EBS / EFS Flashcards
EBS SSD Volumes
Highly available & scaleable storage volumes you can attach to an EC2 instance
EBS GP2 - General Purpose SSD
Suitable for boot disks & and general purpose apps
Up to 16k IOPS per volume
Up to 99.99% durability
EBS GP3 - Provisioned IOPS SSD
Suitable for high performance apps
Predictable 3000 IOPS baseline performance & 125 MiB/s regardless of volume size
Up to 99.99% durability
EBS - IO1 Provisioned IOPS SSD
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
EBS IO2 - Provisioned IoPs SSD
Suitable for OLTP and latency sensitive apps
500 IOPs / GiB
99.99% durability
Latest Gen Provisioned IOPs volume
EBS ST1 - throughput optimized HDD
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
EBS SC1 - cold HDD
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
What is the difference between a volume and a snapshot?
Volumes exist on EBS, snapshots exist in S3
How are snapshots used / snapshot characteristics
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
Can you share snapshots?
Yes across regions and AWS accounts, but you do have to copy the snapshot to the region you’re sharing it with first
Can you change EBS volumes on the fly?
Yes, you can resize EBS volumes on the fly
You can also change the volume type eg go from gp2 to gp3
Instance Store Volumes
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
EBS Storage Limitations
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
Encryption with EBS
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
How to Create an Encrypted EBS volume?
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
What does EC2 Hibernation do?
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
EBS Hibernation Drawbacks
Instances can’t be hibernated longer than 60 days
Available for on-demand and preserved instances only
EFS - Elastic File System
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
When to choose EFS
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
When to choose FSX for Windows
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
When to choose FSX for luster
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
When to use S3 for storage?
Used for serverless object storage, files, videos , etc
When to use Glacier
Used for archiving S3 objects
When to use EFS
Network File System (NFS) for Linux instances!
Centralized storage solution across multiple AZs
When to use FSX for Luster
File storage for high performance Linux file systems
When to use EBS Volumes
Persistent storage for EC2 instances
When to use Instance Store
Ephemeral Storage for EC2 instances
When to use FSX for Windows
File storage for windows instances, centralized storage solution across multiple AZs in one region
How does AWS backup consolidate back up solutions?
Because it backs up EC2, EBS, EFS, FSX for Luster, FSX for Windows, & AWS storage Gateway
AWS Backup with AWS Organizations
You can use AWS Backups and Organizations together to back up your AWS services across AWS accounts
Benefits of AWS Backups
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
