AWS Crash Course - EBS

In the last section we discussed about VPC. In this section we will discuss about EBS.
What is EBS?
  • EBS is Elastic Block Storage.
  • EBS volume is a durable, block-level storage. It’s similar to the hard disk that you have in your laptop or desktop.
  • EBS volumes can be used as primary storage for data that requires frequent updates.
  • EBS volume in an Availability Zone is automatically replicated within that zone to prevent data loss due to failure.
  • You can create encrypted EBS volumes with the Amazon EBS encryption feature or use 3rd party software for encryption.
  • To improve performance use RAID Groups e.g. RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10
What are the different types of EBS volumes?
  • General Purpose SSD (gp2) – It provides you upto 10,000 IOPS(Input/output operations per second)  and it can be of size from 1GB to 16TB . This is used for for normal loads. And should be enough for your you Dev or UAT setups.
  • Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) – It provides you upto 20000 IOPS  and it can be of size from 4GB to 16TB . These are generally used for Large SQL/NoSQL Databases.
  • Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) – These provide you upto 500 IOPS  and can range in size from 500GB to 16TB. These are mostly useful for Big Data/ Data warehouses.
  • Cold HDD (sc1) – These are the cheapest kind of disks.  They provide upto 250 IOPS -and can range in size from 500GB to 16TB. These are commonly used fro data archiving as they provide low IOPS but are cheap for storing data which is not used frequently.
You can take snapshots of EBS volumes.
So what is a snapshot?
  • You can back up the data on your EBS volumes to Amazon S3 by taking point-in-time snapshots
  • Snapshots are incremental backups – Saves time and storage costs
  • Snapshots support encryption
  • Snapshots exclude data that has been cached by any applications or the OS
  • You can share your unencrypted snapshots with others
  • You can use a copy of a snapshot for Migrations, DR, Data retention etc.
You can try handson with EBS by using this exercise .

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