EBS and EC2 Storage Flashcards by Meg G

Requirement of attaching an EBS to EC2

They have to be in the same availability zone

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What are the two EBS Volume Types

SSD Volumes and Magnetic Volumes

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What are SSD volumes used for?

For transactional workloads, such as database and boot volumes (performance depends mostly on IOPS). Can read and write quickly. Small and random I/O operations.

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What is a General Purpose EBS Volume?

(GP2) SSD Volume that balances both pricing and performance.

Ratio 3 IOPs per GB with up to 1000 IOPS and availability to burst up to 3000 IOPS for volumes of 334 GB and above. 6,000 IOPS/volume

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What is a Provisioned IOPs EBS Volume?

(IO1) SSD Volume used for extreme performance I/O intensive apps (large relational or NoSQL DB).

Used for mission critical low-latency or high throughput workloads. over 10000 IOPs.

64,000 IOPS/volume

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What is a Throughput HHD EBS Volume?

(STI) A HHD volume. Low cost designed for frequent access throughput intensive workloads.

Ex. Big Data, data warehouse, log processing.

500 IPS

CANNOT be a boot volume

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What is a Cold HHD EBS Volume?

(SCI) Lowest cost storage for infrequent accessed workloads

Ex. File Server

250 IOPS

CANNOT be a boot volume

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What is a Magnetic EBS Volume

It is the standard HHD volume. Used for Legacy. It is the lowest cost per GB of all EBS volume types that IS BOOTABLE.

Good for workloads where data is accessed infrequently and for apps where lowest storage cost is important

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Three ways to encrypt root device volume?

1) Can now encrypt upon creation

2) Use OS system level encryption

3) Take a snapshot. Copy snapshot, then create image (go to AMI), and then click launch.

40-200 IOPS

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TRUE or FALSE: Once you pick size for EBS volume it can’t be changed

FALSE: you can increase volume size at any time

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Do you need to shut down EC2 instance in order to change/upgrade EBS Volume

No, although it is recommended

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Can you delete a sanpshot of root device of EBS volume used by a registered AMI?

NO, You must first remove the AMI before you can delete the snapshot

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How to protect your EBS from failure

Auto replicate in AZ

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How to move an EBS Volume to another AZ

Create a Snapshot of Volume
Turn snapshot into AMI
Make sure Virtualiztion type is Hardware assisted virtualization
See image under AMI
NOTE Snapshots exist in S3
Best practic is to stop instance before taking a snapshot

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2 AMI Storage Options for EC2

Instance Store
EBS Backed Volumes

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What type of Storage is Instance Store?

Ephemeral Storage

If underlying hardware stops you will lose data

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Negatives of using Instance Store as Storage on EC2

Restricts instance types you can choose
Have to be added on EC2 creation
CANNOT stop instance (can only REBOOT and TERMINATE)
Can loose data if underlying hardware stops

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Positives of using EBS Backed Volumes on EC2

Persistent storage (can stop instance and data will persist)
Can add more EBS backed volumes to EC2 even after creation
Can tell AWS to keep root device volume when EC2 is deleted

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Where are Instance Store volumes created from and where are EBS Backed Volumes created from?

Instance Store = templates stored in S3
EBS = EBS Snapshot

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Virtual Network Card for EC2

ENI
Elastic Network Interface

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When to add ENI or multiple ENIs to EC2

If want management network (separate than production network)
Use network and security appliances in VPC
Create dual homed instances with workloads/roles on distinct subnets
Create low-budget high availability solutions

Basic networking. Or need separate management network for your production network, or separate loggin network you need to do at low cost. In this scenario use multiple ENIs for each network.

What to Add to EC2 if Need single root I/O virtualization/ speed up network?

EN
Enhanced Networking

Need speeds b/w 10 -100 Gbps. & need reliable high throughput

Two methodologies for increasing network performance on EC2

Elastic Network Adaptor (ENA)
- Speeds up network to 100 Gbps
- Most often correct answer

Intel 82599 Virtual Function (VF)
- Supports network speeds of up to 10 Gbps
- Typically used for older instances

Network device that you can attach to EC2 instance to accelerate High Performance Computing (HPC) and machine learning applications.

Elastic Fabric Adaptor

How to share EBS Snapshot with other AWS accounts

Unencrypted snapshots - make snapshot public Encrypted Snapshot - also need to share CMK

How can you increase the performance of a volume?

- You can stripe volumes together in a RAID 0 config - Ensure that your EC2 instances are types that can be optimized for use with EBS - Schedule snapshots of HDD based volumes for periods of low use

How to monitor EBS Volumes?

Cloudwatch - Volume status checks - Volume events

Max volume size

16 TiB

How to create incremental backups in EBS

Snapshots. But note snapshots are constrained to the region they are created. And shared snapshots must be encrypted with a CMK

If an EBS backed instance is deleted what happens to the root volume?

It is deleted by default. But by default all additional EBS volumes created and attached to the instance are retained.

When you attach a new EBS volume on EC2 instance what steps do you have to take to use volume?

Create a file system on the volume and then mount it

What is Amazon EFS?

Elastic File System Storage grows and shrinks automatically and you only pay for what you use (don't need to pre-provision storage as opposed to EBS) Can Scale up to petabytes

TRUE or FALSE: EFS is stored Multi-AZ

TRUE

TRUE or FALSE: EFS works on Windows and Linux EC2?

FALSE only works on Linux

Available features of EFS

Lifecycle policy Enable encryption Supports SFSv4 Read after write consistency Multiple EC2 can access/share same file store

What do you have to enable to install EFS on an EC2?

Must install amazon-efs-utils tool on EC2 server Need to add NFS security policy for EC2 inbound firewall rules

SMB based file services for Window applications

Windows FSx

File system used to process large data sets of hundreds of gigabytes for second (HPC, Big Data, sub millisecond) Can store data directly to S3

Amazon FSx for Lustre

Ways to encrypt data at rest that will be uploaded to EBS Volume (not guaranteed EBS is encrypted)

Encrypt data using native encryption tools available in EC2 Server Encrypt data inside your app before storing it in EBS Use third party volume encryption tools

How to save RAM down to Disk on an EC2 instance

EC2 Hibernate

Describe EC2 Hibernate

1. Saves RAM down to Disk 2. On start up restores root volume to previous state 3. RAM reloaded 4. Processes Resumed 5. Same instance ID retained

Max time for EC2 Hibernate

60 days

Max amount of RAM to save for EC2 Hibernate

150 GB

TRUE or FALSE instances with Hibernate are slower to boot up

FALSE

EC2 Hibernate which families are available

C, M, and R

Migrate Share Point or Active Directory

FSx for Windows

Centeralized Backup Service for AWS

AWS Backup

Services supported for AWS Backup

EC2, EBS, EFS, Fsx for Luster, FSx for Windows, AWS Storage Gateway

What services can you use to backup all of your EC2 instances across all of your AWS accounts

AWS Organizations AWS Backup

EBS Volume type gives you the highest performance in terms of IOPS?

EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express)