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5.1. Storage - EC2 Storage (EBS & EFS & Instance Store).md

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EC2 Storage (EBS, EFS & Instance Store)

  • AWS Storage Cloud Native Options
    • Block (volumes): Amazon EBS, EC2 Instance Store
    • File (network file system): Amazon EFS
    • Object: S3, Glacier
  • Root Volumes
    • Root volumes are ephemeral by default i.e. gets deleted when instance is terminated.
    • Both instance store and EFS can be root volume.
      • When you launch an instance, the root device volume contains the image used to boot the instance.
      • EBS is recommended over Instance store as it launches faster and is more consistent.

Block device mapping

  • Block device
    • Moves data in sequences of bytes or bits, allows random access.
    • E.g. CD-ROM, flash drives, hard disks.
    • Two supported block devices in AWS:
      • Instance store
      • EBS volumes
  • Block device mapping
    • Allows block devices to attach to an EC2.
    • Can be defined when you launch an instance (or in AMI)
    • Allows you to attach additional EBS volumes during and after launch
      • ❗ Cannot attach instance stores after launching an instance.
      • ❗ Additional volumes are not marked for deletion upon instance termination.

EC2 storage types

  • Include

    • EBS: Elastic Block Store
    • EFS: Elastic File System
    • AWS FSx: 📝EFS for Windows.

  • Comparison

    Type When to use Snapshots Scaling
    EBS Storing data in single instance In S3 Can scale volume type & size (available ratios - 3:1 & 50:1 for IOPS per GB), no downtime but needs OS repartitioning
    EFS Storing data in distributed applications Not supported Auto-scaling
    Instance store High performance IOPS when persistance is not needed Not supported Cannot resize

Instance store

  • Actual root volume of some instances (some others come with EBS volumes)
  • 📝 Ephemeral (temporary) storage physically attached to the machine
    • ❗ You lose data when instance is terminated or stopped
      • But data ata survives reboots
      • Unexpected terminations might happen from time to time (AWS will e-mail you)
    • Cannot be detached or reattached i.e. remapped to another instances
  • 📝 Higher performance (millions of IOPS)
    • It has better I/O than EBS as it's not a network drive which EBS is
  • 💡 Choose instance store if you can handle losing data e.g. caches otherwise EBS
  • ❗ No managed backups, cannot resize.
  • ❗ You can't attach instance store volumes to an instance after you've launched it

EFS (Elastic File System)

  • Managed NFS (network file system)
  • POSIX compliant
    • POSIX = Portable Operating System Interface for Unix
    • It supports Unix APIs but it's ❗ Linux only
    • 💡 POSIX permissions allows you to restrict access from hosts by user and group
  • More expensive (≈ 3x gp2 (EBS))
  • Can be mounted on hundreds of instances
    • ❗ Is not attached, it's mounted!
    • Use ENI (Elastic Network Interface) to reveal EFS (elastic file storage) for multiple different EC2 instances.
    • Configurations
      1. Set Linux file system permissions on the presented EFS volume using chmod and chown.
      2. Mount EFS volume to your EC2 instance using mount -t nfs -o xxxx.
      3. Configure a Security Group to allow data traffic on port 2049
        • in EFS SG to connect to the EFS target.
        • in EC2 SG to connect to the EC2 server.
  • Can be mounted to on-prem using AWS Direct Connect
    • Allows you to migrate data from on-prem servers to EFS (EFS File Sync) or/and use it for backup solution.
  • Pay per use (not for provisioned space)
  • Region-specific but AWS DataSync can be used to sync data in different EFS in different regions.
  • Scalability
    • Auto-scaling without provisioning capacity.
      • Elastic storage capacity: can grow and shrink based on the needs (files)
    • Ability to burst up to multiple GB/s for short periods of time.
  • Availability
    • Multi-AZ: Data is stored across multiple AZ within a region.
      • Each EFS instance in AZ get IP address
  • Connections: Multi-region or hybrid through AWS VPN and Inter-Region VPC Peering.
  • Uses NFS v4.1 protocol
    • Allow inbound (NFS -> TCP 204) from EC2 instances in security group of EFS
  • Configurations:
    • Performance mode
      1. General purpose (default)
      2. Max I/O - used when thousands of EC2 are using the EFS - higher latency & more IO.
    • Throughput mode
      1. Bursting: Recommended for most file systems
      2. Provisioned: Use when throughput from bursting is not enough
  • Backup EFS-to-EFS (incremental - can choose frequency)
  • Give per user access
    1. Create a subdirectory for each user
    2. Grant read-write-execute permissions to the users.
    3. Mount the subdirectory to the users' home directory
  • Encryption at rest using KMS keys
  • 💡 Choose when you need to share files e.g. on-prem sync to sync, content management, web serving, data sharing, Wordpress.

EBS (Elastic Block Store)

  • Local storage -> 📝 Can be mounted on a single instance.
  • Network drive (little latency for network communication to the instance)
    • You can attach to your instances while they run.
    • Persists data but can requires to set deletion on EC2 termination to false
  • Can be root volume
    • ❗📝 Gets terminated by default if EC2 is terminated -> Can be disabled
  • Can be detached & re-attached.
  • 💡 Cheaper than EFS (Elastic File System)
  • Portable
    • E.g. if one EC2 fails, you can detach volume and attach it on another instance
  • Have a provisioned capacity & get billed for all of it (does not better how much you use)
  • EBS Volumes are characterized in size, throughput, IOPS (I/O ops per second)
  • Throughput is a good metric for HDD (large files, infrequent read/writes) and IOPS for SSD (smaller files, many read & writes)
    • Throughput: number of bits read or written per second.
    • IOPS: Number of read write operations (of clusters, not files) per second
  • ❗ It's locked to an Availability Zone (AZ)
    • Must be in same AZ as EC2
    • 📝 To move, you need to first snapshot it:
      1. Create a snapshot
      2. Copy to another AZ
      3. Create a volume in that AZ
  • Pricing
    • You still pay for unattached EBS instances
      • GB per month price is applicable
  • Monitoring
    • 💡 Good metric: "queue depth"
      • The queue depth is the number of pending I/O requests (from application to volume)
      • The lower the queue length is the more IOPS you maintain
      • The higher the queue length is the higher throughput you maintain
  • Amazon EBS–Optimized instances
    • Uses optimized configuration stack and provides additional & dedicated capacity for EBS I/O
    • 💡 Recommended to increase storage performance of an instance.

EBS raiding

  • Software-based not managed by AWS
  • RAID 0
    • "Split" gives you higher performance than single EBS.
    • ❗ Risky, if one volume fails, entire data is corrupted but high performance.
      • E.g. 1000 GB = 500 GB + 500 GB
        • Free space is 1000 GB
        • Provides IOPS of "two" 500 GB volumes improving the performance
  • RAID 1
    • "Mirror" of your data for extra redundancy
    • 💡 Provides high availability/redundancy.
    • ❗ Full space is not usable,
    • E.g. 1000 GB = 500 GB + 500 GB
      • Free space is 500GB, the half of total amount.
      • But has durability of "two" 500 GB volumes as data is replicated in two volumes
  • RAID 10
    • Also known as RAID 1/0
    • Array "split" and "mirror" combined.
    • 💡 Combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1, gives more performance and high availability.
    • ❗ Minimum of 4 disks are required and therefore costlier than other RAID configurations

EBS Volume Types

  • Chart

    Attribute / API name gp2 io1 st1 sc1
    Name EBS General Purpose SSD Provisioned IOPS SSD Throughput Optimized HDD Cold HDD
    Summary General purpose Highest performance SSD Low cost HDD Lowest cost HDD
    Description 📝Balances price and performance For mission-critical low-latency or high-throughput workloads For frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads Designed for less frequently accessed workloads
    Storage 1 GiB - 16 TiB 4 GiB - 16 TiB 500 GiB - 16 TiB 500 GiB - 16 TiB
    Bursting ✔ Small gp2 volumes can burst IOPS to 3000 ✔ Provisioned (PIOS) ✔ Max throughput of 500 MiB/s - can burst ✔ Max throughput of 250 MiB/s - can burst
    Max throughput 250 MiB/s 1,000 MiB/s 500 MiB/s 250 MiB/s
    Max IOPS 16000 (5,334 GB) Provisioned! min 100, max 32000 (64000 for nitro instances) 500 250
    Use-cases Most workloads e.g. system boot volumes, virtual desktops, low-latency interactive apps, deployment & test environments More IOPS than gp2 limit, large databases Streaming workloads requiring fast & consistent throughput at a low price e.g. big data, data warehouses, log processing, apache Kafka

  • ❗ HDD disks (st1 and sc1) cannot be boot volume i.e. only SSD (gp2 & io1) can be boot volumes

  • SSD vs HDD

    Features SSD HDD
    Best for workloads with small, random I/O operations large, sequential I/O operations
    Use-cases Transactional workloads: sustained IOPS, large databases Large streaming workloads: Big data, data warehouses, log processing, infrequently accessed data
    Cost moderate / high low
    Dominant performance attribute IOPS Throughput MiB/s

  • ❗ Max 300 TiB of aggregate PIOPS per region (provisioned IOPS for io1)

EBS Availability

  • Stored in multiple physical volumes in the same AZ at no cost.
  • Seamless backups can be done by creating
    • Snapshots
    • AMIs (VM images)
      • Snapshot + some metadata to create another instance
    • RAID 1 configuration (done manually)
    • 💡 Use snapshots or RAID 1 instead for seamless backups.
EBS Snapshots
  • Asynchronous
    • Can be done when instance is running.
  • Incremental backups e.g. latest snapshot + changed delta are saved.
    • 💡 Just maintain a single snapshot of the EBS volume since the latest snapshot is both incremental and complete.
  • Can be encrypted, and encrypted automatically if it's from an encrypted disk.
  • ❗ Performance may drop while snapshot is in progress
    • Because snapshot process use IO.
    • ❗ Shouldn't run while your application is handling a lot of traffic.
    • 💡 Recommended to detach root volume to do snapshot but not necessary.
  • Share snapshot with other accounts
    • Modify the permissions on the encrypted snapshot to share it with the specified account.
    • (If encrypted) Share the custom key used to encrypt the volume.
  • Constrained to the Region -> 💡 copy to share across region.
  • 📝 Stored in S3 (but you won't directly see them)
  • ❗ Max 100.000 snapshots per account
  • 📝 Can make an image (AMI) from Snapshot for e.g. faster deploy on ASG (Auto Scaling Group).
  • 💡 Snapshots can be automated using Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager.
  • EBS volumes restored by snapshots need to be pre-warmed.
    • In Linux you can use fio or dd command to read the entire volume.
  • 💡 If you want to copy EBS volume fast, restore from a snapshot: the disk will already be formatted and have data!
AWS services
Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager
  • Also known as Data Lifecycle Manager or DLM
  • Helps to automate managing EBS snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs
  • You create Lifecycle Policy to schedule snapshots / deletion of them.
  • It's free of charge 1
AWS Backup
  • Integrates with EBS and many other services 1
  • Generic service to centralize backup management and monitoring
  • Costs based on storage consumed, restored, and transferred in a month 2

Scalability

  • You can now increase capacity (GB & IOPS), or change the volume type while in use.
    • No down time when resizing but need to repartition in OS to make space available.
  • ❗ You can't increase unlimitedly as EC2 has max IOPS limit of 80.000.
  • GB and IOPs goes hand in hand
    • For increasing IOPS you need to increase GB
      • You can't have small volume with very high IOPS
      • You get 1 burst IOPS per 3 GB.
    • However io1 is an exception where you only IOPS & GB.
      • The maximum ratio of provisioned IOPS to requested volume size (in GiB) is 50:1.

Volume Encryption

  • The encryption occurs on the servers that host EC2 instances
    • Provides encryption of data as it moves between EC2 instances and EBS storage
    • i.e. all the data in flight moving between the instance and the volume is encrypted
  • As default:
    • All snapshots are encrypted
    • All volumes created from the snapshot
    • Not encrypted (in rest) by default
      • In settings, security can enforce "Always encrypted" per region
  • Encryption & decryption are handled transparently
  • Encryption has a minimal impact on latency
  • EBS Encryption leverages keys from KMS (AES-256)
  • A volume can be encrypted during an initial launch or:
    • Use third party tool e.g. BitLocker & handle manually.
    • Create an instance from launching an image (AMI) from an encrypted volume.
  • Copying an unencrypted snapshot allows encryption
  • Data in transit between an instance and an encrypted volume is also encrypted
  • Snapshots & Encryption
    • Volumes created from encrypted snapshots are automatically encrypted.
      • Snapshots of encrypted volumes are encrypted
    • Volumes that are created from unencrypted snapshots are automatically unencrypted
    • The encryption happens during snapshot process.
  • ❗ No direct way to encrypt an existing unencrypted volume or snapshot
    • You can copy a snapshot & create new volume to encrypt existing unencrypted.
    • Encrypt an unencrypted EBS volume
      1. Create an EBS snapshot of the volume
      2. Encrypt the EBS snapshot (using copy)
      3. Create new EBS volume from the snapshot (The volume will also be encrypted)
      4. You can now attach the encrypted volume to the original instance