EBS

  • Elastic Block Store

  • 4 Types

  • GP2

    • General Purpose
    • Handle up to 16000 IO/PS
    • Used for
    • Recommended for most workloads
    • System Boot
    • Low latency interactive apps
    • Dev and Test environment
    • With 5.3 TB size, the gp2 reached the max IO/PS
  • IO1
    • IO optimized
    • Used for
    • When required more than 16000 IO/PS is required
    • Large Database
    • Critical business operation, require high sustained IO/PS
    • When huge load and performance for the NoSQL database
    • IO can be maximum 50x in comparision of storage capacity. For instance, a 200GB storage can have maximum 200 * 50 = 10000 IO/PS
  • ST1
    • Throughput optimized
    • Used for
    • Streaming workloads, require consistent and fast throughput at low price
    • Big Data, Data warehouses
    • Apache kafka

  • SC1

    • Infrequently Used Throughput optimized
    • Used for large amount of data which are infrequently used
    • For sequential I/O operations

  • EBS transfer

  • EBS volumes are AZ Locked

  • First need to take a Snapshot

  • Create the volume from the Snapshot to another AZ

  • EBS Backup

  • Backups are incremental, only backup the changed blocks

  • Can take snapshot of the EBS Volume
  • Theses snapshot can be made available to other Regions
  • Snapshot can be automate by using DLM aka Data Lifecycle Manager
  • While taking backups
    • There's hamper on heavy traffic
    • Recommended to detach the volume
  • To use snapshot, require pre-warm
  • Snapshots are taking place in S3
  • Using lifecycle policy, can automate the Snapshot

  • Using the retention policy, can be delete the old Snapshot

  • Reference For EBS Types

Encryption

  • Encryption is handled by AWS
  • Supports both in-flight and at rest encryption by KMS
  • Use KMS (AES-256)
  • When a EBS is encrypted
  • All data inside the volume is encrypted
  • All moving data between instance and volume is encrypted
  • All snapshots created from them is encrypted
  • All volumes created from these snapshots are encrypted
  • EBS volumes can be used while making a Snapshots, no problem.
  • To encrypt an un encrypted EBS
  • Take a snapshot
  • Encrypt the snapshot using copy
  • Create volume from the encrypted volume
  • Delete volume and un encrypted snapshot for security leakage

EBS vs Instance Store

Instance Store

  • Physically attached to the instance
  • Good I/O
  • When instance is terminated, the instance store along with the data lost
  • Although it is block storage, size can not be increased over time

EBS

  • Network drive
  • Data is persisted even the instance is terminated

EBS RAID

  • Two types of RAID
  • RAID 0
    • Improve performance
    • Example
    • Lets say we have 2 EBS with 10000 IOps
    • We logically merge and use 20000 IOps
  • RAID 1
    • Use for fault tolerance
    • Mirror the EBS volume
    • Example
    • If we have 2 EBS volume
    • We write on each of volume
    • So even if one EBS volume fails, data is still exist in another one

Attaching a New EBS Volume

When we attach a new EBS to EC2 instance, it is considered as block device. To make it usable, need to

  • Format to a file system (AWS does not pre configure any file system to EBS)
  • Mount it to the instance

Detaching Existing EBS Volume

  • For root volume
  • Stop the instance
  • Detach the volume
  • For non-root volume
  • For running instance, un-mount and detach
  • For stopped instance, detach, no need to un-mount