EBS / EFS

Question 1

EBS SSD Volumes

Answer 1

Highly available & scaleable storage volumes you can attach to an EC2 instance

Question 2

EBS GP2 - General Purpose SSD

Answer 2

Suitable for boot disks & and general purpose apps

Up to 16k IOPS per volume

Up to 99.99% durability

Question 3

EBS GP3 - Provisioned IOPS SSD

Answer 3

Suitable for high performance apps

Predictable 3000 IOPS baseline performance & 125 MiB/s regardless of volume size

Up to 99.99% durability

Question 4

EBS - IO1 Provisioned IOPS SSD

Answer 4

Suitable for OLTP & latency sensitive apps

50 IOPS /GiB

Up to 64,000 IOPs per volume

High Performance and most expensive

Up to 99.99% durability

Question 5

EBS IO2 - Provisioned IoPs SSD

Answer 5

Suitable for OLTP and latency sensitive apps

500 IOPs / GiB

99.99% durability

Latest Gen Provisioned IOPs volume

Question 6

EBS ST1 - throughput optimized HDD

Answer 6

Suitable for big data, data warehouses, ETL

Max Throughput of 500 MB/s per volume

Cannot be a boot volume

Up to 99.9% durability

Question 7

EBS SC1 - cold HDD

Answer 7

Max throughput of 250 MB/s per volume

For less frequently accessed data

Cannot be a boot volume

Lowest cost

Up to 99.9% durability

Question 8

What is the difference between a volume and a snapshot?

Answer 8

Volumes exist on EBS, snapshots exist in S3

Question 9

How are snapshots used / snapshot characteristics

Answer 9

Snapshots are point in time photographs of volumes & are incremental in nature

Your first snapshot will take time to create for consistent snapshots stop the instance and detach the volume

Question 10

Can you share snapshots?

Answer 10

Yes across regions and AWS accounts, but you do have to copy the snapshot to the region you’re sharing it with first

Question 11

Can you change EBS volumes on the fly?

Answer 11

Yes, you can resize EBS volumes on the fly

You can also change the volume type eg go from gp2 to gp3

Question 12

Instance Store Volumes

Answer 12

Called ephemeral storage

You can reboot the host and not lose data

Instance store volumes cannot be stopped. If your underlying host

By default the instance store root volumes will be deleted on termination

Question 13

EBS Storage Limitations

Answer 13

You can reboot instances with EBS storage and not lose data

By default the root volume will be deleted upon terminating an instance

EBS volumes can be configured to keep the root device upon termination

EBS backed instances can be stopped and you will not lose data

Question 14

Encryption with EBS

Answer 14

Data at rest is encrypted in the volume

All data inflight moving between instance and volume is encrypted

All snapshots of encrypted volumes are encrypted

All volumes created from an encrypted snapshot are encrypted

Question 15

How to Create an Encrypted EBS volume?

Answer 15

Create a snapshot of an unencrypted EBS volume

Create a copy of the snapshot and select encrypt

Create an AMI from the encrypted snapshot

Use that AMI to launch new encrypted instances

Question 16

What does EC2 Hibernation do?

Answer 16

Preserves state of in memory RAM on persistent storage (EBS)

Much faster startup bc you don’t need to reload the OS

Instance RAM must be less than 150gb

Only available in C3, c4, c5, m3, m4, m5, r3, r4, & r5

Avail for Windows, Amazon Linux 2 ami & Ubuntu

Question 17

EBS Hibernation Drawbacks

Answer 17

Instances can’t be hibernated longer than 60 days

Available for on-demand and preserved instances only

Question 18

EFS - Elastic File System

Answer 18

Supports NFS v4

Can support 1000s of concurrent NFS connections

Only pay for the storage you use

Data is stored across multiple AZs in a region

Can scale up to petabytes

Read after write consistency

If you get a question asking about highly scaleable shared storage using NFS think EFS

Question 19

When to choose EFS

Answer 19

In the exam you’ll be asked to choose whether to use EFS, FsX for Windows or FsX for luster

When you need distributed highly resilient storage for Linux instances & Linux based apps

Question 20

When to choose FSX for Windows

Answer 20

In the exam you’ll be asked to choose whether to use EFS, FsX for Windows or FsX for luster

When you need centralized storage for windows apps such as share point, ms sql, workspaces, iis, etc, must be ms based

Question 21

When to choose FSX for luster

Answer 21

When you need high speed, high capacity, distributed storage. This will be for apps that do high performance computing (hpc), financial modeling, etc.

FSX for luster can store data directly on S3

Question 22

When to use S3 for storage?

Answer 22

Used for serverless object storage, files, videos , etc

Question 23

When to use Glacier

Answer 23

Used for archiving S3 objects

Question 24

When to use EFS

Answer 24

Network File System (NFS) for Linux instances!

Centralized storage solution across multiple AZs

Question 25

When to use FSX for Luster

Answer 25

File storage for high performance Linux file systems

Question 26

When to use EBS Volumes

Answer 26

Persistent storage for EC2 instances

Question 27

When to use Instance Store

Answer 27

Ephemeral Storage for EC2 instances

Question 28

When to use FSX for Windows

Answer 28

File storage for windows instances, centralized storage solution across multiple AZs in one region

Question 29

How does AWS backup consolidate back up solutions?

Answer 29

Because it backs up EC2, EBS, EFS, FSX for Luster, FSX for Windows, & AWS storage Gateway

Question 30

AWS Backup with AWS Organizations

Answer 30

You can use AWS Backups and Organizations together to back up your AWS services across AWS accounts

Question 31

Benefits of AWS Backups

Answer 31

Backups gives you centralized control letting you automate your backups & define data lifecycle policies.

You get better compliance as you can enforce your back up policies, ensure your back ups are encrypted, & audit them once complete