EC2 Instance Storage
- EC2 Instance Storage
- EBS: Elastic Block Store, Volume is a network drive you can attach to your instances while they run
- EFS: network file system, can be attached to 100s of instances in a region
- EFS-IA: cost-optimized storage class for infrequent accessed files
- FSx for Windows: Network File System for Windows servers
- FSx for Lustre: High Performance Computing Linux file system
EBS Volumes
What’s an EBS Volume?
- 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
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)
- This can be controlled by the AWS console / AWS CLI
- Use case: preserve root volume when instance is terminated
EBS 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)
EFS: Elastic File System
- Managed NFS (network file system) that can be mounted on 100s of EC2
- EFS works with Linux EC2 instances in multi-AZ
- Highly available, scalable, expensive (3x gp2), pay per use, no capacity planning
EFS Infrequent Access (EFS-IA)
- Storage class that is cost-optimized for files not accessed every day
- Up to 92% lower cost compared to EFS Standard
- EFS will automatically move your files to EFS-IA based on the last time they were accessed
- Enable EFS-IA with a Lifecycle Policy
- Example: move files that are not accessed for 60 days to EFS-IA
- Transparent to the applications accessing EFS
Amazon FSx – Overview
- Launch 3rd party high-performance file systems on AWS
- Fully managed service
- FSx for Lustre
- FSx for Windows File Server
- FSx for NetApp ONTAP
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
- A fully managed, highly reliable, and scalable Windows native shared file system
- Built on Windows File Server
- Supports SMB protocol & Windows NTFS
- Integrated with Microsoft Active Directory
- Can be accessed from AWS or your on-premise infrastructure
Amazon FSx for Lustre
- A fully managed, high-performance, scalable file storage for High Performance Computing (HPC)
- The name Lustre is derived from “Linux” and “cluster”
- Machine Learning, Analytics, Video Processing, Financial Modeling
- Scales up to 100s GB/s, millions of IOPS, sub-ms latencies
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
Shared Responsibility Model for EC2 Storage
| AWS | USER |
|---|---|
| Infrastructure | Setting up backup / snapshot procedures |
| Replication for data for EBS volumes & EFS drives | Setting up data encryption |
| Replacing faulty hardware | Responsibility of any data on the drives |
| Ensuring their employees cannot access your data | Understanding the risk of using EC2 Instance Store |
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 Image Builder
- Used to automate the creation of Virtual Machines or container images
- => Automate the creation, maintain, validate and test EC2 AMIs
- Can be run on a schedule (weekly, whenever packages are updated, etc…)
- Free service (only pay for the underlying resources)
EC2: Virtual Machines 
List Elastic Load Balancing & Auto Scaling Groups 
Download PDF : AWS Cloud Practitioner Study Notes (PDF)