Storage

Question 1

Currently, a company makes use of EBS snapshots to back up their EBS Volumes. As a part of the business continuity requirement, these snapshots need to be made available in another region. How could this be achieved?

Answer 1

Create Snapshot and copy the snapshot to a new region

Question 2

An application with a 150 GB relational database runs on an EC2 Instance. While the application is used infrequently with small peaks in the morning and evening, which storage type would be the most cost-effective option for the above requirement?

Answer 2

Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2 or gp3)
EBS provisioned IOPS is not a good choice because the data is accessed infrequently
EBS Throughput Optimized HDD is not good because the minimum size is 500 GB

Question 3

Currently, General Purpose SSD (gp2) volume type states a maximum IOPS of 16,000. What block size is this measurement based on?

Answer 3

16KiB I/O Size

Question 4

Which OS are supported for EFS?

Answer 4

Only Linux

Question 5

With the same amount of GBs provisioned, which one cost less between a S3 Standard, an EBS gp2 and an EFS?

Answer 5

S3 Standard < EFS < EBS gp2

Question 6

What is EBS io2 Block Express?

Answer 6

It has 256,000 at 16 KB I/O max IOPS and 4,000 MiB/s, so is the EBS with highest IOPS and throughput.
It also has 99.999% durability, that is better then all the other volume types which have 99.9%

Question 7

Max IOPS of a gp3 and gp2 volume?

Answer 7

16,000 at 16 KB I/O
250 MiB/s per gp2, 1000 MiB/s per gp3

Question 8

Max IOPS of a io1 and io2 volume?

Answer 8

64,000 at 16 KB I/O and 1000 MiB/s

Question 9

A company is creating a new application that will store a large amount of data. The data will be analyzed hourly and modified by several Amazon EC2 Linux instances that are deployed across multiple Availability Zones. The application team believes the amount of space needed will continue to grow for the next 6 months.
What would you use between EFS and EBS io1?

Answer 9

EFS, it can share data between instance and it’s pay per use, it scales on demand

EBS io1 can be multi-attach, but not across different AZs. You also pay more because you have to provision capacity

Question 10

Can you attach EBS io1 and io2 to multiple EC2 across different AZs?

Answer 10

No, multiattach is available only within a single AZ

Question 11

What happen to the instance store of an EC2 if the instance is terminated?

Answer 11

The data is lost. The instance store only persists during the lifetime of the instance and the reboots

Question 12

Minimum volume size and max throughput for HDD?

Answer 12

For st1 (Throughput Optimized HDD): 125 GiB minimum size, 500 MiB/s throughput
For st2 (Cold Storage HDD): 125 GiB minimum size, 250 MiB/s throughput

Question 13

In which conditions an HDD is more efficient?

Answer 13

ThroughPut Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1) deliver optimal performance only when I/O operations are large and sequential

Question 14

Are there data transfer charges for replicating a RDS instance in the same region?

Answer 14

No

Question 15

Which are the performance modes of EFS?

Answer 15

General Purpose and Max I/O

Question 16

Can you move data from Snowball to Glacier?

Answer 16

Not directly, you first need to send them to S3, and then you can move them to Glacier with a lifecycle policy

Question 17

Can you detach an EBS volume and attach it to a new EC2 instance?

Answer 17

Yes, but only if it is in the same AZ. To move it to a different AZ you need to make a snapshot first

Question 18

What EBS volume would you choose for a frequently accessed, throughput intensive workload?

Answer 18

st1 HDD

Question 19

What is EC2 Instance Store

Answer 19

Instance Store are more performant than EBS volumes, up to 3.3 million IOPS, but they lose the data if the instance is stopped. Backup and replication are your responsability

Question 20

What are the modes of EFS?

Answer 20

You can choose the mode at creation time
Performance Mode:
General purpose (default): latency sensitive use cases (web server, CMS)
MAX I/O: lower latency and higher throughput (big data, media processing)
Throughput mode:
Bursting: higher throughput than performance mode, with burst of up to 100 MiB/s (increases with system size)
Provisioned: you set your throughput regardless of storage size

Question 21

RDS is to relational databases what Fsx is to…

Answer 21

File Systems
FSx provides a managed way to deploy file systems like Window File Server and Lustre

Question 22

What is AWS Data Sync?

Answer 22

Service to move large amount of data from on-premises/other cloud to AWS, or from an AWS service to another AWS service

Question 23

What’s the only way in AWS to move data between two locations preserving the metadata?

Answer 23

AWS Data Sync

Question 24

Can you copy data from Snowball Edge to Glacier?

Answer 24

No, you can only copy data directly to S3, then create a lifecycle policy to move it to Glacier

Question 25

I have an encrypted EBS volume attached to an EC2 instance. Is the encryption at rest or in-flight?

Answer 25

Both. Encryption is actually done in the EC2 instance before sending data to EBS, so the data are encrypted in flight and also at rest