EBS & Local Instance Store Flashcards
What is EBS
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a block-level storage service for use with EC2 instances. It offers highly available and reliable storage volumes that can be attached to EC2 instances to provide persistent storage for applications and data. You can only attach it to one instance. They are linked to a specific availability zone
Amazon EBS provides block-level storage volumes, which are essentially virtual hard drives that can be attached to EC2 instances. These volumes appear as raw block devices to the operating system of the EC2 instance and can be formatted, resized up and used like traditional hard drives.
What happens to the EBS volume after the instance is stopped or terminated
EBS volumes are persistent, meaning that the data stored on them persists independently of the lifecycle of the EC2 instance. Even if the EC2 instance is stopped or terminated, the data on the EBS volume remains intact. This makes EBS volumes suitable for storing critical data and applications that require long-term persistence.
How can you transfer your volumes into another AZ
You can snapshot them and restore them into another AZ
EBS allows you to create point-in-time snapshots of your volumes, which are incremental backups stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Snapshots can be used to back up your data, restore volumes, or create new volumes in different AWS Regions.
What are the EBS Volume types
General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes, which provide a balance of price and performance for a wide range of workloads.
Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volumes, which are designed for I/O-intensive applications that require high performance and consistent low latency.
Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) volumes, optimized for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads such as big data and data warehousing.
Cold HDD (sc1) volumes, suitable for less frequently accessed workloads that require low-cost storage.
Note: Only gp2/gp3 and io1/io2 can be used as boot volumes
What are EBS Snapshots
EBS snapshots are backups or point-in-time copies of Amazon EBS volumes. By creating snapshots regularly, you can protect your data against accidental deletion, corruption, or other data loss events. In the event of a failure, you can use snapshots to restore your volumes to a previous state, minimizing downtime and data loss.
EBS snapshots are incremental, meaning that when you create a snapshot, only the data that has changed since the last snapshot is copied to Amazon S3. No need to detach a volume to do a snapshot, but it is recommended. You can copy snapshots across region for DR purposes. You can make an image (AMI) from a snapshot
Note: EBS volumes restored by snapshots need to be pre-warmed. With Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR), AWS pre-warms the EBS volumes associated with the snapshots, significantly reducing the time it takes to restore the snapshots. FSR allows you to enable fast snapshot restore on specific EBS snapshots as needed.
or you can use the fio/dd command (which is the old way)
What is Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager and its uses
Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager is a service that automates the management of data lifecycle policies for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots.
Amazon DLM automates the creation, retention, and deletion of EBS snapshots according to predefined policies. Instead of manually managing snapshot schedules and retention periods, you can use DLM to automate these tasks, saving time and reducing operational overhead.
With Amazon DLM, you can define lifecycle policies based on your specific requirements and business needs. You can specify the frequency of snapshot creation (e.g., daily, weekly), the number of retained snapshots, and the tags or resource identifiers to apply policies to.
Amazon DLM allows you to define policies based on tags applied to your Amazon EC2 instances or EBS volumes.
Amazon DLM supports copying of snapshots across AWS Regions. You can create policies to automatically copy snapshots to different Regions for disaster recovery, data replication, or compliance purposes.
It cant be used to manage snapshots/AMIs created outside of DLM or instance-store backed AMIs
What is the difference between Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager vs AWS Backup
Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM): DLM is specifically designed for managing the lifecycle of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots. It automates the creation, retention, and deletion of EBS snapshots according to predefined policies.
AWS Backup: AWS Backup is a centralized backup service that supports a wide range of AWS resources, including Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS databases, Amazon DynamoDB tables, Amazon EFS file systems, and more. It provides a unified backup solution for managing backups across multiple AWS services.
Are EBS volumes encrypted by default
No, however, there is an account-level setting to encrypt automatically new EBS volumes and Snapshots. This setting needs to be enabled on a per-region basis
EBS snapshots support encryption of data at rest using AWS (KMS) keys.
What is EBS Multi-Attach?
With EBS Multi-Attach, you can attach a single EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances within the same Availability Zone. This enables multiple EC2 instances to read and write to the same volume concurrently, providing shared storage for applications that require shared access to data.
EBS Multi-Attach is limited to a single Availability Zone. You cannot attach a Multi-Attach volume to instances in different Availability Zones.
What is an EC2 Instance store
EC2 Instance Store is a type of temporary block-level storage that is physically attached to an EC2 instance. Unlike Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store), which provides persistent block storage that persists beyond the lifetime of an EC2 instance, instance store volumes are temporary and are lost when the instance is stopped or terminated. It cannot be increased in size like EBS. It has a very high I/O
