoring is now carried out. You can see that it uses a company called Pinopter.

I never say that, right? And the way this works, I would recommend you take a look at their website. It’s actually pretty cool, especially the way they monitor the network. They have the VCollector, as well as public checks. Server Agent, let’s go over and take a look at some of the network tests that we could do. We have the network performance and a network test as well. Let’s take a look at network performance right now. Now, by default, this will select CDN. I’m going to go and click that. Now sometimes it’s a little klugey, and you can see that it refreshes, but let’s go ahead and leave it at that. But I could select things like duration. You can see that this will show you the amount of time, like one day, one year, et cetera. I could also do test regions. So let’s just say I don’t want to do global; I just want to do North America. So it’ll go ahead and update the metrics, and you can see that it is using them essentially now. Let me just clarify. The way this works is that it uses what is called the Ripe Atlas. It’s also essentially using what’s called the “Internet last mile.” So, for example, I’m in Jacksonville, Florida. So if I select here, I could view what’s called the network map, scale it down, and give it a second to year, et cAnd I’m just going to go scroll over So let’s jIt’s a little bit on the slow side today. I don’t know what it is. All right. I don’t know if it’s on my side or over there, but okay, so you can see I’m over near Jacksonville, Florida. Now if I go over here, I could select each of these. Now for those folks that are not familiar with networking or network providers, each of the network providers, typically when they have probes, agents, or services for monitoring installed, are going to have what’s called an ASN.

Now there’s a couple of different ways to find out. I could just highlight it, go over to Google, and put it in. And as you can see, it is peering DB Comcast. So it’s Comcast that I’m familiar with, not that I have Comcast, but you can see that this is showing you that it’s Comcast that is the provider. So if I go back here, I could select this one here and go look at that ASN as well. And I could also search for it here as well; to be honest, the easiest way is just to go to Google. It just comes up much easier for some reason. And if I go over here to do a search, you can see that it comes up as Helioco Networks. So this is a BGP network provider. You can see that again; that is the provider. It shows up well in the peering BB as well. Again, you can go ahead and check that out as well. tells you information about them, and so on and so forth. That is pretty much it, so let’s go over here. So you can see based on that location that the latency for content delivery providers, where I’m at, is really a toss-up between Google Cloud, Azure, and Akamai, let’s say.

So I could go over here and highlight that area, and you could see, for example, that the latency for Azure is about eight to seven or eight. So it’s pretty steady. You can look at the median or the 90th percentile, whatever you want to look at. You can see the standard deviation is almost zero. So that’s good. The lower you go, the more important content delivery becomes. So like with Amazon CloudFront, for example, you could see that that’s about 17 ms. That again is only about a ten-millisecond difference in latency. However, depending on what you’re trying to serve and your customer type, that could, you know, make a very small difference, but I wouldn’t call it significant. And then there’s rackspace, which is about 18. But if I scroll down and look at USCentral again, you can see that some of them are actually just as good as the local ones. such as Google Cloud CDN in Central That’s Iowa. You can see it’s really only about 13th, so it’s not significantly different. And, of course, Google has its own network; they do not, in general, rely on other service providers. So it’s pretty solid.

If I scroll over here and look at Alibaba, you can see that the median is around 33 milliseconds. And then to also look at the number of tests performed that failed as well. Again, in the east, you can see that different providers are there as well. Now I could go over here to Advanced. I could select how this comes out. Let’s say, for example, that I’m really just concerned about compute services. I go over here, I select Compute, and I don’t need content delivery, so let’s deselect that. And now I have just computed. Now, this could take a few minutes to come up. I’m going to go ahead and pause this. And actually, it came back a little quicker than I would have expected. So that’s good. So you can see that these are the compute providers that come up. You can see some of these are a little unusual; you may not have heard of them. In Amazon EC2, for some reason, latency is only 22 ms, so you can see the region as well. Now, when I go to the test regions, you can see that those are selected. So you should double-check that before proceeding. I can also scroll down and select the number of tests I want to run. So definitely take a look at this and see if it is useful to you or not. You could also go to Network Test and play around with different providers to see how they compare. So this is called cloud harmony. I encourage you to take a look at it if you have not.

12. Testing Considerations

Testing considerations. Let’s proceed and talk about some considerations that you may want to be aware of when it comes to your cloud environment and areas around performance and testing, as well as other factors as well. Now, when it comes to testing your cloud, there are, of course, many different ways to do that. You could, for example, use different tool sets. One could be similar to SOASTA and tailored to your needs. You could also run network tests; you could also run security checks and vulnerability assessments; you name it.

So you want to identify what you want to test and what some of the areas are that you really need to be considerate about. You could use either provider or third-party tools. You could also look at the different approaches to testing in the cloud versus traditional infrastructure. Let us now compare traditional computing to cloud computing in a nutshell. Now, typically with traditional computing, you have capital and operating expenses, whereas with cloud computing, you have operational expenses. This is the capex versus open approach. It is usually manually provisioned rather than self-provisioned. In the cloud, you have fixed capacity versus elastic capacity. So, for example, in your environment, you’re probably not going to be able to scale up infinitely. However, with the major cloud providers, you could pretty much scale up to whatever limits you didn’t exceed. So, for example, in Amazon, if you want to scale your VPC, you’re limited to a certain number of subnets, connections, and other factors. You need to look at what those are. For example, if you’re using data services, some of the services have what’s called a “basically free threshold,” and if you don’t exceed that, there’s no cost.

But if you do, there is an additional cost for bandwidth, for example. So consider the capacity; does it meet or exceed your requirements? Dedicated hardware versus using centralised hardware means you’re going to pay essentially for capacity, whereas in cloud computing you’re typically going to pay for what you use. Typically, most infrastructures have administrators. These could be what database virtualization storage administrators are looking for. Whereas in cloud computing, you’re going to manage your resources through APIs. Generally, when it comes to disaster recovery, unfortunately not all companies believe in it, but in the cloud, some of that is actually done for you as a customer. Now this is dependent, of course, on the service and deployment model that you are using and also on what you want to pay for low agility versus high agility. Whereas data centre costs exist in traditional computing, they do not exist in cloud computing. They’re, of course, built into your subscription.

But the thought is that cloud computing is a “greener” computing approach, with “greener” just meaning that it is supposed to save energy and protect us from global warming or whatever. So with that said, you want to understand that testing can take different approaches. The first is production. Production is your bread and butter. As a company, these are the applications that, if they go down, you’re going to get attention to fix them. So you should approach production testing differently than development and testing, as well as disaster recovery testing. Throughout the last 20 years of my tech career, I’ve worked for a variety of companies as a consultant, professional services provider, and presales engineer. I will say that not every company believes in Dr. They may have a Dr. plan, but they don’t test it. So, even if your Dr. plan is in the cloud, you should consider testing it. So, for example, let’s talk about the cloud here for a second. When it comes to Dr, it’s very common for companies to have production at their geo but have a Dr instance in the cloud and on Amazon, and that’s great if that’s what works for your organisation and you’re able to tolerate the latency and the additional costing maybe.

Or you only need a limited instance, for example, for a backup that’s going to work just fine, but you want to test it out, right? So make sure you plan accordingly for the test. Some of the considerations around testing could be networking, load balancing, replication, data storage, application, and compliance. As far as replication is concerned, for example, BC and Dr. In most cases, replication is required to complete those areas. So replication could be synchronous or asynchronous. And so if your RPOR is good, we’re going to talk more about RPOR and all that. We have modules on disaster recovery and business continuity, and I’m going to talk much more about it further into the course. But what I want you to understand is that you’re going to want to test things differently based on a lot of different variables.

So, if we’re talking about replication, synchronous is what your data centre will typically fall under. Your direct point-to-point connection is going to be typically under 60, so maybe 90. You don’t get much more than that. Now, every vendor gets its own little threshold. Of course, you must also ensure that the link is of high quality. And if you’re replicating, like with EMCSRDF, that’s going to be different from replicating, for example, object storage to Amazon. So you need to understand the variables. For example, you’re going to want to test object storage differently than file storage or sand storage. So, while sand storage will have much lower latency and response time, the cost will be higher. There are numerous other factors to consider. Some other things you want to look at would be penetration testing and vulnerability assessments. Now I just want to point out one thing. Never ever run a pen test against Amazon, Google, Reserve, or Rackspace—whoever you’re using—without notifying support beforehand. If you do, you have a very good chance of getting your services shut down because if they see any suspicious activity, they will reserve the right to shut down your service until they determine what the issue is.

So be mindful of it and proceed with caution. They generally allow you to pen test; that’s not a problem, but just don’t do it without their permission. It’s a great way to ruin your Friday, so just don’t do it, okay? Vulnerability assessments. Now there’s a lot of good tool sets outthere that you could use depending on what youwant to test, how you want to test it. You can use everything from different solutions, like Metasploit and Map. Again, whatever you’re trying to do, look for the right tool for the right job. We’re going to talk more in detail about pen testing and vulnerability assessments in the security section. So look forward to that when we get there. Regression. So what is regression testing? Regression testing is typically performed in situations where the developers will run it to ensure that the application works in a variety of approaches, situations, and configurations, and to weed out any potential issues. And then you have functional testing as well as non-functional as well.You have business processes. These are some of the areas you want to look at. quality assurance, right? So quality assurance means that the service works as expected, that it does a good job of ensuring that the data it’s writing meets the requirements—whether it’s encrypted or not—and so on. So you want to have a testing strategy. This is going to refer to how your organisation can test the cloud infrastructure, platforms, and software packages that are provided as a service delivery model, so you have a strategy. And remember this: successful strategies typically result in a successful cloud project. Cloud testing.

We’re going to, of course, talk a lot more about testing in the troubleshooting module as well, and management to a degree. But just be aware that testing does have some advantages and disadvantages. We’re going to focus on the advantages, of course, during this course. What are the advantages? Again, some of these are listed here. Cloud testing offers a new, more efficient approach to how testing is handled. It does not require dedicated resources. That’s a major advantage. So let’s say, for example, that you need to have a server or virtual machine to run a V app, and if you don’t have the additional resources in house, then going to the cloud could work pretty well. Cloud testing adapts to software development frameworks as well. So, for example, you could go ahead and integrate with Agile or Waterfall in some respects as well. Agile is typically more prevalent in cloud-focused organizations. Cloud testing is again more focused on functional or nonfunctional issues, and again, you want to determine that and work with your developers around that if you need to. You can also use cloud testing. This can also eliminate the need to share the environment. So for example, if you’re in a typical infrastructure environment, you may have servers that are used for different purposes, and if you have a server that becomes overloaded or might not have the resources to perform, that could cause some problems.

When it comes to dev and test environments, these are generally rolled out quickly, and you could terminate them quickly. For example, you go ahead over to Google and use their App engine Services or theirContainer Engine Services, depending on what you’re using. If you want to roll out VMsort containers, that’s up to you. You could spin them up and spin them down pretty quickly. In production environments, though, you probably need to have more strict controls, so you want to be aware of what those need to be. What are some metrics? Before you begin testing, you must first identify the metrics. For example, if you’re testing bandwidth, you’re probably going to be testing the number of megabits per second that that link is performing at. For example, if it’s data storage, you may want to test for IOPS; you may want to test for the latency on that content delivery network, whatever it is, right? Servers, you may want to test for cash, as well as software and hardware, and you may want to test any other metrics defined by the service level agreement. Some metrics and terms you’re going to want to know for this exam Okay. MTTR and MTTF So, on this exam, I want to make certain that you understand what MTTR stands for: mean time to repair. This is essentially the amount of time it takes, for example, to repair that issue.

So, if EMC needs 4 hours to come out to your location to replace a disc drive, that is essentially the repair time. Meanwhile, failure That is a common term that you see quite a bit, especially with the disc drive manufacturers, for example, where that drive will be spinning and spinning and spending so many hours and then all of a sudden it reaches sort of that breaking point, and that’s when it fails. Typically, enterprise disc drives are rated for a certain number of hours—usually millions of hours—before failing. That is not always the case, but at a best-practise level, it is uptime. So again, you understand what uptime is, right? You want to measure uptime in the as-a-service knowing for the exam; what I want you to know is that 59 is the availability. So if you have four nines, that is not as good as five nines. The demo after this will go through a nice calculator that you’d use to figure out the amount of time that the cloud provider is guaranteeing you. When Amazon S-3 went down, for example, it was down for 4 hours and so many minutes, which exceeded Amazon’s basically four-nine guarantee for that service. So with that said, that is again something to be aware of. Now if you’re down for 8 hours, that certainly isn’t going to be 5, 9, and all that. So check out the resource. It’s a good idea to experiment with it and see how many hours or minutes you’d be down in a year in terms of uptime. and this is something that’s going to be specified in the SLA. There are some other terms you want to know. SLAs, right. We have a whole module on A. There are so So a contract is what? That’s a binding agreement between you and the provider. This is saying that you’re going to agree to specific terms and that both parties have responsibilities. But generally what happens is the contractis going to reference the SLA.A lot of people seem to think that the contract and the SLA are the same thing.

That is not true at all. Response time Response time is the amount of time it takes to get support latencies, for example. That is the amount of time it takes for a packet to traverse the network and return to you as a user. And we’re going to talk a lot more about latency in the troubleshooting module. And then we have jitter. Now, jitter, no, that’s not a dance, and that is not a singer. Jitter is a common network term that refers to network interference or instability. Successful strategies result in a successful cloud project. Here is an exam tip. Understand the difference between traditional and cloud infrastructures from a consideration standpoint. So for example, if you’re taking the exam, it has a small case study where customer A is trying to build this environment. They want to make sure that they have control over their environment. Do you specify a cloud or not? Again, you want to think about that from that perspective. But let’s say that the customer says, “Hey, I need to be able to burst out into the cloud.” I need to be able to scale up my resources and scale down again. You probably want to look at the right cloud service to do that. Having agility is part of using a cloud service. So let’s proceed on to the demo.