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EBS - Elastic Block Store

Note

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EBS (Elastic Block Store) is a network drive
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Can only attach one instance at a time
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Can make snapshots for backup and multi AZ/Region deployment
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4 types of EBS Volumes: here
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EBS multi-attach for io1/io2 family
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Provides high application availability in clustered Linux applications
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Up to 16 EC2 Instances at a time

EBS Volume

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An Elastic Block Store (EBS) Volume is a network drive you can attach to your instances while they run
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It allows your instances to persist data, even after their termination
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They can only be mounted to one instance at a time (at the CCP level)
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They are bound to a specific availability zone
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Analogy: Think of them as a “network USB stick”
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It’s a network drive
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It uses the network to communicate the instance, which means there might be a bit of latency
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It can be detached from an EC2 instance and attached to another one quickly
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It’s locked to an Availability Zone (AZ)
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Can work around using snapshots
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Have a provisioned capacity
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You get billed for all the provisioned capacity
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You can increase the capacity of the drive over time

Delete on Termination

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Controls the EBS behaviour when an EC2 instance terminates
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By default, the root EBS is deleted (attribute enabled)
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By default, the other attached EBS volume is not deleted (attribute disabled)
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Can be controlled by the AWS console / AWS CLI
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Use Case: preserve root volume when instance is terminated

EBS Snapshots

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Make a backup (snapshot) of your EBS volume at a point in time
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Not necessary to detach volume to do snapshot, but recommended
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Can copy snapshots across AZ or Region

EBS Snapshots Features

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EBS Snapshot Archive
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Move a Snapshot to an “archive tier” that is 75% cheaper
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Takes within 24 to 72 hours for restoring the archive
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Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots
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Setup rules to retain deleted snapshots so you can recover them after an accidental deletion
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Specify retention (from 1 day to 1 year)
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Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR)
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Force full initialization of snapshot to have no latency on the first use ($$$)

EBS Volume Types

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EBS Volume come in 6 types
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gp2 / gp3 (SSD): General purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance for a wide variety of workloads
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io1 / io2 (SSD): Highest-performance SSD volume for mission-critical low-latency or high-throughput workloads
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st1 (HDD): Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads
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sc1 (HDD): Lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads
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Only gp2/gp3 and io1/io2 can be used as boot volumes

General Purpose SSD

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cost effective storage, low-latency
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System boot volumes, Virtual desktops, Development and test environments

Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) SSD

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Critical business applications with sustained IOPS performance
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Or applications that need more than 16,000 IOPS
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Great for database workloads (sensitive to storage perf and consistency)
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Supports EBS Multi-attach

Hard Disk Drives (HDD)

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Cannot be a boot volume
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Throughput Optimized HDD
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Big Data, Data Warehouses, Log Processing
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Cold HDD:
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For data that is infrequently accessed
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Scenarios where lowest cost is important

EBS Multi-Attach - io1/io2 family

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Attach the same EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances in the same AZ
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Each instance has full read & write permissions to the high-performance volume
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Use case:
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Achieve higher application availability in clustered Linux applications
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Applications must manage concurrent write operations
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Up to 16 EC2 Instances at a time
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Must use a file system that’s cluster-aware (not XFS, EX4, etc…)
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