Network Storage & Data Lifecycle

Question 1

EFS Architecture

Answer 1

It provides network-based file systems

-EFS is an implementation of NFSv4

-You create Filesystems which can be mounted in Linux

-Shared between many EC2 Instances

-Private service, access to EFS file system is via mount targets inside a VPC

-Can be accessed from on-premises - VPN or DX

Architecture:

-Runs inside a VPC, inside EFS you create file systems and these use POSIX permissions

-The EFS file system is made available inside a VPC, via mount targets, and these run from subnets

-Mount targets have IP addresses taken from the IP range of the subnet - for HA, make sure to put multiple MT in multiple AZs

-Instances uses these MT to connect to the EFS file systems

Question 2

EFS - FACTS

Answer 2

-Linux ONLY

EFS offers two performance modes:

-General Purpose = Ideal for latency sensitive use cases, web servers, content management systems, home directories or even general file serving (DEFAULT)

-Max I/O = Can scale to higher levels of aggregate throughtput and operations per second but has a trade-off of increased latencies. For applications or workloads such as big data media processing.

Two throughput modes:

-Bursting = It has a burst pool, but the throughput scales with the size of the file systems (GP2 / EBS)

-Provisioned = You can specify throughput requirements separately from size (IO1 / EBS)

Two storage classes:

-Standard = Used to store frequently accessed files (DEFAULT)

-Infrequent Access = Lower cost storage class, designed for storing things that are IA

-Lifecycle Policies can be used with classes - Move data between classes

Question 3

AWS Backups

Answer 3

-Fully managed data-protection (backup/restore) service

-Allows you to consolidate management into one place… across accounts & across regions

-Supports a wide range of AWS products (EC2, VMWARE) (EBS) (EFS, FSx) (Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB, Neptune, DocumentDB) (S3)

Key components:

-Backup Plans - You can configure the frequency, window, lifecycle, vault, region copy

-Resources - What is being backed up

-Vaults - Backup destination (container) - assign KMS key for encryption - By default, are R/W, meaning backups can be deleted

-Vault Lock - write-once, read-many (WORM), 72 hour cool off, then even AWS can’t delete

-On-Demand - manual backups created as needed

PITR - Point In Time Recovery - you can restore to the state of that resource to specific date and time, within the retention window