Key Points#

The main take away from all of this is the primarily denominations. In a Cloud or virtualised environment you'll never have to be concerned with the type of the RAM being used (DDR4, DDR5, etc.) unless you're doing hyper-performance workloads. This is because the RAM used in AWS will always be modern and it's always being constantly updated by the provider. Instead you're going to be mainly concerned with denominations in GBs and MBs.

Here are the key take aways from this:

Random Access Memory (RAM)

RAM is used to store instructions for application code and the data those applications need to do their job. It's extremely fast, and is addressed directly by the CPU to load instructions and execute them.

Types of RAM

RAM chips come in a few common varities: DRAM, SRAM, and SDRAM. The SDRAM chip is the most common among them all. The SDRAM chip is used in DDR, or Dual Data Rate, setups, which improves the throughput of the hardware. SRAM chips are used inside of CPUs as a very fast, static cache.

Form Factors

The physical RAM we install in systems comes in two different packages: DIMM and SO-DIMM. DIMMs are used in larger systems like PCs and servers. SO-DIMM is used in smaller devices like laptops.

The form factor isn't something you'll deal with directly, but it's possible you may have to setup a physical server at some point in your career or for personal use.

Denominations

RAM is provisioned or installed in denominations, usually measured in the gigabytes (GBs). You'll setup remote, virtualised servers that have some fixed amount of RAM. You have to provision the correct amount of RAM for the given server's use case.

Take this new found knowledge and use it to pass your self-assessment.