Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed
highly reliable and scalable file storage that is accessible
over the industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.
In this video, we're going to focus on scaling your file system's
capacity dynamically and automatically.
Amazon FSx allows you to increase your storage
and scale you throughput capacity both up or down
through the AWS console,
Command Line Interface, and through AWS API's.
Storage capacity scaling allows you to increase your file system size
dynamically as your data set gets larger.
Therefore, when you create your file system, you don't need to predict how much
your data will grow in the future, you can just select what storage capacity you need right now.
That means you only pay for the storage you need at any given time.
Throughput capacity scaling is bidirectional, meaning you can adjust it up or down
on the fly to help fine tune performance and reduce cost.
This is great for cyclical workloads as well as one time bursts
for time sensitive goals like data migration.
We'll look at how to select you initial capacities, and then adjust them
using both he AWS console and the Command Line Interface (CLI).
Finally, we'll look at a solution that automates increases
when free storage capacity falls below a certain point.
Let's start by creating a new file system.
We'll select the initial storage capacity to be fairly low, which will meet our current needs.
We'll leave the default throughput capacity,
but you can see that there are many choices to meet your specific performance needs.
I've already created an active directory, so we'll associate that with our file system.
We check all of our settings, and create the file system.
Once the file system is created
we can select it and see it in the FSx console.
To increase storage capacity, either select update storage capacity
from the action menu, or select update
next to the storage capacity display.
Note that you can choose the new capacity either by
a percentage or by a specific amount.
The minimum increase is 10% of the file systems current storage capacity
up to the maximum of 65 TiB.
Lastly, we accept the changes,
and the process to increase capacity begins.
The file system can still be accessed while the update is in progress,
there's no downtime for your workload while you scale storage capacity.
Updating throughput capacity can also be done through action menu or the update button.
Once the dialog appears, we simply select the new throughput capacity via the dropdown.
Turning our attention to the CLI, we can see information about our file system using
the describe-file-systems command.
We'll need the file system ID, found here in the output
of the command, to update the correct file system.
Now, we use the update-file-systems command
to set the new storage capacity.
You can also use the describe-file-systems command to monitor the progress of the update.
The FILE_SYSTEM_UPDATE section of the output shows the status of the update.
and the storage optimization section
shows the progress as long as the update process is running.
Finally, let's take a look at the dynamic storage capacity scaling update solution.
This solution is found in the Amazon FSx user guide
and you can find the URL below.
Basically, this solution reports free capacity to Amazon CloudWatch
which triggers an alarm when the capacity falls below a threshold you set
when configuring the solution.
This alarm send a message via an Amazon SNS queue
to an AWS Lambda function, which calculates the new storage capacity,
and requests an update from Amazon FSx.
The solution can be deployed via an
AWS CloudFormation template, linked in the documentation.
Copy the template URL from the page,
select "create stack",
make sure "template is ready" is selected,
and the "template source" is Amazon S3 URL.
Paste the URL from the documentation into the text field.
Then, select "next".
Now, you need to fill in some details for the project.
The file system ID can be copied from the Amazon FSx console.
Select the threshold where you'd like storage capacity to be added.
I've chosen 5%.
You could also use a threshold of a specific size in GiB.
The e-mail address you enter will get a notification when
the alarm occurs so that you're aware that the process is allocating more space.
The alarm modification notification parameter allows the system to determine
a proportionally larger storage capacity increase the next time an alarm is triggered.
Note that this is useful even if you specified a percentage for the threshold
as the percentage is translated to GiB when the stack is created.
Finally, the percent increase determines how much extra storage capacity to allocate.
There are some advanced options giving control over permissions,
rollback and notification, but I won't change any defaults.
Lastly, a quick review of the setting, an acknowledgement of the use of
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resources
Once the stack is created,
we can head over to the CloudWatch dashboard and examine the alarm metrics.
and see what's going on with our file system.
We'll use the fsutil application to consume storage capacity.
Now, when we go back to CloudWatch
we can see that our free capacity has dropped below our threshold shown here
by the red dotted line, which is around 11 GiB.
If we look back at our file system in the Amazon FSx dashboard,
we can see that a storage capacity update has been initiated for us.
With a 25% increase selected, storage capacity will
grow from 128 to 160 GiB.
Additionally, an e-mail is sent to notify us that the threshold was crossed.
That way, you're never caught unaware of a capacity change and increased storage activity.
This automatic storage capacity scaling solution provides a convenient,
hands off method to increase storage capacity in your
Amazon FSx for Window File Server
file system.
With this solution deployed,
you'll automatically get the storage capacity you need as your data grows.
You'll also be informed when increases happen so you can keep an eye on data growth.
In this video we explored different options for
scaling storage and throughput capacity
with Amazon FSx for Windows File Server.
For further information, please visit the Amazon FSx homepage. Thank you!