Definition
What’s an EBS (Elastic Block Store) Volume?
- An EBS Volume is a network drive (i.e. not a physical drive) you can attach to your instances while they run
- It allows your instance to persist data, even after their termination
- They can only be mounted to one instance at a time (at the CCP level)
- They are bound to a specific availability zone
- Analogy: Think of them as a “network USB stick”
- Free tier: 30 GB of free EBS storage of type General Purpose (SSD) or Magnetic per month
Definition
EBS Volume
- It’s a network drive (i.e. not a physical drive)
-> It uses the network to communicate the instance, which means there might be a bit of latency
-> It can be detached from an EC2 instance and attached to another one quickly - It’s locked to an Availability Zone (AZ)
-> An EBS Volume in us-east-1a cannot be attched to us-east-1b
-> To move a volume across, you first need to snapshot it - These Volumes have a provisioned capacity (size in GBs and IO per secs)
-> You get billed for all the provisioned capacity
EBS - Delete on Termination attribute
- Controls the EBS behaviour when an EC2 instance terminates
-> By default, the root EBS volume is deleted (attribute enabled)
-> By default, any other attached EBS volume is not deleted (attribute disabled) - This can be controlled by the AWS console / AWS CLI
- Use case: preserve root volume when instance is terminated
EBS Snapshots
- Make a backup (snapshot) of your EBS volume at a point in time
- Not necessary to detach volume to do snapshot, but recommended
- Can copy snapshots across AZ or Region
EBS Snapshot Features
- EBS Snapshot Archive
-> Move a Snapshot to an “archive tier” that is 75% cheaper
-> Takes within 24 to 72 hours for restoring the archive - Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots
-> Setup rules to retain deleted snapshots so you can recover them after an accidental deletion
-> Specify retention (from 1 day to 1 year)
What does AMI stand for?
- Amazing Machine Interface
- Amazon Metric Inteligence
- Advanced Made Internet
- Amazon Machine Image
Amazon Machine Image
What does EBS stand for?
- Elastic Bean Stalk
- Elastic Binary System
- Elevated Binary Storage
- Elastic Block Store
Elastic Block Store
AMI Overview
- AMI = Amazon Machine Image
- AMI are a customization of an EC2 instance
-> You add your own software, configuration, operating system, monitoring.
-> Faster boot / configuration time because all your software is pre-packaged - AMI are built for a specific region (and can be copied across regions)
- You can launch EC2 instances from
-> A Public AMI: AWS provider
-> Your own AMI: you make and maintain them yourself
-> An AWS marketplace AMI: an AMI someone else made (and potentially sells)
Service Overview
EC2 Image Builder
What is it used for?
- Used to automate the creation of Virtual Machines or container images
- Automates the creation, maintain, validate and test EC2 AMI’s
- Can be run on a schedule (weekly, whenever packages are updated, etc…)
- Free service (only pay for the underlying resources)
If you need a high-performance hardware disk, use EC2 Instance Store
Local EC2 Instance Store
Note:
-Better I/O performance
-EC2 Instance Store lose their storage if they’re stopped (ephemeral)
- Good for buffer / cache / scratch data / temporary content
What does EFS stand for?
Type of storage
Elastic File System
EFS (Elastic File System) Overview
- Manage NFS (network file system) that can be mounted on 100s of EC2 instances
- EFS works only with Linux EC2 instances in multi-AZ (availability zone)
- Highly available, scalable, expensive (3x gp2), pay per use, no capacity planning
EFS Infrequent Access (EFS-IA)
- Storage class that cost-optimized for files not accessed every day
- Up to 92% lower cost compared to EFS Standard
- EFS will automatically move your files to EFS-IA based on the last time they were accessed
- Enable EFS-IA with a Lifecycle Policy
- Example: move files that are not accessed for 60 days to EFS-IA
- Transparent to the applications accessing EFS
Shared Responsibility Model for EC2 Storage
AWS vs User
AWS
- Infrastructure
- Replication for data for EBS volumes & EFS (Elastic File System)
- Replacing faulty hardware
- Ensuring their employees cannot access your data
YOU
- Setting up backup / snapshot procedures
- Setting up data encryption
- Responsibility of any data on the drives
- Understanding the risk of using EC2 Instance Store
Amazon FSx - Overview
- Launch 3rd party high-performance file systems on AWS
- Fully managed service
- 3 main 3rd party systems: FSx for Lustre, FSx for Windows File Server, FSx for NetApp ONTAP
What are the 2 flavors of Amazon FSx?
FSx Lustre and FSx Windows file server
EC2 Instance Storage - Summary
- EBS volumes:
-> network drives attach to one EC2 instance at a time
-> Mapped to an Availability Zone
-> Can use EBS Snapshots for backups / transferring EBS volumes across AZ - AMI (Amazon Machine Image):
-> create ready-to-use EC2 instances with our customizations - EC2 Image Builder:
-> automatically build, test and distribute AMIs - EC2 Instance Store:
-> High performance hardware disk attached to our EC2 instance
-> Lost if our instance is stopped / terminated - EFS: network file system, can be attached to 100s of instances in a region
- EFS-IA: cost-optimized storage class for infrequent accessed files
- FSx for Windows: Network File System for Windows servers
- FSx for Lustre: High Performance Computing Linux file system
Quiz question
Which EC2 Storage would you use to create a shared network file system for your EC2 instances?
- EBS Volume
- EC2 Instance Store
- EBS Snapshots
- EFS
EFS (Elastic File System)
Note: Amazon EFS is a fully managed service that makes it easy to set up, scale, and cost-optimize file storage in the Amazon Cloud
Which service can be used to automate image management processes?
- AMI
- EC2 Image Builder
- EBS Snapshots
- IAM
EC2 Image Builder
Note: EC2 Image Builder is an automated pipeline for the creation, maintenance, validation, sharing, and deployment of Linux or Windows images (os’) for use on AWS and on-premises
Which of the following is fully managed native Microsoft Windows file system?
- EFS
- FSx
- EBS
FSx
Note: Amazon FSx makes it easy and cost effective to launch and run popular file systems that are fully managed by AWS. It comes in two offerings: FSx for Windows File Server (used for business applications), and FSx for Lustre (used for high-performance computing)
What are AMI NOT used for?
- Add your own software license
- Add your own configuration
- Add your own operating-system
- Add your own IP addresses
Add your own IP addresses
Note: You cannot use AMIs to add your IP addresses. IP addresses are added to an instance as you create it.
EBS Volumes CANNOT be attached to multiple EC2 instance at a time.
True
False
True
Note: EBS (Elastic Block Store) Volumes can be attached to only one EC2 Instance at a time, but EC2 Instances can have multiple EBS Volumes attached to them
An EBS Volume is a network drive you can attach to your instances while they run, so your instances’ data persist even after their termination
True
False
True
Note: EBS Volumes allows instances’ data to persist even after their termination
Which statement is CORRECT regarding EC2 Instance Store?
- It is not good to use as a disk to cache content
- It has a better I/O performance, but the data is lost if the EC2 Instance is terminated
- Your data is always safe with EC2 Instance Store
It has a better I/O performance, but the data is lost if the EC2 Instance is terminated
Note: EC2 Instance Store has a better I/O performance, but data is lost if: the EC2 instance is stopped or terminated, or when the underlying disk drive fails.
