Section - Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Elastic File System(EFS)

Question 1

What is Elastic Block Store(EBS)?

Answer 1

• Storage volumes you can attach to your EC2 instances
• Use them the same way you would use any system disk
  
  • Create a file system
  • Run a database
  • Run an operating system
  • Store data
  • Install applications
• Mission Critical
  
  • Production workloads
    
    • Designed for mission-critical workloads
  • Highly Available
    
    • Automatically replicated within a single Availability Zone to protect against hardware failures.
  • Scalable
    
    • Dynamically increase capacity and change the volume type with no downtime or performance impact to your live systems.

Question 2

EBS Volume Types - Solidate State Disk (SSD)?

Answer 2

• General Purpose SSD (gp2)
  
  • 3 IOPS per GiB
  • up to a maximum of 16,000 IOPS per volume
  • gp2 volumes smaller than 1 TB can burst up to 3,000 IOPS
  • Good for boot volumes or development and test applications that are not latency sensitive.
• General Purpose SSD (gp3)
  
  • ​Predicatable 3,000 IOPS baseline performance and 125 MiB/s regardless of volume size.
  • Ideal for applications that require high performance at a low cost, such as MySQL, Cassandra, Virtual desktops, and hadoop analytics.
  • Customers looking for higher performance can sclae up to 16,000 IOPS and 1000 MiB/s for an additional fee.
  • NB: the top perfomance of gp3 is 4 times faster than max throughput of gp2 volumes
• Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1)
  
  • Up to 64,000 IOPS per volume. 50 IOPS per GiB
  • use if you need more than 16,000 IOPS
  • High performance option and the most expensive.
  • Designed for I/O intensive applications, large databases, and latency-sensitive workloads.
  • 99.9% durability
• Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) Latest
  
  • io2 is the same price as io1
  • latest generation
  • Higher durability and more IOPS
  • 500 IOPS per GiB
  • Up to 64,000 IOPS
  • 99.999% durability
  • Designed for I/O intensive applications, large databases, and latency-sensitive workloads.
  • Applications which need high levels of durablity.

NB: do not memorize the IOPs for the exam ..

Question 3

EBS Volume Types - Hard Disk Drive (MB/s-Intensive) ?

Answer 3

• Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)
  
  • Low cost HDD volume.
  • Baseline throughput of 40 MB/s per TB
  • Ability to burst up to 250 MB/s per TB
  • Maximum throughput of 500 MB/s per volume.
  • Cannot be a boot volume (ec2)
  • Usage scenario:
  • Frequently-accessed, throughput-intensive workloads
  • Big Data, Data warehouses, ETL, and log processing
• Cold HDD (SC1)
  
  • Lowest cost option
  • Baseline throughout of 12 MB/s per TB
  • Ability to burst up to 80MB/s per TB
  • Max throughput of 250MB/s per volume
  • Cannot be a boot volume (ec2)
  • Usage Scenario:
  • A good choice for colder data requiring fewer scans per day.
  • Perfomance is not a factor

Question 4

IOPS Versus Throughput?

Answer 4

• IOPS (Input/output operations per second(IOPS, pronounced eye-ops))
  
  • Measures the number of read and write operation per second
  • Important metric for quick transactions, low latency apps, transactional workloads
  • The ability to action reads and writes very quickly
• Throughput
  
  • Measures the number of bits read or written per second (MB/s)
  • Important metric for large datasets, large I/O sizes, complex queries.
  • The ability to deal with large datasets

Question 5

What are Volumes?

Answer 5

• Volumes Exist on EBS
• Think of it as a virtual hard disk
  
  • Volumes are simple a virtual hard disks.
  • You need a minimum of 1 volume per EC2 instance.
  • This is called the root device volume.

Question 6

What are Snapshots?

Answer 6

• Snapshots exist on S3
  
  • Think of snapshots as a photograph of the virtual disk/volume
• Snapshots are point in time
  
  • When you take a snapshot, it a point-in-time copy of a volume
• Snapshots are incremental
  
  • This means only the data that has been changed since your last snapshot are moved to S3.
  • This saves dramatically on space and the time ti takes to take a snapshot.
• The first snapshot
  
  • If it is your first snapshot, it may take some time to create as there is no previous point-in-time copy.

Question 7

3 Tips for Snapshots?

Answer 7

• Consistent Snapshots
  
  • Snapshots only capture data that has been written to your Amazon EBS volume. which might exclude any data that has been locally cached by your application or OS.
  • For a consistent snapshot, it it recommended you stop the instance and take a snap.
• Encrypted Snapshots
  
  • ​If you take a snapshot of an encrypted EBS volume, the snapshot will be encrypted automatically.
• Sharing Snapshots
  
  • You can share snapshots, but only in the region in which they were created.
  • To share to other regions, you will need to copy them to the destination region first.
  • You can share snapshots between AWS accounts as well as between regions.

Question 8

What is EBS Encryption?

Answer 8

• EBS encrypts your volume with a data key using industry-standard AES-256 algorithm.
• Amazon EBS encryption uses AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) customer master keys(CMK) when creating encrypted volumes and snapshots.

Question 9

What Happens when you Encrypt an EBS Volume?

Answer 9

• Data at rest is encrypted inside the volume.
• All data in flight moving between the instance and volume is encrypted
• All snapshots are encrypted
• All volumes created from the snapshot ar encrypted.
• Handled Transparently
  
  • Encryption and decryption are handled transparently (You do’t need to do anything)
• Latency
  
  • Encryption has a minimal impact on latency
• Copying
  
  • Copying an unencryoted snapshot allows encryption.
• Snapshots
  
  • Snapshots of encrypted volumes are encrypted.
• Root Device Volumes
  
  • You can now encrypt root device volumes upon creation.

Question 10

4 Steps to Encrypt an Unencrypted Volume?

Answer 10

• Create a snapshot of the unencrypted root device volume.
• Create a copy of the snaphot and select the encrypt option.
• Create an AMI from the encrypted snapshot.
• Use that AMI to launch new encrypted instances.

Question 11

What is EC2 Hibernation?

Answer 11

• When you hibernate an EC2 instance, the operating system is told to perform hibernation (suspend-to-disk)
• Hibernation saves the contents from the instance memory (RAM) to your Amazon EBS root volume.
• This persist the instance’s Amazon EBS root volume and any attached Amazon EBS data volumes

Question 12

EC2 Hibernation in Action?

Answer 12

• When you start your instance out of hibernation:
  
  • The Amazon EBS root volume is restored to it’s previous state
  • The RAM contents are reloaded
  • The processes that were previously running on the instance are resumed
  • Previously attached data volumes are reattached and the instance retains it’s instance ID.
  • With EC2 hibernation, the instance boots much faster. The operating system does not need to reboot because the in-memory state (RAM) is preserved. this is useful for:
    
    • Long-running processes
    • Services that take time to initialize
  • Instance RAM must be less than 150GB
  • Instance families include C3,C4,C5,M3,M4,R3,R4 and R5
  • Available for Windows, Amazon Linux 2 AMI, and Ubuntu
  • Instances can’t be hibernated for more than 60 days.
  • Available for On-Demand and Reserved instances

Question 13

What is EFS?

Answer 13

• Amazon Elastic File System
• Managed NFS (Network file system) that can be mounted on many EC2 instances.
• EFS works with EC2 instances in Multiple Availability Zones.
• Highly available and scalable; however, it is expensive.
• Uses NFSv4 protocol
• Compaitible with Linux-based AMI (Windows not supported at this time)
• Encryption at rest using KMS
• Read-after-write consistency
• EFS performance
  
  • 1000s concurrent connections
  • 10 Gbps Throughput
  • Petabytes scaling
• Storage Tiers
  
  • EFS comes with storage tiers and lifecycle management, allowing you to move data from one tier to another after X number of days
  • Standard - For frequently accessed files
  • Infrequently Accessed
• Use Cases:
  
  • Content management
  • web servers
    
    • have a single folder for your website

Question 14

FSx for Windows

Answer 14

• Amazon FSx for windows File Server provides a fully managed native Microsoft Windows file System so you can easily move your Windows-based applications that require file storage to AWS.
• Amazon FSX is built on windows server.

Question 15

How is FSx for Windows different from EFS?

Answer 15

• FSx for Windows
  
  • Amanaged windows server that runs Windows Server Block (SMB)-based file services
  • Designed for Windows and Windows applications
  • Support AD users, access control lists, groups, and security policies, along with Distributed File System (DFS) namespace and replication.
• EFS
  
  • A managed NAS filer for EC2 instances based on Network File System (NFS) version 4
  • One of the first network file sharing protocols native to Unix and Linux.

Question 16

Amazon FSx for Lustre

Answer 16

• a fully managed file system that is optimized for compute-intensive workloads
• high performance computing
• machine learning
• With Amazon FSx, you can lunch and run a Lustre file system that can process massive datasets at up to hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput, millions of IOPS, and sub-millisecond latencies.

Question 17

Exam Tips: EFS,FSx

Answer 17

• EFS: When you need distributed, highly resilient storage for Linux instances and Linux-based applications.
• Amazon FSx for Windows: When you need centralized storage for Windows-based applications, such as sharepoint, microsoft SQL server, workspaces, IIS web server etc ..
• Amazon FSx for lustre: When you need high-speed, high-capacity distributed storage. This will be applications that do high perfomance computing (HPC), financial modelling
  
  • FSx Lustre can store data directly on S3