C1000-142 IBM Cloud Advocate v2 Question and Answers

Virtualization is a process that allows for more efficient utilization of physical computer hardware and is the foundation of cloud computing. Virtualization uses software to create an abstraction layer over computer hardware that allows the hardware elements of a single computer—processors, memory, storage and more—to be divided into multiple virtual computers, commonly called virtual machines (VMs). Each VM runs its own operating system (OS) and behaves like an independent computer, even though it is running on just a portion of the actual underlying computer hardware. Benefit of virtualization: Virtualization brings several benefits to data center operators and service providers: Resource efficiency: Before virtualization, each application server required its own dedicated physical CPU—IT staff would purchase and configure a separate server for each application they wanted to run. (IT preferred one application and one operating system (OS) per computer for reliability reasons.) Invariably, each physical server would be underused. In contrast, server virtualization lets you run several applications—each on its own VM with its own OS—on a single physical computer (typically an x86 server) without sacrificing reliability. This enables maximum utilization of the physical hardware’s computing capacity. Easier management: Replacing physical computers with software-defined VMs makes it easier to use and manage policies written in software. This allows you to create automated IT service management workflows. For example, automated deployment and configuration tools enable administrators to define collections of virtual machines and applications as services, in software templates. This means that they can install those services repeatedly and consistently without cumbersome, time-consuming. and error-prone manual setup. Admins can use virtualization security policies to mandate certain security configurations based on the role of the virtual machine. Policies can even increase resource efficiency by retiring unused virtual machines to save on space and computing power. Minimal downtime: OS and application crashes can cause downtime and disrupt user productivity. Admins can run multiple redundant virtual machines alongside each other and failover between them when problems arise. Running multiple redundant physical servers is more expensive. Faster provisioning: Buying, installing, and configuring hardware for each application is time-consuming. Provided that the hardware is already in place, provisioning virtual machines to run all your applications is significantly faster. You can even automate it using management software and build it into existing workflows. [Exam Tips]: You can expect few questions from Virtualization and benefits of virtualization.

Explanation

Correct Answer : MongoDB is an open source, non-relational database management system that uses flexible documents to process and store various forms of data. A NoSQL solution, MongoDB provides an elastic data model that enables users to store and query multivariate data types with ease. This not only simplifies database management for developers but also creates a highly scalable environment for applications and services. MongoDB uses documents or collections of documents as its basic unit of data. Formatted as JSON objects, these documents can store various types of data and be distributed across multiple systems. MongoDB offers a few capabilities that make it stand out from other database management systems, including load balancing, ad hoc database queries, and multi-language support. In-Correct Answers Redis (for REmote DIctionary Server) is an open-source, in-memory, NoSQL key-value store that is used primarily as an application cache or quick-response database. Redis supports multiple data structures, built-in Lua scripting, multiple levels of on-disk persistence, and high availability. While Redis is an in-memory database store, MongoDB is known as an on-disk document store. Although both solutions are built for different purposes, they are often used together to maximize the speed and efficiency of a NoSQL database. PostgreSQL, commonly pronounced “Post-GRES,” is an open-source database that has a strong reputation for its reliability, flexibility, and support of open technical standards. PostgreSQL provides the ability to restore databases to a specific moment in time because it maintains a write-ahead log that logs every database change. PostgreSQL features built-in support for multiple procedural languages. etcd is an open-source, distributed key-value store used to hold and manage the critical information that distributed systems need to keep running. etcd’s performance is heavily dependent upon storage disk speed, so it’s highly recommended to use SSDs in etcd environments. Db2 is a relational database with enterprise-grade performance. It provides multizone support allowing it to be run in a highly-available configuration. Note : Cloudant is also a document database that uses JSON files to store and index documents. Its serverless design allows for easy scaling based on need.

Cloud Internet Services (CIS) provides reliability, performance, and security for Internet facing applications, websites, and services using Cloudflare's 165+ Global Points of Presence (PoPs). It includes Domain Name Service (DNS), Global Load Balancer (GLB), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection, Web Application Firewall (WAF), Transport Layer Security (TLS), Rate Limiting, Smart Routing, and Caching.

Correct Answer:

Hyper Protect Crypto Services is a key management system that provides keep your own key (KYOK) capabilities for cloud data encryption. It provides lifecycle management for keys, encryption for IBM Cloud services, access management, auditing, and security certification.

In-Correct Answers:

Key Protect securely stores and applies secrets for apps. It provides encryption solutions and allows data to be secured and stored in IBM Cloud through envelope encryption. If users want to manage symmetric keys to encrypt data at rest, they should use Key Protect.

IBM Certificate Manager service helps you manage and deploy SSL/TLS certificates for your apps and services. Certificate Manager provides you with a security-rich repository for your certificates and their associated private keys and helps prevent outages by sending you notifications when your certificates are about to expire.

IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Virtual Servers grant you complete authority over your Linux-based virtual servers for workloads that contain sensitive data and business IP. They offer a confidential computing environment, addressing your top security concerns for peace of mind when building applications in the cloud and helping you with the following issues:

- Memory protection through a trusted execution environment

- Data-at-rest and data-in-flight encryption

- Prevention of unauthorized access

By using the IBM Cloud® Security and Compliance Center, you can significantly decrease the likelihood of a misconfiguration-related security issue by setting guardrails around the way that your resources can be configured. With the Configuration Governance component of the Security and Compliance Center, you are able to define rules and templates that can help to standardize your organizations resource configuration. When you create a rule and enable enforcement, you can apply it to your entire enterprise, account, or a subset of your resources by limiting your scope to a resource group. Then, when a rule is in place, a user in your account is unable to provision a resource or set a configuration that violates the rule. In some situations, resource configurations require multiple API calls to set. In these cases, you must also define a template in order for the resource to be configured. With templates, you can define your preferred values, or customized defaults, on properties that are used to configure an IBM Cloud resource. By creating templates that users in your accounts can regularly review and reference, you set guidelines for teams to follow. After you attach a template to a scope, your customized defaults are applied by target services to ensure that your selections override the IBM-defined values each time that a target resource is created.

Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model that provisions computing resources on demand and offloads all responsibility for common infrastructure management tasks. They are auto scalable so it can handle extremely active traffic periods.

Serverless computing does-not means there are no physical servers utilized, of course there are servers, but we don't have to manage them, in background cloud provider manage (provisioning, scheduling, scaling, patching and more) for us, this gives developers more time to develop and optimize their front-end application code and business logic. And with serverless, customers never pay for idle capacity. They pay only for the resources required to run their applications, and only when those applications are running.

Serverless is a polyglot environment, enabling developers to code in any language or framework - Java, Python, node.js - with which they're comfortable. Because serverless scales up and down on demand in response to workload, it offers significant cost savings for spiky workloads. But it does not offer the same savings for workloads characterized by predictable, steady or long-running processes; in these cases, a traditional server environment might be simpler and more cost-effective.

Serverless Implementations differ across service providers, and capabilities vary, including supported runtimes, authentication, scaling and monitoring.

Serverless architectures are well-suited for event-driven, IOT and stream-processing workloads most notably open-source Apache Kafka event streaming platform.

Benefits:

- Pay only for the time for our code will run.

- Developer don't have to take care of servers or infrastructure, it maintains by cloud provider, so

they can focus more on development and business logic.

- API Management & Integrated event sources.

- Serverless scales up and down on demand in response to workload

Block storage is used to store data files on Storage Area Networks (SANs) or cloud-based storage environments. It can be attached to compute instance. Block Storage normally mounted onto only one compute node at a time. With block storage, you specify the size of the storage and pay a fee based on the size you provisioned.

When data is moved to block storage, the underlying SAN technology breaks the data into separate, uniform-sized pieces, or blocks. Each block will be given a unique identifier. The SAN will then place those blocks onto the physical storage, distributing them across several disks, often making multiple copies.

When a user or application requests data from a block storage system, the underlying SAN technology reassembles the data blocks and presents the data to the user or application.

Block storage decouples data from user environments. It allows data to be spread and duplicated across multiple storage devices, enabling faster retrieval and higher resilience to disk failures.

Benefits:

Provides the lowest latency: Block storage provides the lowest latency for network-based storage versus local disk drives in the server, Provide IOPS up to 48,000 IOPS.

High performing: Block storage is highly available and independent of the clients that access it. It remains available and durable regardless of client outages.

High redundancy: Network-based block storage is considered to have a higher level of redundancy compared to local disk storage.

Endurance and Performance tiers: Block storage has two tiers from which to choose. Volumes can be created from 20 GB to 12 TB in size.

Eight authorized hosts: Block storage allows eight authorized hosts (can request up to 64) to connect via the multipath IO (MPIO) iSCSI connection.

Snapshots: Block storage allows point-in-time non-disruptive “snapshots,” which can be replicated to a cross-regional data center as a duplicate volume.

Custom costs: Block storage allows monthly and hourly billing cycles.

Data-at-rest encryption: Block storage offers provider-managed encryption-at-rest. Note: Customer-managed encryption is not supported by IBM Classic Storage; however, customer-managed encryption keys can be stored

Use Cases:

⦾ As you have learned, block storage has a high performance and is easily updatable. Therefore, many organizations use it for transactional databases.

⦾ Because of its high performance and reliability, block storage is a common solution for storing emails.

⦾ Block storage suitable for low latency workloads where consistently high speeds required.

IBM Watson OpenScaleâ„¢ tracks and measures outcomes from your AI models, and helps ensure they remain fair, explainable and compliant wherever your models were built or are running. Use IBM Watson OpenScale to analyze your AI with trust and transparency and understand how your AI models make decisions. Detect and mitigate bias and drift. Increase the quality and accuracy of your predictions. Explain transactions and perform what-if analysis. IBM Watson OpenScale is an enterprise-grade environment for AI applications that provides your enterprise visibility into how your AI is built, is used, and delivers return on investment. Its open platform enables businesses to operate and automate AI at scale with transparent, explainable outcomes that are free from harmful bias and drift. With the Watson OpenScale service, you can scale adoption of trusted AI across enterprise applications on hosted on-premises environments or in a private cloud environment.

Explanation

PostgreSQL, commonly pronounced “Post-GRES,” is an open source database that has a strong reputation for its reliability, flexibility, and support of open technical standards. Unlike other RDMBS (Relational Database Management Systems), PostgreSQL (link resides outside ibm.com) supports both non-relational and relational data types. This makes it one of the most compliant, stable, and mature relational databases available today. PostgreSQL is expandable and versatile so it can quickly support a variety of specialized use cases with powerful extension ecosystem, which covers things from time-series data types to geospatial analytics. Its versatile and approachable design makes PostgreSQL a “one-size-fits-all” solution for many enterprises looking for cost-effective and efficient ways to improve their database management systems.

Cloud migration is the process of relocating an organization’s data, applications, and workloads to a cloud infrastructure. Enterprises typically migrate workloads to a cloud to improve operational performance and agility, workload scalability, and security. Key Drivers Related to Cloud Migration are Agility, Flexibility and Competitiveness.

A security group acts as a virtual firewall that controls the traffic for one or more virtual server instances. A security group is a collection of rules that specify whether to allow or deny traffic for an associated instance. You can associate an instance with one or more security groups and edit the security group rules An Access Control List (ACL) can manage (that is, it can allow or deny) inbound and outbound traffic for a subnet. An ACL is stateless, which means that inbound and outbound rules must be specified separately and explicitly. Each ACL consists of rules, based on a source IP, source port, destination IP, destination port, and protocol. Note : Security Groups control traffic at the virtual service instance level and n Access Control List (ACL) control the traffic at subnet level.

Explanation

Correct Answer : Metro : The name of a city where 1 or more data centers are located. A metro might have a multizone region, such as Dallas, or might have a single zone region, such as Mexico City. If you create a cluster in a multizone region, the Kubernetes master and worker nodes can be spread across zones for high availability. In-Correct Answers: Geography : An organizational grouping that is based on geographic continents. Note : District & Urban site are not valid options for IBM Cloud - these are added for distraction.

Bare Metal provides dedicated hardware and is popular with gaming providers due to their bandwidth provision and high-level performance.

Explanation

The NIST definition lists five essential characteristics of cloud computing: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity or expansion, and measured service

Explanation

An advantage for a business to use the pay-as-you-go model is cost savings.

Cloud is a great way to switch IT spending to a pay-as-you-go model and reduce CapEx costs, as well as reap other benefits. Switching to the cloud results in faster development and release of new applications. Companies who switch to the cloud experience improved efficiency, decreased development time, and decreased expenses. Companies who transform using cloud technologies find they are leading change and innovation in their industry.

Explanation

The IBM Cloud® Databases for MongoDB service allows developers to take advantage of the latest MongoDB features: rich JSON documents, powerful query language, multi-document transactions, and authentic APIs. The service also automates common database administration tasks like high availability, backups, encryption, and infrastructure planning.

Explanation

Microservices architecture is an approach in which a single application is composed of many loosely coupled and independently deployable smaller services. These services typically have their own technology stack, inclusive of the database and data management model; - Microservices communicate with one another over a combination of REST API's, event streaming, and message broker and - Microservices are organized by business capability, with the line separating services often referred to as a bounded context.

Explanation

IBM Watson Assistant is an AI-powered virtual agent that provides customers with fast, consistent, and accurate answers across any messaging platform, application, device, or channel. Using AI and natural language processing, Watson Assistant learns from customer conversations, improving its ability to resolve issues the first time while removing the frustration of long wait times, tedious searches, and unhelpful chatbots. With Watson Assistant, you can build conversational interfaces into any application, device, or channel. Most virtual assistants try to mimic human interactions, but Watson Assistant knows when to search for an answer from a knowledge base, when to ask for clarity, and when to direct someone to a human. Like a human personal assistant, the assistant you build helps your customers perform tasks and answer questions.

Cold Vault (for cold data): Use this option for data accessed only a few times a year. A larger retrieval charge applies for reading data. Common use cases include long-term backup, large data set preservation, or older media content. Cold Vault includes a threshold for object size and storage period with a minimum billable object size of 256 KB and a minimum storage duration of 90 days. Objects smaller than the minimum size will incur a charge for the minimum billable object size. In-Correct Answers : Standard (for active data) : Use this level for active data that's accessed multiple times a month. Your data is immediately available when needed. Common use cases include streaming mobile and web content, DevOps, analytics, collaboration and active content repositories. There are no retrieval charges, no minimum object size and no minimum duration requirement. Vault (for less active data): Use this level for less active data that's accessed once a month or less. Data is immediately available when needed. A low retrieval charge applies for reading data. Common use cases include backup and digital asset retention. Vault includes a threshold for object size and storage period with a minimum billable object size of 128 KB and a minimum storage duration of 30 days. Hot Tier : Hot tier is built in tier type of Smart tier.With Smart Tier, you no longer have to worry about selecting the right storage class for your workloads. Smart Tier will track your monthly activity and bill you one monthly capacity rate from three built-in pricing tiers: hot, cool, or cold. Smart Tier: Smart Tier employs automatic cost optimization to ensure that you get the lowest storage cost each month. This is valuable for all workloads, especially ones with variable or unpredictable data access patterns and ones that change over time.

Today answer this question, it's important to know cloud computing benefits Below are the benefits of cloud computing : Reduced IT costs, Scalability, Business continuity, Collaboration efficiency, Flexibility of work practices, Access to automatic updates. Best answer here is : Scalability and Cost-effectiveness

The best answer here is Regulatory and compliance standards. The other Challenges and Perceived Risks of Cloud Computing are : •Data security •Governance and sovereignty issues •Lack of standardization

Multi Cloud is a combination of two or more cloud services from different cloud providers. In-Correct Answers : Private Cloud : The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units). It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises. Community Cloud : The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a specific community of consumers from organizations that have shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be owned, managed, and operated by one or more of the organizations in the community, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises. Public Cloud : The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for open use by the general public. It may be owned, managed, and operated by a business, academic, or government organization, or some combination of them. It exists on the premises of the cloud provider. Hybrid Cloud : The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).