By Wenson Ding, Alibaba Cloud Certified Expert (ACE)
This article is the first edition in the My Alibaba Cloud ACE Experience series, where I share my experience of completing the Alibaba Cloud Expert (ACE) certification. I recently passed the ACE Cloud Computing exam, and I am very excited to share my learning experience with everyone. I have compiled my ACE certification journey in a three-part blog series, and this is the first part of the series. Let's take a quick look at short synopsis of all the parts in this series:
a) What is the ACE exam?
b) How to apply for ACE certification?
a) What is an ideal preparation regime?
b) How to improve the understanding and knowledge of the Alibaba Cloud technologies?
c) How to choose the right learning course and exam that suits your requirements?
Now, let's dive straight into Part 1.
Alibaba Cloud offers three levels of certifications, Associate, Professional, and Expert. Alibaba Cloud Expert Certification (ACE) is an advanced level certification and is designed for those who are highly proficient and experienced in a specific technical field.
Unlike other cloud providers, who provide just two levels of certifications, Alibaba Cloud Expert certification offers more comprehensive content and covers extensive knowledge requirements. It requires multifaceted capabilities and is undoubtedly worth the effort. It's important to note that the ACE certification does not just include Alibaba Cloud technologies but also enhances your knowledge about the whole gamut of cloud technologies.
At just USD 168, you get a comprehensive learning path that prepares you to have a stronghold in the cloud computing industry. Currently, Alibaba Cloud offers ACE certification at an attractive discount, and in comparison with the other cloud vendors, it's a significant saving and ideal deal. You can make the most of this opportunity by registering today.
Currently, there are no limits or prerequisites for the ACE exam globally. However, the prerequisites for the ACE exam in Mainland China are quite stringent. It requires more than 5-year working experience in the cloud technology and has criteria to pass the related Alibaba Cloud Professional (ACP) exam.
The total duration of the ACE Cloud Computing exam is 150 minutes, and the passing score is 90 out of an overall score of 150. Unlike other cloud computing exams, it offers a fixed score criteria to pass the exam.
The ACE certification is designed to test your knowledge thoroughly and thus structures the exam into single choice and multiple-choice questions, and every question carries 2 points each. The following table shows further details about the exam structure:
The process of registering for the exam is straightforward and convenient. The exam is organized by Pearson VUE, the biggest third party exam center around the world.
I would recommend you apply for the exam one month in advance, and regarding the location, just follow the steps below to find an exam center in your city easily.
1) Click on this link and select Take the Exam.
2) Register an account, if you don't have an existing Alibaba Cloud account and click View Exams.
3) Choose the right exam code i.e., ACE-Cloud1.
4) Next, find the nearest exam center. For example, I am in Hong Kong, so I could see the 5 exam center near my location, as shown below.
5) Choose the preferred exam center and click Next.
6) Now choose the date for the exam. Usually, the available time slots are for the next month from the current date, so I suggest you plan one month in advance. After selecting the date, choose the morning or afternoon time slot.
7) Review your information and click Proceed to Checkout.
8) Lastly, use Buy Now option and take the exam code and avail of the discount, otherwise, it will be USD 280.
The ACE exam content is exhaustive and covers every detail. I recommend you carefully read the exam outline here.
The exam content is divided into two parts; let's take a quick look at the content outline.
1) Knowledge: The course content not only covers Alibaba Cloud know-how but also encompasses common IT concepts.
To ensure you answer all the questions in the exam, I recommend brushing up cloud computing concepts during exam preparation.
2) Capacity: The exam includes several scenario-based questions and hence it's imperative to understand the concepts such as:
Now let's take a look at some sample questions.
1) A startup company has hired you to build a mobile application that is expected to see a doubling of the number of images (now billions) and videos stored on Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS) every six months. Due to the business nature, the company predicts a sudden dramatic increase in traffic flowing to and from OSS. In addition, the company has to fulfill performance requirements for processing the application. What information do you need to determine whether OSS is the right choice for the business?
a) How many customers the company now has (which is critical to understanding the company's customer base over the past two years).
b) Whether the amount of OSS storage is sufficient for an appropriate space design of the application architecture.
c) Size of a single object being written to OSS (which allows for appropriate adjustments to the application architecture).
d) The total number of OSS requests per second at peak times.
The right answer is C
Important Notes
a) The capacity of OSS is unlimited. Hence, we do not care how many customers are there in total; we could hold the whole world as a customer. Wrong
b) Alibaba OSS service is auto sufficient. Hence, there is no need to choose or select the amount. Wrong
c) The size of a single object being written to OSS is critical. If a file is bigger than 5G, it has a limit for the direct upload; thus, you need to use multiple uploads. It will impact the upload method and efficiency. Right
d) The capacity is unlimited. Therefore, no need to worry about it. Wrong
2) As its business and customer base keep growing, a company needs to transform itself digitally. The original online trading system uses a chimney-style architecture that has become incapable of dealing with the increasing number of requests. Given this, the company executives decide to upgrade the original system with the help of Alibaba Cloud to solve the problem. They want the new system to go online as soon as possible. As an architect, how do you design the most appropriate upgrade solution?
a) Without any reconstruction, upgrade the original system to a high-performance host system to improve performance.
b) Without any reconstruction, upgrade the original system by building a load balancing cluster to improve performance.
c) Upgrade the original system by building a load balancing cluster, reconstructing the original system into a stateless application, and separating the application and database.
d) Reconstruct the original system into a distributed microservice architecture in which database and table shards are used for distributed processing.
The right answer is B
Important Notes
a) Option 'a' signifies a traditional approach and is not efficient. Wrong
b) The load balancing solves the concerned problem and the key requirement of 'as soon as possible' solution. It meets all requirements. Right
c) It will be a good solution if the scenario doesn't have the 'as soon as possible' requirement. But it is not a suitable option for this question. Wrong
d) it also doesn't meet the 'as soon as possible' requirement. Wrong
1) A cloud e-commerce platform is going to hold a sales promotion during Christmas. At present, the customer has built an online shopping platform on Alibaba Cloud by using Server Load Balancer (SLB), Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Relational Database Service (RDS), and Object Storage Service (OSS). When handling a surge of business traffic during the past holiday sales promotions, the customer's platform encountered the following problems: Because of great purchase demands for certain holiday products, the number of access requests for such products was too large, resulting in image loading failures on shopping pages. Transaction pages of hot-selling products were loading slowly or even could not be opened. To build the cloud architecture in advance to cope with the growth of business traffic during the sales promotion, if you are an Alibaba Cloud architect, which of the following solutions do you think are the most reasonable and effective? (Two correct answers)
a) Enable Alibaba Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) and separate the details pages of hot-selling products from those of general products in the business system. Statically process the details pages of hot-selling products to allow servers to dynamically determine only the user clicks for buying products, and cache other static data on CDN.
b) Use the data control module of the business system to cache the data of hot-selling products in advance on ApsaraDB for Redis, implementing high concurrency and relieving the RDS access pressure.
c) Change the instance type to upgrade the configuration of SLB instances and increase the bandwidth to handle the traffic surge.
d) Configure existing RDS instances as single RDS instances to improve database performance.
The right answer is A&B
Important Notes
In the given scenario, the key problem is either hot-selling products are loading slowly or even not opening in some cases. Usually, such a problem could be addressed on the following 2 fronts:
Option 'd' is not recommended as RDS needs to communicate and synchronize. Furthermore, to make improvements on the RDS side, there are several ways For example, using Redis as a cache, using DRDS, or adding read-only RDS instances. Option 'b' is Right
2) An Internet finance company has deployed its official website on Elastic Compute Service (ECS) based on Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). For security reasons, the company did not configure any public IP addresses for ECS when purchasing ECS instances. In the meantime, the company deployed the official website on multiple ECS instances to guarantee the concurrency and performance of frontend access. To give users of this enterprise access to services on ECS over the Internet, which of the following methods are correct for establishing a cloud architecture? (Two correct answers)
a) Create a Server Load Balancer (SLB) instance on VPC, and add multiple ECS instances to the backend of the SLB instance. Then, users can send requests to the SLB instance, and the SLB instance will forward the requests to backend ECS instances for processing.
b) Create a Network Address Translation (NAT) gateway on VPC and configure destination NAT (DNAT) entries to map a public IP address to ECS instances on VPC, so that users can have access to ECS over the Internet.
c) Create a NAT gateway on VPC and configure source NAT (SNAT) entries to map a public IP address to ECS instances on VPC, so that users can have access to ECS over the Internet.
d) Create an SLB instance on VPC, add multiple ECS instances to the backend of the SLB instance, and bind an Elastic IP Address (EIP) to this SLB instance. Then, users can send requests to the EIP bound to the SLB instance, and the SLB instance will forward the requests to backend ECS instances for processing.
The right answer is B&D
Important Notes
According to the question, the user needs access to services on ECS over the Internet. Since the company did not configure any public IP for ECS, we can connect to the Internet in three ways:
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Haemi Kim August 19, 2020 at 2:57 am
In the last question, i think answers are somewhat vague, binding EIP is only allowed when it comes to private SLB type, public load balancer type does not allow to bind EIP, it already has a fixed public IP after creation. The answer needs to be more accurate..
5386101031602681 October 28, 2020 at 8:10 am
agree, in addition, DNAT is for 1 ECS, but the company needs a single point to access multiple ECS instances