Cloud Computing Lab (IT-704) - Important Questions

Demonstrate an autoscaling scenario for a web application: define appropriate scaling metrics, configure scale-up and scale-down policies (including cooldowns), simulate increasing and decreasing load, and report how instances scaled over time. Include screenshots/logs of policy triggers and resulting instance counts.

Configure a load balancer for a three-tier web application: create target groups or pools, define listeners and routing rules, set health checks, and demonstrate traffic distribution across backend instances. Show how the load balancer handles instance failure and how traffic is re-routed.

Design and implement a cloud network for a production-like deployment: create a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), public and private subnets, route tables, Internet Gateway and NAT Gateway, and attach appropriate security groups and network ACLs. Deploy application instances in private subnets and demonstrate internet access via NAT and public access to a front-end via the Internet Gateway.

Configure session persistence (sticky sessions) on a load balancer and demonstrate its effect using a stateful web application. Compare cookie-based and source-IP based persistence methods, and show test results that prove session affinity under concurrent requests.

Configure health checks for backend instances behind a load balancer and enable automatic replacement of unhealthy instances in an autoscaling group. Simulate instance failure, show how health checks mark instances unhealthy, and document the lifecycle of instance termination and launch.

Implement load-based and schedule-based autoscaling policies using cloud monitoring metrics (for example CPU utilization and request count per target). Create alarms/metrics that trigger scaling actions, simulate load to trigger each policy, and present graphs showing metric values and scaling events.

Implement a blue-green or rolling deployment for an application using an autoscaling group and a load balancer. Demonstrate how to shift traffic between old and new versions, perform verification, and show steps to roll back if issues are detected.

Explain and demonstrate the differences between security groups and network ACLs, and describe how route tables and security controls interact with load balancers and autoscaling instances. Provide configuration examples and show packet flow for inbound and outbound traffic.