Section7: EC2 Instance Storage

Question 1

What is an EBS(Elastic Block Store) volume?

Answer 1

• Is an network drive(not a physical drive) which you can attach while instance is running.
• It allows your instance to persist data even after the instance is terminated.
• They can only be mounted to one instance at a time.
• They are locked to an Availability Zone

Question 2

What is a AMI?

Answer 2

• AMI = Amazon Machine Image
• AMI are customization(software,OS,config) of an EC2 instance.
• AMI are built for specific region.
• You can launch EC2 instances from :
  -> A public AMI
  -> Your own AMI
  -> An AWS Marketplace AMI

Question 3

What is the AMI process? Or how to create AMI?

Answer 3

• Start an EC2 instance and customize it
• Stop the instance
• Build an AMI
• Launch instances from other AMIs

Question 4

What is a EC2 instance Store?

Answer 4

• High performance disk attach to a EC2.
• Data are loss when you terminate the instance.
• Good for buffer/cache
• Risk of data loss if hardware fails, backups are your responsibility.

Question 5

Name different EBS Volumes types

Answer 5

1) gp2/gp3(SSD): General purpose SSD.
> Cost effective storage, low-latency
> System boot volumes, Virtual desktop
> 1 Gig to 16Tib
2) io1/io2(SSD) High performance SSD
> Critical business applications.
> Or applications that need more than 16000 IOPS
> Great for database workloads
3) st1(HDD): Low cost HDD
4) sc1(HDD): Lowest cost HDD.

Note: Only gp2/gp3 and io1/io2 can be used as boot volumes.

Question 6

What is EBS Multi-Attach?

Answer 6

• From the io1/io2 family
• Can attach same EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances in the same AZ.
• Must use file system which is cluster-aware.

Question 7

What is EFS?

Answer 7

• EFS(Elastic File System)
• Managed NFS(network file system) that can be mounted on many EC2
• EFS works with EC2 instances in multi-AZ.
• Highly available, scalable, expensive
• Compatible with Linux bases AMi(not windows)
• Use case: content management, web serving, data sharing

Question 8

EFS - Performance & Storage Classes Options

Answer 8

• Performance Mode(set at EFS creation time)
  > General purpose(default): latency-sensitive use case(web servers)
  > Max i/O: Higher latency throughput(big data,media processing)
• Throughput mode
  > Burst: low for short burst
  > Provisioned: Set your throughput regardless of storage size
• Storage Tiers
  > Standard: for frecently accessed files
  > Infrequent access:cost to retrieve files, lower price to store