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EC2 Storage & AMI

Overview

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.
  • They are bound to a specific Availability Zone.
    • To move a volume across, you first need to snapshot it.
  • Free tier: 30GB of free EBS storage of type General Purpose (SSD) or Magnetic per month
  • Analogy: Think of them as a "network USB stick" that you can take from a computer and put it into another one.
  • 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.

  • Have a provisioned capacity (size in GBs, and IOPS)

    • You get billed for all the provisioned capacity, not the used capacity.
    • You can increase the capacity of the drive over time.

  • EC2 Delete on Termination attribute for EBS Volumes:

    • By default, the root EBS volume of an instance will be deleted upon termination.
    • But, for other volumes (non-root), the default is to keep the EBS volume.
    • This can be controlled by the AWS console / AWS CLI

EBS Snapshots

ebs-snapshot

  • Make a backup of your EBS volume at a point in time.
  • Not necessary to detach volume to do snapshot, but recommended
  • Can copy snapshots across availability zones or region
  • Ex: we can create a snapshot of a volume in us-east-1a and then restore this volume from another region like us-east-1b

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) - Fast Snapshot Restore (FST) - Allows you to get your volumes restored in a few seconds. - Force full initialization of snapshot to have no latency on the first use ($$$)

AMI - Amazon Machine Image

  • AMI are 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 published

Creating an AMI