You can use the IBM Cloud® Security and Compliance Center to create and manage templates by using the console or the APIs. Templates help you define your preferred property values for supported resources in your accounts. After you create a template and attach it to a scope, your defined values override the defaults that are provided by IBM. Later, when an account user creates a resource that is targeted by the template, your customized defaults are applied.

Explanation

Public Cloud 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. In a public cloud model, users get access to servers, storage, network, security, and applications as services delivered by cloud service providers over the internet maintain by the cloud provider. Characteristics of a public cloud: A public cloud is a virtualized multi-tenant architecture enabling tenants or users to share computing resources, residing outside their firewalls. Use Case : Now a days, Organizations are using public cloud computing resources to build secondary infrastructures for disaster recovery, data protection, and business continuity. In-Correct Answer : Private Cloud 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 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. Hybrid Cloud 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).

Hybrid Cloud combines public cloud, private cloud and on-premises infrastructure to create a single, flexible, cost-optimal IT infrastructure. Hybrid Cloud model best suits where security and regulatory compliance required. Use Cases : Security and regulatory compliance: We can reserve sensitive data and highly regulated workloads behind-the firewall in private cloud and can use more economical public cloud resources for less-sensitive workloads and data. Resource optimization, and cost savings: We can manage predictable capacity workload on private cloud and can migrate unpredictable workloads to public cloud to scale up quickly and automatically. Cloud Scaling : A business has on-premise infrastructure that can handle a certain amount of user load. The hybrid allows them to scale up in response to a larger load then automatically de-provision resources when they no longer need them. Multicloud: Composite cloud are applications that are spread across multiple cloud environments. If a business has on-premise architecture that allows them to run three components of their app but the system gets bogged down in busier times, such as holidays, they take advantage of the multicloud architecture by composing their application across multiple cloud environments. In-Correct Answers - Full control over hardware and software choices : In Private cloud, customer have full control over IT infrastructure, They are free to purchase the hardware and software as per their choice. They can customize(configure) servers and software as needed. - Greater visibility into security and access control, In Private Cloud, all workloads run behind the customers’ own firewall. - Greater elasticity and scalability: With public cloud, a customer can add capacity in response to unexpended surges in traffic, without purchasing and installing new hardware. [Exam Tips] : You can expect few questions from here in your exam, so before appearing for exam, you should be aware of use cases of private, public and hybrid cloud.

We have two option to view billing information - monthly overview and specific service.

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.

Explanation

Use Watson Studio develop sophisticated machine learning models using Notebooks and code-free tools to infuse AI throughout your business. Watson Studio democratizes data science and AI to drive innovation in your business. With a suite of tools for all skill levels, everyone can collaborate to prepare, analyze, and model data. You can write Python or R code in notebooks, visually code on a graphical canvas, or automatically build models.

Explanation

A VPC is a public cloud offering that lets an enterprise establish its own private cloud-like computing environment on shared public cloud infrastructure. You can subdivide a VPC with subnets, where each subnet can reach the public internet through an optional public gateway. You can assign an FIP to any instance to reach it from the internet, or the other way around. This is independent of whether the subnet is attached to a public gateway. Subnets within IBM Cloud VPC offer private connectivity; they can talk to each other over a private link, through the implicit router. Setting up routes isn't necessary.

Identity and access management, or IAM is used to control access to resources.

IBM Cloud® Pak's are AI-powered software. Using IBM Cloud® Pak's customers are automating, predicting and optimizing business processes and modernizing business models at a faster pace without compromising capabilities, security and resiliency.

IBM Cloud offers IBM Cloud® Pak's for following:

IBM Cloud Pak® for Network Automation: Automate networks to deliver zero-touch operations.

IBM Cloud Pak® for Security: Generate deeper insights into threats and orchestrate actions for scalability and automated responses.

IBM Cloud Pak® for Business Automation: Automate business operations to achieve better performance.

IBM Cloud Pak® for Data: Unify cloud storage and simplify the collection, organization and analysis of data.

IBM® Event Streams for IBM Cloud® is a high-throughput message bus built with Apache Kafka. It is optimized for event ingestion into IBM Cloud and event stream distribution between your services and applications. Event Streams was previously known as Message Hub. You can use Event Streams to complete the following tasks: - Offload work to back-end worker applications. - Connect event streams to streaming analytics to realize powerful insights. - Publish event data to multiple applications to react in real time

Cloud is a metaphor for the internet based on the basic cloud drawing used to represent the telephone network. [Exam Tips] : On-demand self-service is an essential characteristic of cloud computing.

IBM Watson Discovery is an award-winning AI-powered search technology that eliminates data silos and retrieves information buried inside enterprise data. It is an intelligent search service that delivers specific answers to questions while serving up an entire document for exploration.

Content Delivery Network is a distributed server network that delivers temporarily stored, or cached, copies of website content to users based on the users’ geographical location to enables faster web performance. Exam tips: Remember CDN Improving website load times, by distributing content from nearby CDN server.

IBM Watson Assistant helps you construct chatbots and virtual assistants for a spread of channels including mobile devices, messaging platforms, and even robots. IBM Watson Assistant allows you to use the power of Watson to bring a conversational interface to your solution. Your customers can interact with Watson Assistant using natural language conversation.

Explanation

NoSQL databases are non-relational, which eliminates the need for connecting tables. Their built-in sharding and high availability capabilities ease horizontal scaling. If a single database server is not enough to store all your data or handle all the queries, the workload can be divided across two or more servers, allowing companies to scale their data horizontally.

Multi-cloud generally refers to the consumption of cloud services from two or more cloud providers. Organizations are preferring multi-cloud environment for deploying their application: to avoid vendor lock-in ,to reduce cloud costs and to use cloud provider unique capabilities.

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.

Explanation

Pay-As-You-Go is created automatically when users register with IBM Cloud, receives basic support, and gives a $200 credit to use on IBM Cloud.

Explanation

Application modernization is the process of updating outdated business systems and applications. There are many ways to modernize your applications, from integrating existing systems with APIs to doing a full rip-and-replace of infrastructure and building an entirely new application architecture. Common goals of application modernization : - Microservices architecture - DevOps - Cloud migration Benefits of Application modernization : Speed of Development: Since the microservices that make up cloud applications are built once and can be reused over and over, they are easier to use and can be deployed quickly once created. Risk Management: Since one microservice can be used by multiple applications, maintaining security and compliance can be monitored from a central location rather than from within multiple applications. Manage Cost: Since microservices are only written once, the cost to develop them is significantly smaller. The cost to maintain them is also lower since they can be maintained from one central location.

Cloud computing means on-demand network access to shared resources. The main benefits of cloud computing is to provide faster time to market, Improved agility of applications. Selling un-used time slice of computing is the earliest implementation of cloud computing. [Exam Tips] : On-demand self-service is an essential characteristic of cloud computing.

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.

With VMware HCX customers can migrate VMware workloads to the IBM Cloud while using existing tools, technologies, and skills from your on-premises environment. Customers can also extend their On-Premises Environments to the IBM Cloud and move applications seamlessly between environments at scale and avoid the cost and complexity of refactoring applications.