EC2 Instance Storage
• An EBS (Elastic Block Store) Volume is a network drive you can attach to your instances while they run
• It allows your instances 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
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 attached to us-east-1b
• To move a volume across, you first need to snapshot it
• Have a provisioned capacity (size in GBs, and IOPS)
• You get billed for all the provisioned capacity
• You can increase the capacity of the drive over time
• Controls the EBS behavior 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 SnapshotsEBS 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 Snapshots 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
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 provided
• Your own AMI: you make and maintain them yourself
• An AWS Marketplace AMI: an AMI someone else made (and potentially sells)
AMI Process (from an EC2 instance)
• Start an EC2 instance and customize it
• Stop the instance (for data integrity)
• Build an AMI – this will also create EBS snapshots
• Launch instances from other AMIs
EC2 Instance Store
• EBS volumes are network drives with good but “limited” performance
• If you need a high-performance hardware disk, use EC2 Instance Store
• Better I/O performance
• EC2 Instance Store lose their storage if they’re stopped (ephemeral)
• Good for buffer / cache / scratch data / temporary content
• Risk of data loss if hardware fails
• Backups and Replication are your responsibility
EBS Volume Types
• EBS Volumes come in 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 (I/O Ops Per Sec)
• When in doubt always consult the AWS documentation – it’s good!
• Only gp2/gp3 and io1/io2 can be used as boot volumes
EBS Volume Types Use cases
Optimized for transactional workloads involving frequent read/write operations with small I/O size, where the dominant performance attribute is IOPS. SSD-backed volume types include:
Hard disk drives (HDD) — Optimized for large streaming workloads where the dominant performance attribute is throughput. HDD-backed volume types include Throughput Optimized HDD and Cold HDD volumes.
Previous generation — Hard disk drives that you can use for workloads with small datasets where data is accessed infrequently and performance is not of primary importance. We recommend that you consider a current generation volume type instead. For more information, see Previous generation Magnetic volumes.
General Purpose SSD
• Cost effective storage, low-latency
• System boot volumes, Virtual desktops, Development and test environments
• 1 GiB - 16 TiB
• 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
• Or applications that need more than 16,000 IOPS
• Great for databases workloads (sensitive to storage perf and consistency)
• 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
• Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)
• Big Data, Data Warehouses, Log Processing
• Max throughput 500 MiB/s – max IOPS 500
• Cold HDD (sc1):
• For data that is infrequently accessed
• Scenarios where lowest cost is important
• Max throughput 250 MiB/s – max IOPS 250
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
Encryption: encrypt an unencrypted EBS volume
• Create an EBS snapshot of the volume
• Encrypt the EBS snapshot ( using copy )
• Create new ebs volume from the snapshot ( the volume will also be encrypted )
• Now you can attach the encrypted volume to the original instance
Amazon EFS – Elastic File System
file sistemi qurmaqin yollari birinci file sistem yaratdiqdan sonra instance
• Managed NFS (network file system) that can be mounted on many EC2
• EFS works with EC2 instances in multi-AZ
• Highly available, scalable, expensive (3x gp2), pay per use
• Use cases: content management, web serving, data sharing, Wordpress
• Uses NFSv4.1 protocol
• Uses security group to control access to EFS
• Compatible with Linux based AMI (not Windows)
• Encryption at rest using KMS
• POSIX file system (~Linux) that has a standard file API
• File system scales automatically, pay-per-use, 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 (set at EFS creation time)
• 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
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)
• Over 90% in cost savings
EBS vs EFS – Elastic Block Storage
• EBS volumes…
• can be attached to only one instance at a time
• are locked at the Availability Zone (AZ) level
• gp2: IO increases if the disk size increases
• io1: 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. (you can disable that)
EFS – Elastic File System
• Mounting 100s of instances across AZ
• EFS share website files (WordPress)
• Only for Linux Instances (POSIX)
• EFS has a higher price point than EBS
• Can leverage EFS-IA for cost savings
• Remember: EFS vs EBS vs Instance Store
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