EBS

Question 1

What is EBS?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

Give some restrictions when using EBS

Answer 2

• Can only be mounted to one instance at a time
• Bound to a specific availability zone
• Have to provision the EBS volume capacity (size in GBs, IOPS (input/output per second)

Question 3

How can you move an EBS volume across AZs?

Answer 3

Snapshot the volume in order for it to be moved across AZs.

Question 4

What is the Delete on Termination attribute? Give one example when you would not want this enabled

Answer 4

If enabled, the EBS volume is deleted when an attached EC2 instances terminates.
(By default, the root EBS volume is deleted)
Example: Preserve the root volume when an instance is terminated by disabling this attribute.

Question 5

Why would you move an EBS snapshot to an ‘archive tier’?

Answer 5

Archive is 75% cheaper

Question 6

What is the EBS recycle bin?

Answer 6

Allows recovery of snapshots in the case of accidental deletion - rules can be set up to retain a deleted snapshot for a specified amount of time, 1 day to 1 year

Question 7

What is FSR?

Answer 7

Fast Snapshot Restore - force full initialization of snapshot to have no latency on the first use. Expensive

Question 8

What is an AMI?

Answer 8

Amazon Machine Image: a customization of an EC2 instance

Question 9

What does creating an AMI allow for?

Answer 9

Allows you to add your own software, configuration, operating system, monitoring etc.
Allows for faster boot/configuration time as software is pre-packaged

Question 10

What is an EC2 instance store?

Answer 10

A high-performance hardware disk attached to an EC2 instance

Question 11

What are the advantages of an EC2 instance store over EBS?

Answer 11

Better I/O

Question 12

What are the disadvantages of an EC2 instance store over EBS?

Answer 12

Instance Store loses its data if it is stopped (ephemeral)
Risk of loss of data if hardware fails

Question 13

What is a use case for an EC2 Instance Store

Answer 13

Buffer/cache/scratch data/temporary content

Question 14

What are the general purpose EBS volume types?

Answer 14

gp2/gp3 - general purpose SSD that give cost effect storage with low latency

Question 15

What is the difference between gp2 and gp3?

Answer 15

With gp3 you can independently set IOPS and throughput, whereas with gp2 they are linked.

Question 16

What are the Provisioned IOPS EBS volume types?

Answer 16

io1/io2 - provide high, sustained IOPS performance

Question 17

What is the use case for PIOPS?

Answer 17

Databases workloads (sensitive to storage performance and consistency).
Good for critical business applications with sustained IOPS performance or applications that need > 16,000 IOPS

Question 18

What are some features of io2 Block Express?

Answer 18

4GiB to 64TiB
>64,000 IOPS or 1,000 MiB/s of throughput
Sub-millisecond latency
Supports EBS multi-attach

Question 19

Describe HDD EBS volumes

Answer 19

Hard Disk Drive
Cannot be boot volume

Question 20

What is a use case for HDD EBS volumes

Answer 20

Throughput Optimized HDD st1- Big Data, Data Warehouses, Log Processing
Cold HDD sc1 - Infrequently access data, cost efficiency

Question 21

What is a use case of gp2/gp3?

Answer 21

Low-latency interactive apps
Dev and test environments

Question 22

What are the features of EBS multi-attach?

Answer 22

io1/io2 family
Attach the same EBS volume to up to 16 EC2 instances
Each instance has full read & write permissions to the high-performance volume

Question 23

What is a use case of EBS multi-attach?

Answer 23

Achieve higher application availability in clustered Linux applications (e.g., Teradata)
Applications must manage concurrent write operations

Question 24

What is EFS?

Answer 24

Elastic File System - a managed network file system (NFS) that can be mounted on many EC2

Question 25

Give two features of EFS

Answer 25

Works with many EC2 instances in multi AZ
Highly available, scalable, expensive (3x gp2), pay per use

Question 26

What are some use cases of EFS?

Answer 26

Content management, web serving, data sharing, wordpress.

Question 27

What AMIs is EFS compatible with?

Answer 27

Linux based (NOT Windows)

Question 28

Describe the two EFS storage tiers

Answer 28

Storage tier: move file after N days
Standard: for frequently accessed files
Infrequent access (EFS IA): cost to retrieve but lower price to store.

Question 29

What are the differences between standard/regional and one-zone availability and durability for EFS?

Answer 29

Standard: Multi AZ, great for prod
One Zone: Single AZ, great for dev, backup enabled by default, compatible with IA

Question 30

Can you use an AMI in one region to create an EC2 instance in another?

Answer 30

Not directly - the AMI can be copied across to the target region first, as AMIs are specific to a region.

Question 31

What is the peak EBS IOPS or equivalent GB?

Answer 31

16,000 IOPS or 5334 GB volume

Question 32

What is the max IOPS of io1/io2/io2 block express volume types?

Answer 32

64,000 for io1/io2 on Nitro instances, 32,000 on other; 256,000 for io2 block express

Question 33

What is the max IOPS of gp2/gp3 volume types?

Answer 33

16,000

Question 34

What is the max IOPS of st1/sc1 volume types?

Answer 34

500 and 250 respectively