EBS

Question 1

What is EBS?

Answer 1

Elastic Block Store. Virtual disk in the cloud that protects you from failure of single components. Can run on EC2.

Question 2

Requirement of attaching an EBS to EC2

Answer 2

They have to be in the same availability zone

Question 3

What are the two EBS Volume Types

Answer 3

SSD Volumes and Magnetic Volumes

Question 4

What are SSD volumes used for?

Answer 4

For transactional workloads, such as database and boot volumes (performance depends mostly on IOPS). Can read and write quickly. Small and random I/O operations.

Question 5

What is a General Purpose EBS Volume?

Answer 5

(GP2) SSD Volume that balances both pricing and performance.

Ratio 3 IOPs per GB with up to 1000 IOPS and availability to burst up to 3000 IOPS for volumes of 334 GB and above.

Question 6

What is a Provisioned IOPs EBS Volume?

Answer 6

(IO1) SSD Volume used for extreme performance I/O intensive apps (large relational or NoSQL DB).

Used for mission critical low-lateny or high throughput workloads. over 10000 IOPs.

Up to 20,000 IOPS per volume

Question 7

What is a magnetic volume used for?

Answer 7

Very throughput intensive workloads (ex. MapReduce and log processing). For large datasets, large I/O and complex queries. As well as sequential workloads or streaming.

Question 8

What is a Throughput HHD EBS Volume?

Answer 8

(STI) A HHD volume. Low cost designed for frequent access throughput intensive workloads.

Ex. Big Data, data warehouse, log processing.

CANNOT be a boot volume

Question 9

What is a Cold HHD EBS Volume?

Answer 9

(SCI) Lowest cost storage for infrequent accessed workloads

Ex. File Server

CANNOT be a boot volume

Question 10

What is a Magnetic EBS Volume

Answer 10

It is the standard HHD volume. Used for Legacy. It is the lowest cost per GB of all EBS volume types that IS BOOTABLE.

Good for workloads where data is accessed infrequently and for apps where lowest storage cost is important.

Question 11

Two ways to encrypt root device volume?

Answer 11

1) Use OS system level encryption

2) Take a snapshot. Copy snapshot, then create image (go to AMI), and then click launch.

Question 12

How can you increase the performance of a volume?

Answer 12

• You can stripe volumes together in a RAID 0 config
• Ensure that your EC2 instances are types that can be optimized for use with EBS
• Schedule snapshots of HDD based volumes for periods of low use

Question 13

How to monitor EBS Volumes?

Answer 13

Cloudwatch

• Volume status checks
• Volume events

Question 14

Max volume size

Answer 14

16 TiB

Question 15

How to create incremental backups in EBS

Answer 15

Snapshots. But note snapshots are constrained to the region they are created. And shared snapshots must be encrypted with a CMK

Question 16

If an EBS backed instance is deleted what happens to the root volume?

Answer 16

It is persisted by default. But by default all additional EBS volumes created and attached to the instance are deleted.

Question 17

When you attach a new EBS volume on EC2 instance what steps do you have to take to use volume?

Answer 17

Create a file system on the volume and then mount it