Chapter 7 - Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Elastic File System (EFS)

Question 1

What is EBS?

Answer 1

EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes are virtual disk in the cloud that you can attach to your EC2 instances.

Question 2

How do you use EBS volumes?

Answer 2

Use them the same way you would use any system disk:
          Create a file system
          Run a database
          Run an operating system
          Store data
          Install applications

Question 3

What does “IOPS” stand for?

Answer 3

Input / Output Operations Per Second

Question 4

What are the use cases and fundamental characteristics of EBS volumes?

Answer 4

Production Workloads
Designed for mission-critical workloads.

Highly Available
Automatically replicated within a single Availability Zone to protect against hardware failures.

Scalable
Dynamically increase capacity and change the volume types with no downtime or performance impact to your live systems.

Question 5

What is the difference between IOPS and Throughput?

Answer 5

IOPS is optimized for transactional speed. Generally associated with SSDs.

Throughput is optimized for large amounts of data transfer. Generally associated with HDDs.

IOPS

• Measures the number of read and write operations per second
• Important metric for quick transactions, low-latency apps, transactional workloads.
• The ability to action reads and writes very quickly.
• Choose Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1 or io2)

Throughput

• Measures the number of bits read or written per second (MB/s).
• Important metric for large datasets, large I/O sizes, complex queries.
• The ability to deal large datasets.
• Choose Throughput Optimized HDD (st1).

Question 6

What is the break point between General Purpose SSDs and Provisioned IOPS SSDs?

Answer 6

16,000 IOPS

Question 7

What are Volumes?

Answer 7

It is a virtual hard disk.

You need a minimum of 1 per EC2 instance, which is the Root Device Volume.

This is where the OS is installed.

Question 8

What are Snapshots?

Answer 8

A “photograph” of the virtual disk/volume, which is stored in S3.

Snapshots are a point in time.

Snapshots are incremental.

The first Snapshot may take some time to create as there is no previous point-in-time copy.

Question 9

What are 3 Tips for Snapshots?

Answer 9

Consistent Snapshots

• Snapshots only capture data that has been written to your Amazon EBS volume, which might exclude any data that has been locally cashed by your application or OS.
• For a consistent Snapshot, it is recommended you stop the EC2 instance and take a snap.

Encrypted Snapshots
- If you take a snapshot of an encrypted EBS volume, the snapshot will be encrypted automatically.

Sharing Snapshots (Changing the location of an EC2 instance)

• You can share snapshots, but only in the region in which they were created.
• To share to other regions, you will need copy them to the destination region first.
• How to move EC2 instances from one region to another is a common question on the exam. Using a snapshot is how that is done.

Question 10

What to Know about EBS Volumes?

Answer 10

Location
- EBS volumes will always be in the same AZ as the EC2 it is attached to.

Resizing

• EBS volumes can be resized on the fly.
• They do not need to be stopped and restarted.
• However, you will need to extend the file system in the OS so the OS can see the resized volume.

Volume Type
- EBS volume types can be switched on the fly. You do not need to stop or restart the instance.

Question 11

What are the fundamental characteristics of EBS Encryption?

Answer 11

Data at rest is encrypted inside the volume.

All data in flight moving between the instance and the volume is encrypted.

All snapshots are encrypted.

All volumes created from the snapshot are encrypted.

The encryption is end-to-end.

Question 12

What are the steps required to encrypt existing unencrypted EC2 instances?

Answer 12

Take a snap

Copy that snap and encrypt while copying

Create an AMI from the encrypted snap

Launch and EC2 instance from that AMI

Question 13

What is EC2 Hibernation?

Answer 13

Hibernating an EC2 instance tells the operating system to perform hibernation aka suspend-to-disk)

Hibernation saves the contents from the instance memory (RAM) to the associated Amazon EBS volume.

The instance’s Amazon EBS root and attached data volumes persist.

Question 14

What are the benefits o starting an EC2 instance out of hibernation?

Answer 14

The instance boots much faster.

The operating system does not need to reboot because the in-memory state (RAM) is preserved.

This is useful for:

• Long-running processes
• Services that take time to initialize

Question 15

What are the limitations of EC2 Hibernation?

Answer 15

Instance RAM must be less than 150 GB.

Instance families include: C3, C4, C5, M3, M4, M5, R3, R4, R5

Available for Windows, Amazon Linux 2 AMI, and Ubuntu

Instances can’t be hibernated for more than 60 days.

Available for On-Demand instances and Reserved Instances

Question 16

What is EFS?

Answer 16

Amazon Elastic File System - Shared Storage

A managed NFS (network file system) that can be mounted on many EC2 instances.

Uses NFSv4 protocol

Question 17

What are the use cases for EFS?

Answer 17

Content Management

• Easily share content between EC2 instances
• Wordpress blogs, Joomla! websites

Web Servers
- Have just a single folder structure for your website.

Question 18

What are the two fundamental performance characteristics options for EFS?

Answer 18

General Purpose
- Web servers, CMS, etc.

Max I/O
- Big data, media processing, etc.

Question 19

What are the Pros and Cons of EFS?

Answer 19

Pros

• Highly available and scalable
• File system scales automatically up to petabytes; no capacity planning required
• Only pay for the storage you use (no provisioning required)
• Can support thousands of concurrent NFS connections
• Data is stored across multiple AZs within a region
• Read-after-write consistency

Cons

• Expensive
• Only compatible with Linux-based AMI (Windows not supported at this time)

Question 20

What is FSx for Windows?

Answer 20

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides a fully managed native Microsoft Windows file system so that you can easily move your Windows-based applications that require file storage to AWS.

Amazon FSx is built on Windows Server

Question 21

How is FSx for Windows different from EFS?

Answer 21

FSx for Windows is:

• A managed Windows Server that runs Windows Server Message Block (SMB)-based file services.
• Designed for Windows and Windows applications
• Supports AD users, access control lists, groups, and security policies, along with Distributed File System (DFS) namespaces and replication.

EFS is:

• A managed NAS filer for EC2 instances based on NFSv4.
• One of the first network file sharing protocols native to Unix and Linux.

Question 22

What is FSx for Lustre?

Answer 22

A fully managed file system that is optimized for compute-intensive workloads

High performance computing

Machine learning

Media data processing workflows

Electronic design automation

This file system can process massive datasets at up to hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput, millions of IOPS, and sub-millisecond latencies.

Question 23

How do you choose to use EFS, FSx for Windows or FSx for Lustre?

Answer 23

EFS: When you need distributed, highly resilient storage for Linux instances and Linux-based applications.

Amazon FSx for Windows: When you need centralized storage for Windows-based applications, such as SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Workspaces, IIS Web Server, or any other native Microsoft application.

Amazon FSx for Lustre: When you need high-speed, high capacity distributed storage. This will be for applications that do high performance computing (HPC), financial modeling, etc. Remember that FSx for Lustre can store data directly on S3.

Question 24

What is an AMI?

Answer 24

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides the information requires to launch an instance.

An AMI is just a blueprint for an EC2 instance.

You must specify an AMI when you launch an instance.

Question 25

What are the 5 Things You Can Base You’re AMI On?

Answer 25

Region

Operating system

Architecture (32-bit or 64-bit)

Launch permissions

Storage for the root device (root device volume)

Question 26

What is the difference between a root device for an instance launched from the AMI on EBS vs Instance Store?

Answer 26

Amazon EBS

• The root device for an instance launched from the AMI is an Amazon EBS volume created from an Amazon EBS snapshot.
• EBS-backed instances can be stopped.

Instance Store

• The root device for an instance launched from the AMI is an instance store volume created from a template stored in Amazon S3.
• Instance store volumes cannot be stopped.

Both

• You can reboot both EBS and instance store volumes and will not lose your data.
• By default, both root volume types will be deleted on termination. However, with EBS volumes, you can tell AWS to keep the root device volume.

Question 27

What is AWS Backup?

Answer 27

Backup allows you to consolidate your backups across multiple AWS services, such as EC2, EBS EFS, Amazon FSx for Lustre, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, and AWS Storage Gateway.

It can include other services, such as database technologies like RDS and DynamoDB.

Question 28

What is AWS Backup with Organizations?

Answer 28

Centralized control of backup of multiple AWS accounts across the entire AWS organization.

Question 29

What are the benefits of AWS Backup?

Answer 29

Central Management
- Use a single, central backup console, allowing you to centralize your backups across multiple AWS services and multiple AWS accounts.

Automation
- You can create automated backup schedules and retention policies. You can also create lifecycle policies, allowing you to expire unnecessary backups after a period of time.

Improved Compliance
- Backup policies can be enforced while backups can be encrypted both at rest and in transit, allowing alignment to regulatory compliance. Auditing is made easy due to a consolidated view of backups across many AWS services.