Amazon Elastic Block Store

EBS is a block storage system that is used to store persistent data and has 3 types of volumes differentiated based on performance characteristics and cost namely. General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS (SSD), and Magnetic.

EBS Volume Types:

EBS General Purpose (SSD)

EBS General Purpose (SSD) is preferably suitable for small and medium workloads, has a storage capacity from 1GB to 1TB with a cost of $0.10 per GB for one month and supports, SSD 3 IOPS /GB by default.

Provisioned IOPS (SSD)

Provisioned IOPS (SSD)is preferably suitable for the highest demanding I/O intensive, transactional workloads and large relational, EMR and Hadoop workloads, it costs $0.125 per GB per month for provisioned storage and $0.10 per provisioned IOPS per month and IOPS SSD supports 30 IOPS/GB by default

EBS Magnetic Volumes

EBS Magnetic Volumes is preferably suitable workloads which infrequently access data, such as data backups, logs storage, has a storage capacity from 10GB to 1TB and costs $0.05 per GB per month for provisioned storage and $0. 05 per million I/O requests.

Volumes Attached to One Instance

The accounts will have a limit of 20 EBS volumes, the Amazon’s support team should be contacted if there is any additional requirement.

It is advisable to save anything on Amazon EBS as the EBS volumes can be accessed and read anytime once the file is attached to EC2 instance

Tutorialpoint.AmazonWebServices-Elastic Block Store(2020)https://www.tutorialspoint.com/amazon_web_services/amazon_web_services_elastic_block_store.htm

How to Set Up Amazon EBS?

EBS is similar to our physical hard drive. Data and information will remain lifetime and can be moved between virtual machine any required time.

Create a New EBS Volume:

Provide the necessary information requested and click the Create Volume button.

Volume Type: General purpose

Since we are practicing the lab you can make your column type according to your requirement.

Availability zone similar to your EC2instance about to attach EBC volume.

Attach the Volume to an Instance

Select the running instance.

Connect to Your Amazon EC2 Instance

All Amazon EC2 instances assigned to private and public IP addresses, Where Public IP directly connected internet or though NAT. And Private IP will remain inside private network without reaching internet.

Windows Users: Using SSH to Connect

Use PuTTY to SSH to Amazon EC2 instances:

PuTTy is a software terminal emulator for Windows and Linux. It provides a text user interface to remote computers running any of its supported protocols, including SSH and Telnet.

Computer Hope. (13^th November 2018)https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/p/putty.htm

The connection will be set up now. Connect to the Amazon EC2 instance Using SSH and puTTY.

Login as ec2-user

Create and Configure Your File System 

The new volume will be added to a Linux instance as an ext3 file system under the /mnt/data-store mount point.

This shows the original 8GB disk volume and the new volume has been mounted.

ext3 file system on the new volume:

The ext3 file system is an enhanced version of the ext2 file system.

Redhat.redhatdocumnetation(2020)

https://web.mit.edu/rhel-doc/5/RHEL-5-manual/Deployment_Guide-en-US/ch-ext3.html

Create a directory for mounting the new storage volume using

sudo mkdir /mnt/data-store

Mount the new volume

sudo mount /dev/sdf /mnt/data-store

To configure the Linux instance to mount this volume, you will need to add a line to /etc/fstab.

echo "/dev/sdf   /mnt/data-store ext3 defaults,noatime 1 2" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

View the available storage again

df -h

The output will now contain an additional line - /dev/xvdf:

reate a file , on your mounted volume, and add some text to it.

sudo sh -c "echo some text has been written > /mnt/data-store/file.txt"

Verify that the text is  written to your volume.

Create an Amazon EBS Snapshot

The data at Amazon EBS volumes can be backed up to Amazon S3 by taking point-in-time snapshots, here  only the blocks that were changed after the most recent snapshot will be saved.  When a snapshot is deleted, only the data relevant to the particular snapshot will be removed. 

 AWS.Userguid(2020)https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSSnapshots.html

In the remote SSH session, delete the file created on your volume

sudo rm /mnt/data-store/file.txt

Verify that the file has been deleted using

ls /mnt/data-store/

Restore the Amazon EBS Snapshot

Due to the speed, convenience and cost EBS snapshots are known to be the most preferred backup tool on Amazon EC2. You are able to recreate the state of a volume at a particular point in the past with all data intact when you restore data from a snapshot. You are able to duplicate data across regions, replace a damaged volume in its entirety, create test environments, or retrieve certain files, and transfer them by attaching a restored volume to an instance.

AWS.UserguidforLinuxinstances(2020)https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-restoring-volume.html

Create a Volume Using Your Snapshot

 Attach the Restored Volume to Your EC2 Instance

Mount the Restored Volume:

What’s The Difference between Amazon EBS VS S3?

Amazon EBS, and Amazon S3 are AWS’ three different types of storages that are applicable for various types of workloads.

Amazon EBS provides high-availability block-level storage volumes for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Data is stored on a file system which will be retained after the EC2 instance is shut down.

Amazon S3 is preferably good at storing vast numbers of backups or user files, and is not limited to EC2.Files in a S3 bucket could be accessed either programmatically or directly from services such as AWS CloudFront.

Amazon EBS Benefits

The storage is Reliable and secure storage – the EBS volume will each automatically respond to its Availability Zone in order to protect from component failure.

Secure – since the control policies allows to specify as to who can access which volumes

Higher performance − SSD technology is used by Amazon EBS to deliver data results with consistent I/O performance of application.

Easy data backup − Data backup can be done through snapshots.

Amazon EBS Use Cases

Testing and development: You are able to archive, scale, provision or duplicate your testing environments, development environments, or production environments.

NoSQL databases: NoSQL databases are offered by EBS

Relational databases: EBS scales to provide the needed storage making it the perfect choice to deploy databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server.

Business consistency: Copying EBS Snapshots and Amazon Machine Images in order to run applications in different AWS regions which reduces loss of data and helps in the speeding up the recovery time by having file backups.

Enterprise-wide applications: various enterprise computing needs are met through powerful block storage that supports important applications.

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 provides object storage where each object has an unique identifier to access through web from any location it also supports static web content hosting which could be accessed from the S3 bucket or from AWS CloudFront and S3 is secure, providing. “eleven nines” - 99.999999999 of data durability.

Amazon S3 Benefits

Robust performance, scalability, and availability: Amazon S3 scales the storage resources and keeps the data safe from errors, threats and failures, and makes it available when needed

Cost-saving storage classes: Storage class analysis helps to locate data that could be moved to a lower-cost storage class, transferring the data could be done by using an S3 Lifecycle policy. then, S3 intelligent-tiering helps to store the data that has various access patterns by tiering objects, which cuts storage costs.

Easier security, compliance, and audit features: S3 is able to and protect data from unauthorized access by using its access management and encryption tools. The features of S3 make it easy to comply with the regulatory requirements, Amazon Macie denies irregular access requests.

Exacting data control: An array of management tools enable you to classify and report on data. S3 includes storage class analysis which monitors access patterns, while object transfers to lower-cost storage are analyzed by S3 Lifecycle. Retention dates are assigned to objects by S3 Object Lock in order to prevent deletion, and visibility of stored objects and their encryption and metadata are offered by S3 Inventory.S3 Batch Operations are able to run storage management maintenance for billions of objects and  automation of  workflows, define alerts and log activities without added management of infrastructure can be done through AWS Lambda .

Amazon S3 Use Cases

Data lake and big data analytics:  In order to hold raw data in its native format a data lake can be created and in order to insights machine learning tools, query-in-place, and analytics can be used. AWS Lake Formation together with S3 creates data lakes and defines policies regarding governance, security, and auditing. Together, they can need your data store requirement and you will not need to have any prior investment.

Backup and restoration: when S3 is combined with other AWS offerings you are able to easily build Secure, robust backup and restoration solutions, which would include EBS, EFS, or S3 Glacier.your on-premises capabilities will be enhanced by these offerings, while objectives with regard to compliance, recovery time, and recovery point are met by the other offerings.

Reliable disaster recovery: protecting data, critical applications, and IT systems is made easy by S3 Cross-Region Replication,S3 storage and additional AWS networking, computing, and database services .It offers nimble recovery from outages, whether it is caused by a system issue, human error or a natural disaster.

Methodical archiving: in order to provide methodical archiving capabilities S3 works seamlessly with other AWS offerings. S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive enables archiving of data and retiring of physical infrastructure. Three S3 storage classes are available which have low rates to retain objects for extended periods of time. You are able to create S3 Lifecycle policies to archive objects at any given point through the life cycle, or you can directly upload objects to archival storage classes .Compliance regulations are met by S3 Object Lock by applying retention dates so that objects avoid their deletion. And S3 Glacier are able to restore any archived object in a short period of time.

Missioncloud.BrianYung(23^rdJuly2019)https://www.missioncloud.com/blog/resource-amazon-ebs-vs-efs-vs-s3-picking-the-best-aws-storage-option-for-your-business