Hi. Are you looking to increase your knowledge of Amazon's Elastic Block Storage?
If so, this video is for you. Please subscribe and hit the bell to be informed of free cloud
computing videos every Wednesday. Hi, I'm Mike Gibbs, and I've been in tech for over 25 years.
I've worked in networking, I've worked in security, and I've worked in cloud computing.
And a lot of what I've been doing recently is teaching cloud computing
to our students. And one key topic that people really have a hard time
is Amazon's storage platform. So today we're going to dive into Amazon's Elastic Block Storage.
To begin our discussion on Elastic Block Storage, let's first define what it is.
Amazon's Elastic Block Storage, often referred to as EBS, is high-performance block storage.
And it's non-volatile, which means it does not go away when the instance is terminated,
which automatically makes it different than instant storage because you would reboot a
system in instant storage, you would lose whatever data is there. So if you need to
maintain data on a host and the Amazon platform, you're going to be using Elastic Block Storage.
It kind of acts like a virtual hard drive. So you're going to mount this, your computer is
going to think it's a hard drive, but in reality, it's a high speed RAID Array that's sitting in an
Amazon data center somewhere, and therefore it can give some extremely good performance.
And you're going to use EBS with both EC2 computing instances, but you're
also going to use it with your databases on the Amazon [inaudible 00:01:38]. It's
extremely scalable. And being block storage, it's very high performance. So what happens
with block storage is you take your data. It gets broken up into many little pieces called blocks.
Each block has a unique identifier and it can be stored wherever is most efficient on the storage
array. So it's placed there in the most optimal manner. And then you have the identifiers. So when
you need the data, you look up the identifiers and there's your data. So it's very fast.
Elastic Block Storage is very flexible, meaning you can use it with your windows
servers and you can also use it with your Linux servers. And because they're on RAID Arrays,
and the way they're architected, they're very high availability. Five nines or 99.999% of the time
it'll be there. So think of your high transactional workloads, that's where
you're going to be using EBS. Now EBS volumes are associated with a single availability zone,
so keep that in mind. And because they're high availability, when you back them up, it's going
to back it up to a different availability zone, so it's always going to be in a different data center
than where you actually were in the first place, which is always a good way to look at things.
And you can encrypt these volumes with AES 256, which is a very solid encryption. It's used in a
lot of other environments. One thing to note is EBS volumes are backed up via snapshots.
So, there are backup solutions in place where you do incremental backups, for example, and it
looks at file attributes, and your backup tapes or your backup environment has all this information.
And you never know exactly what it's going to look like until you try and do a restore.
This is completely different. The snapshot is actually a complete image of that entire volume
that's going to be placed in a separate availability zone in,
actually, Amazon S3. So you know that when you take that image, if you ever need to,
you can reconstitute it into the entire drive, whether that drive [inaudible 00:03:34] the
operating system, or whether it's pure data. But you're going to get exactly
what you got. The only difference is that if you ever need to restore a system or recreate a system
from an EBS volume, if the volume wasn't encrypted before, when you take the image and mount it to an
instance, it'll be encrypted in that image. But you're going to want to use encryption anyway.
Now that you know about Elastic Block Storage, let's talk about the Elastic Block Storage volume
types. And there's really aesthetically about four types of EBS volumes that you're going to use.
And you want to use the correct volume because you want to make sure your applications meet their
performance requirements, but you also don't want to overpay
if you don't need super low latency. So let's talk about those performance requirements. Now,
in performance requirements, we're going to talk about two things, both latency
and throughput. And since many people get them confused, we're going to really define them.
So latency is going to be really determined about the number of input and output operations per
second, so IOPS. The more input and output you can do per second, the less latency.
Now that's different than throughput. Throughput is the amount of data that
can actually be moved per second. So in certain cases, if you need a very high throughput drive,
but you're less sensitive to latency, you can use a throughput optimized option. But you might have
a database that needs super low latency, so you really need to know your application requirements.
The first volume we'll talk about is your provisioned IOPS. Amazon refers to it as IO1. Now,
this is really high performance SSD storage.
In terms of throughput, it's got great throughput. But in terms of input,
output operations per second, this is the best you can get on the Amazon platform.
And this is designed for really large databases or any highly latency sensitive applications.
And the throughput's pretty good too, because you're getting about a thousand megabits a second.
So great throughput, low latency. When you need a high performance storage option on Amazon, this
is what you're going to use. Now there's another type of SSD based array that you can purchase.
That's called EBS general purpose SSD and Amazon calls that GP2. And this is fast SSD storage.
One thing to note about this type of volume, it gives you a really good mix of performance
to actual pricing. It's really great. If you're going to use it as a boot volume for your server.
It's great for storage on the server for things that aren't
incredibly latency sensitive. And a lot of times you're going to use this in a test environment.
So let's say you know your application and your database, they're all running on the data center,
and they need to be in very low latency environments because they're going to have
a lot of work dependent upon them. But in your performance testing environment,
you don't have quite as many demands on them, but you still need to roll out new software. By using
EBS general purpose SSD in your lab environment. You can get a lot of the performance, similar to
what you would get in the provisioned IOPs, that you would use in your production environment. But
because it can be mounted to instances and it can be booted off of this, it's a really good option
if you don't want to lose your information when you reboot, as you would with instant storage.
So, now you know about provisioned IOPS and general purpose SSD. Now let's talk about
magnetic storage options. So EBS throughput optimized hard drive, which Amazon calls ST1,
this is some high throughput magnetic storage, and it's great for frequently accessed workloads
that are not latency sensitive. And this is great when there's a lot of data to store,
a lot of data that needs to be moved around quite frequently, but super low latency is not required.
Log storage is an excellent use for this type of storage. And this type of storage is also
good for anything that's got sequential reads and writes. So you can get very good throughput
and use this for your throughput intensive workloads that are not super latency sensitive.
And the last volume type we'll talk about is EBS cold hard drive.
And they refer to that as SC1. Now, this is really low cost storage. And it's also low
performance storage. So you're going to use this for workloads that are not frequently accessed.
But it's good to know that you have an option for inexpensive storage,
they can be mounted to the system for workloads that are not needed that frequently.
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