EC2 Instance Storage

Question 1

An __________ is a network drive you can attach to your instance while they run and at the associate level it can have multi-attach feature & it’s bond to a specific availability zone

Answer 1

EBS Volume

Question 2

What are some features of EBS Volume?

Answer 2

• 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 one availablity zone so can be used in another one unless you use a snapshot
• Have a provisioned capacity

Question 3

The ____________ controls the EBS behavior when an EC2 instance terminates and by default the root EBS volume is deleted (when attribute is enabled) and by default any other attached EBS volume is not deleted (when attribute disable)

Answer 3

Delete on termination attribute (it’s used to preserve root volume when instance is terminated)

Question 4

________ is a backup of your EBS volume at a point in time & can copy them across AZ or regions

Answer 4

EBS snapshots

Question 5

What are some features of EBS snapshots?

Answer 5

• EBS snapshots are archive (move a snapshot to an archive tier that is 75% cheaper)
• Can use a recycle bin for EBS snapshots (setup rules to retain deleted snapshots so you can recover them after an accidental deletion)(from 1 day to 1 year)
• Has fast snapshot restore (FSR) ( force full initialization of snapshots to have no latency on the first use )

Question 6

_______ are a customization of an EC2 instance

Answer 6

AMI (Amazon machine image)

Question 7

AMI are built for a specific ________

Answer 7

Region (and can be copied across regions)

Question 8

What are the different AMI you can launch your instance from?

Answer 8

1. Public AMI (AWS provided)
2. Your own AMI (you make & maintain them yourself)
3. An AWS marketplace AMI (an AMI someone else made & potentially sells)

Question 9

What is the AMI process from an EC2 instance?

Answer 9

• Start an EC2 instance and customize it
• Stop the instance (for data integrity)
• Build an AMI (which will also create EBS snapshots)
• Launch instance from other AMIs

Question 10

EBS volumes are __________ with good but limited performance

Answer 10

EBS volumes

Question 11

If you need a high performance hardware disk use ___________

Answer 11

EC2 instance store

Question 12

What are some features of EC2 instance store?

Answer 12

• Better I/O performance
• EC2 instance Store lose their storage if they’re stopped (ephemeral)
• Risk of data loss if hardware fails
• Your responsible for backups and replications
• Use case for buffer /cache / scratch data / temporary content

Question 13

What are the 6 different types of EBS volumes?

Answer 13

1. gp2/gp3 (SSD) : general purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance for a wide variety of workloads
2. io1/ io2 block express (SSD): highest performance SSD volume for mission critical low latency or high throughput workloads
3. st l (HDD): low cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed throughput intensive workloads
4. sc1 (HDD): lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequent access workloads

Question 14

What are some features of the EBS volume types?

Answer 14

• EBS volumes are characterized in size | throughout | IOPS (I/O ops per sec)
• Only gp2/gp3 and io 1/ io2 block express can be used as boot volumes

Question 15

What are some features of the general purpose SSD EBS volumes?

Answer 15

• Cost effective storage, low latency
• System boot volumes, virtual Desktops, development and test environments
• I 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 volume can burst IOPS to 3,000, size of them volume and IOPS are linked, max IOPS is 16,000, 3 IOPS per GB which means at 5,334 GB we are at the max IOPS

Question 16

What are some features of provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) SSD volume types?

Answer 16

• Used for critical business applications with sustained IOPS performance or applications that need more than 16,000 IOPS
• For exams whenever you see database workloads that is send twice to storage perf and consistency then provisioned volumes would be great for it
• io 1 (4-16 TiB) : Max PIOPS : 64,000 for nitro EC2 instances & 32,000 for other & can increase PIOPS independently from storage size
• io 2 block express (4-64 TiB): sub-millisecond latency, max PIOPS of 256,000 with an IOPS: GiB ratio of 1,000:1
• Provisioned IOPS supports EBS Multi-attach

Question 17

What are some features of hard disk drives (HDD)?

Answer 17

• Can’t be a boot volume
• 125 GiB to 16 TiB
• Throughput optimized HDD (st 1): use for big data, data warehouses, log processing, max throughout 500 MiB/s- max IOPS 500
• Cold HDD (sc 1): for data that is infrequently accessed, scenarios where lowest cost is important, max throughput 250 MiB/s - max IOPS 250

Question 18

___________ allow you to attach the same EBS volume to mutlose EC2 instance in the same AZ (which is only available for the io 1/ io 2 Family)

Answer 18

EBS mutli-attach

Question 19

What are some features of the EBS mutli-attach & use case?

Answer 19

• Each instance has full read & write permissions to the high performance volume
• Up to 16 EC2 instance at a time
• Must use a file system that’s cluster -aware (not XFA, EXT4, etc)
• Use case achieve higher application availability in clustered Linux applications (ex. Teradata) or applications must manage concurrent write operations

Question 20

When you create an encrypted EBS volume, what do you get?

Answer 20

• 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 volume created from the snapshots

Question 21

Encryption and decryption are handled ____________ and it has minimal impact on latency

Answer 21

Transparently

Question 22

What are some features of encryption?

Answer 22

• EBS encryptions leverages keys from KMS (AES-256)
• Copying an unencrypted snapshot allows encryption
• Snapshots of encrypted volumes are encrypted

Question 23

How do you encrypt and unencrypted EBS volume?

Answer 23

1. Create an EBS snapshot of the volume
2. Encrypt the EBS Snapshot (using the copy)
3. Create new ebs volume from the Snapshot (the volume will also be encrypted)
4. Then you can attach the encrypted volume to the original instance

Question 24

__________ is a managed NFS (network file system) that can be mounted on many EC2 and it works with EC2 instance in multi-AZ

Answer 24

Amazon EFS (elastic file system)

Question 25

What are the different use cases for EFS?

Answer 25

1. Content management, web serving, data sharing, WordPress & uses NFSv4. 1 protocol - It’s only compatible with Linux based AMI (not windows)

Question 26

What are some features of EFS?

Answer 26

EFS scales: - 1000s of concurrent NFS clients, 10 GB+ /s throughout - Grow to petabyte scale network file system automatically Performance Mode (Set at EFS creation time): - General purpose (default): latency -sensitive use cases (web server, CMC, etc) - Max I/O - higher latency, throughput, highly parallel (big data, media processing) Throughput mode: - Bursting- 1 TB = 5MiB/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 on your workloads (up to 3GiB/s for reads and 1 GiB/s for writes & good for unpredictable workloads)

Question 27

What are the different EFS storage classes?

Answer 27

1. Storage tiers (lifecycle management feature move file after N days) - standard for frequently accessed files - infrequent access (EFS-1A): cost to retrieve files, lower price to store. Enable EFS-1A with a lifecycle policy Availability and durability: - Standard: Multi - AZ which is great for prod - One zone: One AZ great for development, backup enabled by default, compatible with IA (EFS one zone IA) (over 90% in cost savings) - One zone: One AS fr