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EBS (Elastic Block Store)

  • Storage volumes to attach EC2 instances to

  • Encryption is disable by default

  • Encryption can be enabled for all EBS at EC2 settings

  • Snapshot from encrypted volume is always encrypted

  • Instance created from encrypted AMI are also encrypted

  • Encryption doesn't impact instance performance

  • EBS Encryption

    • Data is encrypted at-rest and in-transit

  • EBS-Optimization

    • Separate Storage Path from Network Path

  • Types

    • Solid State Drives (SSD)
      • General Purpose SSD (gp2): suitable for boot disks and general applications
      • General Purpose SSD (gp3): suitable for high performance applications
      • Provisioned IOP (io1): for OLTP and latency-sensitive applications
      • Provisioned IOP (io2): for OLTP and latency-sensitive applications (with grate nb of IOPS)
    • Hard Disk Drives (HDD)
      • Throughput Optimized HDD: for bigdata, warehouse and ETL
      • Cold HDD (sc1): less frequently accessed data and low cost applications

  • When creating EC2 instances, you can only use the following EBS volume types as boot volumes: gp2, gp3, io1, io2, and Magnetic (Standard)

  • Using EBS Multi-Attach, you can attach the same EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances in the same AZ. Each EC2 instance has full read/write permissions

  • Multi-attach feature can only be enabled on EBS Provisioned IOPS io2 or io1 volumes

Volumes and Snapshot​

  • Volumes
    • Are where the data is stored
    • They are always in the same AZ as EC2
    • Can be resized in the fly
    • Can change the volume type in the fly
  • Snapshot
    • It's a current state of the volume at point in time
    • For consistent snapshot it's recommended to stop the instance then take the snap
    • Snapshot can only be shared in the region where they are created, to share them with other regions we need to copy them to those regions
  • EBS fast snapshot restore