Amazon Web Service- Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is an easy to use, scalable, high performance block storage service designed for Amazon EC2. EBS allows you to create storage volumes and attach them to Amazon EC2 instances. Once attached, we can create a file system on top of these volumes, run a database, or use them in any other way you would use block storage.

AWS Elastic Block Storage

Ø Features of EBS:

1.   Scalability– EBS volume sizes and features can be scaled as per the needs of the system.
This can be done in two ways;

a.   Take a snapshot of the volume and create a new volume using the snapshot with new updated features.

b.   Updating the existing EBS volume from the console.

2.   Backup-Users can create snapshots of EBS volumes that act as backups.

a.   Snapshot can be created manually at any point in time or can be scheduled.

b.  Snapshots are stored on AWS S3 and are charged according to the S3 storage charges.

c.   Snapshots are incremental in nature.

d.  New volumes across regions can be create from snapshots.

3.   Encryption– Encryption can be a basic requirement when it comes to storage. This can be due to the government of regulatory compliance. EBS offers an AWS managed encryption features;

a.   Users can enable encryption when creating EBS volumes by clicking on a checkbox.

b.   Encryption keys are managed by the Key Management Service (KMS) provided by AWS.

c.   Encrypted volumes can only be attached to selected instance types.

4.   Charges– unlike AWS S3, where you are charged for the storage you consume, AWS charges users for the storage you hold. For ex. If user use 1 GB storage in a 5 GB volume, user had still be charged for a 5 GB EBS volume.

a.   EBS charges vary from region to region.

Ø EBS Volume Types:

EBS VolumeTypes

1.   SSD- backed volumes:

SSD (Solid State Drives): this is a general purpose storage. It supports up to 4000 IOPS (Input/output Operations per Second) which is quite very high. SSD storage is very high performing, but it is quite expensive as compared to HDD storage. SSD volume types are optimized for transactional workloads such as frequent read/write operations with small I/O size, where the performance attribute is IOPS.

SSD Further classified into two parts;

·        General purpose SSD

·        Provisioned IOPS SSD

2.  HDD- backed Volumes:

HDD (Hard Disk Drive) support up to 100 IOPS which is very low. The size of the HDD based storage could be between 1GB to 1TB. HDD Further classified into three parts;

·        Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)

·        Cold HDD (sc1)

·        Magnetic Volume

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