Understanding Amazon EBS

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) offers persistent block storage volumes that automatically replicate within their respective Availability Zones. It allows for quick scalability, enabling users to adjust their usage levels within minutes.

Features of Amazon EBS

EBS volume use cases:

• Boot volumes and primary storage for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances
• Data storage with a file system
• Database hosts

Snapshot use cases:

• Create a backup of critical workloads.
• Recreate EBS volumes.
• Share and copy data.

EBS volume types

Solid state drives (SSDs):

• Provisioned IOPS SSD
• General Purpose SSD volumes

Hard disk drives (HDDs):

• Throughput Optimized HDD
• Cold HDD

Use cases for EBS volume types: SSD

Provisioned IOPS

• I/O-intensive workloads
• Relational databases
• NoSQL databases

General Purpose

• Recommended option for most workloads.
• System boot volumes
• Virtual desktops
• Low-latency interactive apps
• Development and test environments

Use cases for EBS volume types: HDD

Throughput-optimized

• Streaming workloads that require consistent, fast throughput at a low price
• Big data
• Data warehouses
• Log processing
• Not a boot volume

Cold

• Throughput-oriented storage for large volumes of data that are infrequently accessed.
• Scenarios where the lowest storage cost is important.
• Not a boot volume

Case Study:

A multinational software development company, XYZ Solutions, faced challenges managing their data storage efficiently across various projects. They needed a scalable and reliable storage solution that could adapt to their dynamic workload requirements.

Architecture of Case study

Creation of EBS Volume:

select the desired volume type based on their specific workload requirements.

Attaching to the EBS volume to an Instance:

select the volume you want to attach, click on actions and select attach volume.

select the Instance ID you want to attach the EBS Volume to, then attach volume.

Check that you instance was attached:

ssh into the instance to do this

#To view the storage that is available on your instance
df -h
#To create an ext3 file system on the new volume
sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdf
#To create a directory to mount the new storage volume
sudo mkdir /mnt/data-store
#To mount the new volume
sudo mount /dev/sdf /mnt/data-store
echo "/dev/sdf   /mnt/data-store ext3 defaults,noatime 1 2" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
#To view the configuration file
cat /etc/fstab
df -h

Create an Amazon EBS snapshot:

create a snapshot for your created volume to store data on the volume.

Conclusion:

XYZ Solutions now possesses the knowledge and practical experience to optimize their storage infrastructure using EBS, enhancing their overall operational efficiency and data security.