EC2 Instance Storage Section Flashcards
What is EBS?
Elastic Block Store - Volume is a network drive you can attach to your instances while they run
What is the advantaged of EBS?
It allows your instances to persist data, even after their termination
At EBS:
What do you have to pay for?
What happens if you require additional disk space?
You get billed for all the provisioned capacity
You can increase the capacity of the drive over time
What will happen by default when you terminate your EC2 instance for the root or other attached volume?
- By default, the root EBS volume is deleted (attribute enabled)
- By default, any other attached EBS volume is not deleted (attribute disabled)
What are EBS Snapshots?
- Make a backup (snapshot) of your EBS volume at a point in time
- Not necessary to detach volume to do snapshot, but recommended
- Can copy snapshots across AZ or Region
What is AMI
Amazon Machine Image
A customization of an EC2 instance
• You add your own software, configuration, operating system, monitoring…
• Faster boot / configuration time because all your software is pre-packaged
AMI are built for a specific region (and can be copied across regions)
From where You can launch EC2 instances?
You can launch EC2 instances from:
• A Public AMI: AWS provided
• Your own AMI: you make and maintain them yourself
• An AWS Marketplace AMI: an AMI someone else made (and potentially sells)
What is the AMI Process - from an EC2 instance(4 steps)?
- Start an EC2 instance and customize it
- Stop the instance (for data integrity)
- Build an AMI – this will also create EBS snapshots
- Launch instances from other AMIs
What to do if you need a high-performance hardware disk? Why?
If you need a high-performance hardware disk, use EC2 Instance Store
- Better I/O performance
- EC2 Instance Store lose their storage if they’re stopped (ephemeral)
- Good for buffer / cache / scratch data / temporary content
- Risk of data loss if hardware fails
- Backups and Replication are your responsibility
6 types of EBS volumes:
EBS Volumes come in 6 types
- *• gp2 / gp3 (SSD):** General purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance for a wide variety of workloads
- *• io1 / io2 (SSD):** Highest-performance SSD volume for mission-critical low-latency or high-throughput workloads
- *• st1 (HDD):** Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput- intensive workloads
- *• sc1 (HDD):** Lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads
• EBS Volumes are characterized in Size | Throughput | IOPS (I/O Ops Per Sec)
• When in doubt always consult the AWS documentation – it’s good!
!!Only gp2/gp3 and io1/io2 can be used as boot volumes!!
What is EBS Multi-Attach?
- Attach the same EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances in the same AZ
- Each instance has full read & write permissions to the volume
What are the use case for EBS multi attach?
- Achieve higher application availability in clustered Linux applications (ex: Teradata)
- Applications must manage concurrent write operations
What can you do when you have EBS Encryption?
- Data at rest is encrypted inside the volume
- All the data in flight moving between the instance and the volume is encrypted
- All snapshots are encrypted
- All volumes created from the snapshot
How to encrypt an unencrypted EBS volume in four steps?
- Create an EBS snapshot of the volume
- Encrypt the EBS snapshot ( using copy )
- Create new ebs volume from the snapshot ( the volume will also be encrypted )
- Now you can attach the encrypted volume to the original instance
What is EFS?
Elastic File Service
- Managed NFS (network file system) that can be mounted on many EC2
- EFS works with EC2 instances in multi-AZ
- Highly available, scalable, expensive (3x gp2), pay per use
