Chapter 7.1 - EBS Overview

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