Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Elastic File Storage (EFS) Flashcards
What is EBS?
EBS is Elastic Block Storage is the underlying data storage for EC2 instances.
EBS Volumes can be used for data storage or as boot volumes.
EBS Volumes are virtual hard drive in the cloud.
What are the attributes and benefits of EBS
- Highly Available
- Replicated in a single Availability Zone (It’s distributed within potentially different data centers)
- Scalable - Can update size and type on the fly without performance impact
- Designed for production workloads
What are the types of standard SSD EBS Drives and what is the use case?
- “General Purpose” - Balance of price and performance
- Max 16,000 IOPS
- Used for Boot disk
- Used for OS
- GP2
- GP3 - newer, higher performance
What is the higher level of SSD EBS? What are their use case?
- Provisioned IOPS
- Above 16,000 IOPS
- Higher durability
- IO1
- IO2
- Higher durability
- Higher throughput
What is a less expensive Hard Drive Option for EBS? Can you install an OS on it? What is it used for?
- Throughput Optimized / ST1 / Magnetic HDD
- Use Cases
- Big Data
- Data warehouses
- ETL
- Cannot install OS
What is the lowest cost EBS volume?
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- SC1 / Cold HDD
- No Operating system
- Good for file servers when performance isn’t a factor
- Sequential reads
- Infrequent access
- Okay for throughput usage
Describe IOPS and what is an example? Whats the best option for EBS?
A measure of reads and writes per second
transactional databases
Amazon.com - many small transactions at large scale
IO1
What is throughput? Which hard drive option is best for this requirement?
Total volume of data read or written
Used for data warehouses, any large data set
Use Throughput optimized SC1 EBS (magnetic)
What are the 4 types of EBS SSD Options?
GP2 - General Use (16,000 IOPS)
GP3 - General use, higher Performance
IO1 - OLTP
IO2 - OLTP - More IOPS/GB (above 16,000+)
What is a Volume vs a Snapshot
Volume is the hard drive, a snapshot is an incremental copy at a point in time. The first snapshot is big, subsequent ones are deltas.
What’s the deal with snapshots? (what are they, where are they stored, how long do they take for the first and subsequent ones?
- A copy of a point in time of a volume
- Stored on S3
- First one takes a while
- Subsequent ones are faster (because they are deltas)
What are best practices for creating snapshots
- Stop the instance first so that all data is stored (only copies EBS stored data, not data in RAM).
- If the EBS volume is encrypted the snapshot will also be encrypted.
Can you share snapshots
- You can share snapshots within a region, and you can copy them to another region to share them in another region. this allows you to migrate an EC2 to another region
Can EBS Volumes be in a different AZ than the EC2 Instance?
No. EBS Volumes are always in the same AZ as the EC2
What are the steps to copy an EC2 instance to another region?
- Stop the EC2 Instance
- Take a snapshot of the EC2
- Copy the snapshot to the new region (can encrypt the snapshot on copy)
- Create an AMI from the snapshot
- Create the EC2 instance from the AMI
What is the level of encryption of EBS volumes?? Who manages the encryption keys?
Using AES-256. you can manage the keys yourself (CMS-C) or let Amazon Manage it