Week 16 — Final Exam

This is the end of the semester and you should be ready for this exam. Please make sure that you have reviewed all material from weeks 1-15. In addition to the weekly materials, you should also have completed all projects and labs.

The final is cumulative. The first section recaps the midterm material; the rest covers everything since. Treat each item as a checklist — revisit the relevant week if anything is unfamiliar.

Carried Over from the Midterm (Weeks 1–7)

• Foundations & command line — Regions/Availability Zones, the AWS Console, and working in the Windows and *nix command lines.
• IAM & security — users, groups, and roles; JSON policy structure (Effect, Action, Resource, Condition); least privilege.
• AWS CLI & S3 — configuring the CLI and profiles; S3 buckets, objects, and static website hosting.
• DynamoDB — tables/items/attributes, partition & sort keys, scan vs. query vs. filter, and Node.js SDK CRUD.

AWS Lambda (Week 9)

• Serverless model — running code without managing servers; the handler function and the event and context objects.
• Triggers & event sources — what can invoke a function (S3, DynamoDB, API Gateway, schedules, and more).
• Layers — packaging and sharing libraries across functions.
• Monitoring & permissions — CloudWatch Logs, and the Lambda execution role that grants the function its permissions.

Lambda with DynamoDB (Week 10)

• CRUD from Lambda — insert, scan, query, query-with-filter, and delete items using the AWS SDK.
• Permissions — granting the execution role access to the target DynamoDB table.

Amazon API Gateway (Weeks 11–12)

• REST APIs — resources, methods (GET/POST/etc.), and integrating a method with a Lambda function.
• Requests — URL/path and query-string parameters; testing methods in the console.
• Deployment — what a stage is and why an API must be deployed before it can be called.
• Access & usage — API keys and usage plans.
• CORS — why browsers block cross-origin calls and how to enable CORS on an endpoint.

CI/CD & Hosting (Week 13)

• Pipelines — CodePipeline stages; CodeBuild and the buildspec.yml file; using GitHub as a source.
• Deploying a site — building a React app and deploying it to S3.
• Domains & HTTPS — how Route 53, CloudFront, and AWS Certificate Manager work together.

Amazon EC2 (Weeks 14–15)

• Instances — AMIs, instance types, launching instances, and key pairs.
• Networking & security — security groups and Elastic IP addresses.
• Connecting — SSH to Linux, RDP to Windows, and retrieving the Windows administrator password.
• Web servers — hosting a site with Apache on Linux and IIS on Windows.

These emphasize the second half of the course but assume the fundamentals from the midterm. If you can answer them confidently, you are ready for the final.

1. How do IAM policies control what a service such as Lambda is allowed to do?
2. Describe the anatomy of a Lambda function — what are the handler, the event, and the context?
3. Name three event sources that can trigger a Lambda function.
4. What is a Lambda execution role, and why does a function that reads DynamoDB need one?
5. Outline the steps to run a query against a DynamoDB table from within a Lambda function.
6. In API Gateway, what is the difference between a resource and a method?
7. Why must an API be deployed to a stage before it can be called, and what is a stage?
8. What problem does CORS solve, and where do you enable it for an API Gateway endpoint?
9. What is the purpose of the buildspec.yml file in a CodePipeline/CodeBuild pipeline?
10. Describe how Route 53, CloudFront, and Certificate Manager combine to serve a site over HTTPS on a custom domain.
11. What is a security group, and how might one differ between a public web server and a backend instance?
12. Compare how you connect to and configure a web server on a Linux EC2 instance vs. a Windows EC2 instance.