EC2 Instance Storage Section

Question 1

What is EBS?

Answer 1

Elastic Block Store - Volume is a network drive you can attach to your instances while they run

Question 2

What is the advantaged of EBS?

Answer 2

It allows your instances to persist data, even after their termination

Question 3

At EBS:

What do you have to pay for?

What happens if you require additional disk space?

Answer 3

You get billed for all the provisioned capacity
You can increase the capacity of the drive over time

Question 4

What will happen by default when you terminate your EC2 instance for the root or other attached volume?

Answer 4

• By default, the root EBS volume is deleted (attribute enabled)
• By default, any other attached EBS volume is not deleted (attribute disabled)

Question 5

What are EBS Snapshots?

Answer 5

• 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

Question 6

What is AMI

Answer 6

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)

Question 7

From where You can launch EC2 instances?

Answer 7

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)

Question 8

What is the AMI Process - from an EC2 instance(4 steps)?

Answer 8

1. Start an EC2 instance and customize it
2. Stop the instance (for data integrity)
3. Build an AMI – this will also create EBS snapshots
4. Launch instances from other AMIs

Question 9

What to do if you need a high-performance hardware disk? Why?

Answer 9

If you need a high-performance hardware disk, use EC2 Instance Store

1. Better I/O performance
2. EC2 Instance Store lose their storage if they’re stopped (ephemeral)
3. Good for buffer / cache / scratch data / temporary content
4. Risk of data loss if hardware fails
5. Backups and Replication are your responsibility

Question 10

6 types of EBS volumes:

Answer 10

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!!

Question 11

What is EBS Multi-Attach?

Answer 11

• Attach the same EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances in the same AZ
• Each instance has full read & write permissions to the volume

Question 12

What are the use case for EBS multi attach?

Answer 12

• Achieve higher application availability in clustered Linux applications (ex: Teradata)
• Applications must manage concurrent write operations

Question 13

What can you do when you have EBS Encryption?

Answer 13

• 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

Question 14

How to encrypt an unencrypted EBS volume in four steps?

Answer 14

• 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

Question 15

What is EFS?

Answer 15

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

Question 16

What can be use case for amazon EFS?

Answer 16

Use cases: content management, web serving, data sharing, Wordpress

Question 17

Is EFS compatible with windows based AMI?

Answer 17

Compatible with Linux based AMI (not Windows)