EBS

Question 1

What are the Volume Types in EBS?

Answer 1

General Purpose SSD - Balance price and performance for variety of workloads (Under 10k IOPS)
Provisioned IOPS SSD - Highest performance SSD volume for mission-critical low-latency or high-throughput workloads such as NoSQL (over 10k IOPS)

Throughput Optimized HDD - Low cost HDD designed for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads, can't be boot vol
Cold HDD - Lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads, can't be boot vol Magnetic Standard - Can be a boot volume, (previous generation)

Question 2

Can EBS Volumes on one AZ be attached to an EC2 instance in a different AZ?

Answer 2

Nope. Can only attach to own AZ

Question 3

Can you mount an EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances?

Answer 3

Nope. You can only mount to a single EC2 instance at a time.

Question 4

Can you modify volumes in real time?

Answer 4

Yes, you can modify size and storage type in real time

Question 5

Can you modify IOPS of all volume types

Answer 5

No, HDD types can’t modify IOPS

Question 6

Where are EBS snapshots stored?

Answer 6

S3

Question 7

What are EBS snapshots?

Answer 7

Snapshots are incremental point in time “snapshots” of the volume

Question 8

What happens when you snapshot an encrypted volume?

Answer 8

Snapshots of encrypted volumes are encrypted automatically

Question 9

What happens when you restore a volume from an encrypted snapshot?

Answer 9

The volume restored from an encrypted snapshot will be encrypted automatically

Question 10

Is it possible to share snapshots?

Answer 10

Yes, but only if its unencrypted

Question 11

Can you encrypt a root volume of an EC2 by default?

Answer 11

Nope. You cannot encrypt a root volume of an EC2 during creation. You have to create a snapshot, encrypt it and then create an AMI using said snapshot and launch an instance from the image.

Question 12

What is an instance store volume?

Answer 12

AKA Ephemeral volume, is temporary storage that will be erased when stopped. Rebooting is fine.

Question 13

What is an EBS store volume?

Answer 13

EBS volume type that can be stopped and still retain data. Rebooting is fine

Question 14

How do you take a snapshot of a RAID array?

Answer 14

Take an application consistent snapshot by one of these methods:

1) Turning off the instance
2) Freeze the RAID array
3) Dismount the volume

The idea is to remove any application or write back caches

Question 15

How many IOPS is the General Purpose SSD volume capable of?

Answer 15

10k or less IOPS

Question 16

How many IOPS is the IOPS optimized SSD volume capable of?

Answer 16

Over 10k IOPS

Question 17

If you have to encrypt data at rest on both Windows and Linux instances what third party tool could you use that would work on both?

Answer 17

TrueCrypt, open source and works with amazon resources. Supports both Windows and Linux.