Section 7 : Instance Storage

EBS : An EBS (Elastic Block Store) Volume is a network drive you can attach to your instances while they run and allows data to persist even after their termination.
- They can only be mounted to instance at a time and bound to a specific AZ (Free tier is 30gb)
- It can be detached from an EC2 and attached to another one quickly
- To move AZ you first need to snapshot it
- 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)
- Preserve root volume when instance is terminated

 

EBS Hands on
- Select the instance and then go to storage, you can check the attached ebs information
- Can check and select Volume settings -> you can check the AZ in networking in instance
- After creating -> you have to attach the volume to the instance manually -> go to EC2 storage to check if the volumes are attached

EBS Snapshots
- A Backup of your EBS volume and can copy snapshots across AZ

EBS snapshot archive
- Move a snapshot to an archive tier that is 75% cheaper and takes within 24~72 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

Fast snapshot Restore
- Force full initialization of snapshot to have no latency on the first use

 

EBS snapshot – Hands on
- EC2 -> volumes -> create snapshot -> copy snapshot to another AZ (to backup data)
- Create volume with snapshot -> re create ebs volume across AZ
- Recycle Bin -> retention rules -> move storage to archive -> recover snapshots after deleting

 

AMI Overview
- AMI are a customization of an EC2 instance (you can create your own software, config, etc)
- AMI are built for a specific region and you can launch EC2 instances from a public AMI, your own AMI or an AWS marketplace AMI
AMI process : Start an EC2 and customize it / build an AMI which will create EBS snapshot and launch instances from other AMI’s

 

AMI – Hands on
- Launch instance -> advanced details and copy user data (except the last line) -> launch the instance -> take some time for it to work -> right click and click create image -> configure the settings and click create
- You can check by going to images (AMI) and then you can launch instances straight from there or create EC2 from my own AMI (booting from a custom AMI can be faster)

 

EC2 Instance store
- EBS volumes are network drives with good but limited performance
- High performance hardware disk, use EC2 instance store for better I/O performance
- EC2 instance store lose their storage if they’re stopped
- Good for buffer / cache / scratch data / temp content
- but risk of data loss if hardware loss so backup and replication is necessary and responsibility

 

EBS Volume types (6 types)
- gp2 / gp3 (SSD): General purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance for

a wide variety of workloads

- io1 / io2 (SSD): Highest-performance SSD volume for mission-critical low-latency or

high-throughput workloads

- st1 (HDD): Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput- intensive workloads

- sc1 (HDD): Lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads
- EBS volumes are characterized in size / throughput / IOPS and only gp2/gp3 and io1/io2 can be used as boot volumes

 

General purpose SSD
- Cost effective storage, low latency
- System boot volumes, Virtual desktops, Development and test environments
gp3:

• Baseline of 3,000 IOPS and throughput of 125 MiB/s

• Can increase IOPS up to 16,000 and throughput up to 1000 MiB/s independently

gp2:

• Small gp2 volumes can burst IOPS to 3,000

• Size of the volume and IOPS are linked, max IOPS is 16,000

• 3 IOPS per GB, means at 5,334 GB we are at the max IOPS

Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) SSD
- Critical business applications with sustained IOPS performance
- Applications that need more than 16,000 IOPS
- Great for databases workloads
- io1/io2 (4 GiB - 16 TiB):

• Max PIOPS: 64,000 for Nitro EC2 instances & 32,000 for other

• Can increase PIOPS independently from storage size

• io2 have more durability and more IOPS per GiB (at the same price as io1)

- io2 Block Express (4 GiB – 64 TiB):

• Sub-millisecond latency

• Max PIOPS: 256,000 with an IOPS:GiB ratio of 1,000:1

- Supports EBS Multi-attach

Hard disk drives (HDD)
- cannot be a boot volume
- 125 GIB to 16 TIB and throughout optimized HHD
- Cold HDD for data that is infrequently accessed and scenarios where lowest cost is important with a max throughput 250 Mib/s – max IOPS 250

EBS multi-Attach – io1 / io2 family
- Attach the same ebs volume to multiple EC2 instances in the same AZ and each instances has full & write permissions
- Used when needed to achieve higher application availability in clustered Linux applications and must manage concurrent write operations
- Up to 16 EC2 instances at a time 
- Must use a file system that’s cluster-aware

 

EBS Encryption
- When you create an encrypted EBS volume, you get the following:

• Data at rest is encrypted inside the volume

• All the data in flight moving between the instance and the volume is encrypted

• All snapshots are encrypted

• All volumes created from the snapshot

- Encryption and decryption are handled transparently (you have nothing to do)

- Encryption has a minimal impact on latency

- EBS Encryption leverages keys from KMS (AES-256)

- Copying an unencrypted snapshot allows encryption

- Snapshots of encrypted volumes are encrypted

To encrypt an EBS volume
- Create an EBS snapshot of volume -> Encrypt the EBS snapshot
- Create new EBS volume from the snapshot and now you can attach the encrypted volume to the original instance

Amazon EFS – Elastic File System
- Managed NFS that can be mounted on many EC2 and works with EC2 instances in multi AZ
- Highly available, scalable, however very expensive, pay per use

 

- Used for content management, web serving, data waring, wordpress
- Uses NFSv4.1 protocol and uses security group to control access and compatible with linux based AMI
- Encryption available and no capacity planning

EFS – Performance & storage classes
- EFS scale
• 1000s of concurrent NFS clients, 10 GB+ /s throughput

• Grow to Petabyte-scale network file system, automatically
- Performance Mode
• General Purpose (default) – latency-sensitive use cases (web server, CMS, etc…)

• Max I/O – higher latency, throughput, highly parallel (big data, media processing)
- Throughput mode
• Bursting – 1 TB = 50MiB/s + burst of up to 100MiB/s

• Provisioned – set your throughput regardless of storage size, ex: 1 GiB/s for 1 TB storage

• Elastic – automatically scales throughput up or down based on your workloads

• Up to 3GiB/s for reads and 1GiB/s for writes

• Used for unpredictable workloads

EFS – Storage classes
- Storage Tiers (lifecycle management feature move file after N days)
• Standard: for frequently accessed files
• Infrequent access (EFS-IA): cost to retrieve files, lower price to store. Enable EFS-IA with a Lifecycle Policy

- Availability and durability
• Standard: Multi-AZ, great for prod
• One Zone: One AZ, great for dev, backup enabled by default, compatible with IA (EFS One Zone-IA)

 

Amazon EFS – Hands on
- Go to EFS system and create EFS -> click customize -> select your system
- Choose between general purpose or Max I/O
- Must choose a VPC and choose the AZ + security group then create
- Go to create new instance -> edit network and select subnet -> select EFS and choose a EFS
- After selecting everything launch the instance
- You can check all the security rules at the EFS
- Once you connect to your instance, you can create files and check that they are getting saved

EBS vs EFS – Elastic Block Storage
EBS :
- one instance and locked at AZ level
- gp2: IO increases if the disk size increases
- IO 1: can increase IO independently
To migrate an EBS volume across AZ

• Take a snapshot

• Restore the snapshot to another AZ

• EBS backups use IO and you shouldn’t run them while your application is handling a lot

of traffic

- Root EBS Volumes of instances get terminated by default if the EC2 instance gets terminated.

EFS :
- Mounting 100s of instances across AZ
- EFS share website files
- Only for Linux and more expensive
- Can leverage EFS-IA for cost savings