EBS - Elastic Block Storage

An EC2 instances loses its root volume when it is manually terminated
Unexpected terminations may happen
Sometimes we need a way to store instance data somewhere
An EBS (Elastic Block Store) Volume is a network drive which can be attached to an EC2 instance
It allows for the instances to persist date
EBS is a network drive:
- It uses the network to communicate with the instance, which can introduce latency
- It can be detached from an EC2 and attached ot another
EBS volumes are locked to an AZ
To move a volume across, we need to create a snapshot
EBS volumes have a provisioned capacity (size in GB and IOPS)
Billing is done for all provisioned capacity even if the capacity is not fully used

EBS Volume Types

EBS Volumes can have 4 types:
- GP2 (SSD): general purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance
- IO1 (SSD): highest performance SSD volume for mission-critical low-latency or high-throughput workloads
- ST1 (HDD): low cost HDD volume designed for frequent access, throughput-intensive workloads
- SC1 (HDD): for less frequently accessed data
EBS Volumes are characterized in Size Throughput IOPS (I/O Operations per second)
Only GP2 and IO1 can be used as boot volumes

Recommended for most workloads
Can be system boot volume
Can be used for virtual desktops, low-latency applications, development and test environments
Size can range from 1GiB to 16TiB
Small GP2 volumes can burst IOPS to 3000
Max IOPS is 16000
We get 3 IOPS per GiB, which means at 5334GiB we are the max IOPS size

Recommended for business critical applications which require sustained IOPS performance, or more than 16000 IOPS per volume
Recommended for large database workloads
Size can be between 4Gib and 16 TiB
The maximum ratio of provisioned IOPS per requested volume size is 50:1
Max IOPS for IO1/2 volumes is 64000 IOPS for instances built on Nitro System and 32000 for other type of instances

Throughput oriented storage for large volumes of data which is infrequently accessed
Can not be a boot volume
Max IOPS is 250, max throughput 250MiB/sec

SSD, General Purpose – gp2 – Volume size 1 GiB – 16 TiB – Max IOPS/volume 16,000
SSD, Provisioned IOPS – i01 – Volume size 4 GiB – 16 TiB – Max IOPS/volume 64,000 – HDD, Throughput Optimized – (st1) – Volume size 500 GiB – 16 TiB
- Throughput measured in MB/s, and includes the ability to burst up to 250 MB/s per TB, with a baseline throughput of 40 MB/s per TB and a maximum throughput of 500 MB/s per volume
HDD, Cold – (sc1) – Volume size 500 GiB – 16 TiB.
- Lowest cost storage – cannot be a boot volume – These volumes can burst up to 80 MB/s per TB, with a baseline throughput of 12 MB/s per TB and a maximum throughput of 250 MB/s per volume: HDD, Magnetic – Standard – cheap, infrequently accessed storage – lowest cost storage that can be a boot volume

Snapshots are incremental - only the changed blocks are backed up
EBS backups use IO and we should not run them while the application is handling a lot of traffic
Snapshots are stored in S3 (we are not able to see them)
It is not necessary to detach the volume to do a snapshot, but it is recommended
An account can have up to 100k snapshots
We can make an image (AMI) out of a snapshot, snapshots can be copied across AZs
EBS volumes restored from snapshots need to be pre-warmed (using fio or dd commands to read the entire volume)
Snapshots can be automated using Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager

EBS Volumes are locked to a specific AZ
To migrate it to a different AZ (or region) we have to do the following:
- Create a snapshot from the volume
- (optional) Copy the volume to a different region
- Create a volume from the snapshot in the AZ of choice

When we create an encrypted EBS volume, we 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 snapshots will be encrypted
Encryption and decryption are handled transparently by EBS system
Encryption may have a minimal impact on latency
EBS Encryption leverages keys from KMS (encryption algorithm is AES-256)
Copying an unencrypted snapshot allows encryption
Encrypt an unencrypted EBS volume:
1. Create an EBS snapshot from the volume
2. Copy the snapshot an enable encryption on the process
3. Create a new EBS volume from the snapshot (the volume will be encrypted)
4. Attach the encrypted volume to an instance

Some instances do not come with a root EBS volume
Instead, they come with an instance store (ephemeral storage)
An instance store is a physically attached to the machine (EBS is a network drive)
Pros of instance stores:
- Better I/O performance
- Good for buffer, cache, scratch data, temporary content
- Data survives a reboot
Cons of instance stores:
- On stop or termination of the instance, the data from the instance store is lost
- An instance store can not be resized
- Backups of an instance store must be done manually by the user
An instance store is:
- A physical disk form the physical server where the EC2 instance runs
- Very Hight IOPS disk
- A disk up to 7.5 TiB, stripped to reach 30 TiB
- A block storage (just like EBS)
- Can not be increased in size
- An ephemeral storage (risk of data loss if hardware fails)

EBS is already redundant storage (replicated within an AZ)
If we want to increase IOPS of if we want to mirror an EBS volume we can mount EBS volumes in parallel RAID settings
RAID is possible as long as the OS supports it
Some RAID options are:
- RAID 0
- RAID 1
- RAID 5, RAID 6 are not recommended for EBS
RAID 0: used for increased performance. We can combine to or more volumes and what we get is the total number of disk space and I/O
- If one of the disks fail, all the logical data is lost
- Use cases:
  - Applications with lot of IOPS but without the need for fault-tolerance
  - A database with builtin replication
RAID 1: used for increased fault-tolerance. Mirroring a volume to another.
- If one the disks fails, the logical volume will still work
- We have to send the data to two EBS volumes at the same time
- Use cases:
  - Applications that need increased fault-tolerance
  - Applications which need to service disks