Amazon EBS is Amazon’s cloud-based storage service offering block-level storage volumes for EC2 instances. This storage service can be used for various purposes, including replacing traditional hard disks.
At the AWS re:Invent 2019 event, Amazon showcased several new features for its EBS service, making it easier and more cost-effective. Look at the new Amazon EBS features and what they can provide.
A Guide to Amazon EBS at AWS re:Invent 2019
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides block level storage volumes for Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances, providing the much needed persistent local storage required for virtual instance instances. Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to provide high availability and durability. In addition, Amazon EBS is designed to encrypt data and scale under workload changes, enabling cloud administrators to take advantage of reduced manageability costs and improved performance.
Amazon EBS is also ideal for enterprise applications and large-scale business environments because it can provide more than 16TB of storage per volume and attach multiple volumes to a single EC2 instance. Multiple EC2 instances can theoretically share data on one or more attached volumes or mount the same volume on another EC2 instance.
This year at AWS re:Invent 2019, AWS launched some exciting features that help simplify how you use and manage your Amazon EBS volumes. With these new features, AWS focuses on providing greater automation and improved control over access via integration with other services like Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
These features include Automated Snapshots which allows customers to schedule snapshots of their data; IAM Access that makes it easier for customers to manage access; Multi-Attach support which makes it easier for large clusters of servers to have shared access to the same data volumes; New Volume Types – General Purpose SSDs for up-to-date application performance; Enhanced Durability – featuring additional replication techniques as well as new methods for recovering from catastrophic events; Optimized Performance – with enhancements such as streamlined IO scheduling logic, more efficient backup mechanisms, faster snapshot times and increased throughput capacity; Storage Tiers – allowing customers to optimize their cost by changing EBS volume types without losing any currently stored data.
What are the benefits of Amazon EBS?
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block-level storage volumes for Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS cloud. This means you can use EBS to store data such as databases and applications, provide long-term storage of persistent data, and access it from EC2 instances.
The following is an overview of some of the key benefits of EBS:
1. High Performance: With EBS you can enjoy consistent performance with up to 64000 IOPS per volume or fully utilize SSD or HDD type storage volumes in a single availability zone. Through Amazon’s automated snapshotting feature and seamless scalability, administrators can easily increase their efficient storage needs over time.
2. Resilience: Amazon EBS allows extra resilience by replicating user volume across two Availability Zones (AZs) for protection against local failure scenarios like server and disk problems at the primary AZ/subnet level.
3. Cost savings: Compared to traditional on-premises solutions, EBS offers a cost-effective solution to many enterprise workloads needing consistent performance and availability. In addition, through its powerful snapshotting capabilities, administrators are able to manage backups more effectively while reducing costs associated with manual restores and long-term archival loads.
4. Scalability and Availability: Through its on-demand model and integration with other AWS services such as Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) for automated dynamic scalability makes EBS suitable for any workload profile from massive web scale applications down to test environments requiring single instance low latency responsiveness with decent performance specifications.
Finally the reliable recovery policy provides granular control over how quickly customer’s data can be restorable in disaster scenarios creating higher levels of service availability assurance such as when serving customer facing applications.
AWS re:Invent 2019
AWS re:Invent 2019 was a major event for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers.
Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage) was one of the key topics at the event. This guide will review all the news and updates related to Amazon EBS that came out of re:Invent 2019 and explore how they might benefit Amazon Web Services customers.
What new features were announced?
At AWS re:Invent 2019, Amazon EBS had added four major new features designed to provide customers with enhanced performance, flexibility, security and cost control.
The first feature is a new block storage performance class called Provisioned IOPS SSD. This type of storage allows you to provision either a certain number of I/O operations per second (IOPS) or a certain amount of throughput (measured in megabytes per seconds, MB/s) that your application can use. By specifically allocating IOPS and/or throughput for better control and performance for high-traffic instances with databases or other heavy-duty workloads could benefit the most from its use.
The second feature announced for re:Invent 2019 was Elastic Volumes which allow customers to increase their volume size, Performance Class and Provisioned IOPS capacity up to 6 times the original size from when it was first created – all while an instance is running! This will be especially useful in cases where more heavy read/write operations are needed at different points throughout the life cycle of an application or project during scaling or development changes without having any additional down time on an instance or even needing to detach a volume before being resized.
The third major announcement was EBS Multi-Attach which allows multiple Amazon EC2 instances in two Availability Zones to share a single EBS volume concurrently – meaning multiple EC2’s now have direct access at one point making it easier than ever before for multiple machines across different A-Zs’ access one data set concurrently via Amazon EBS.
Lastly, the fourth big feature announced at re:Invent 2019 is Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore–it reduces snapshot restore time down by as much as 4 times, making it faster than ever! Now instances can be up and running much quicker, not interrupting business cycles like might have been experienced before. Slow restore times could have caused outages in applications or downtime during peak hours due to longer restore time frames associated with traditional snapshots.
What is the new Amazon EBS Volume Interface?
At AWS re:Invent 2019, Amazon announced the availability of the new Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Volume Interface, which provides enhanced storage performance and simplifies management of EBS volumes.
The new Amazon EBS Volume Interface can improve storage performance by up to 8x over existing Amazon EBS volumes while streamlining the creation and management process. By using this interface, customers can more easily provision EBS volumes quickly and with greater control over performance. In addition, customers can adjust performance settings on existing or newly created EBS Volumes to take advantage of this capability.
The new Volume Interface also provides customers with better visibility into the status of their EBS volumes — customers can view the number of IOPS being consumed in real time, allowing them to better monitor their storage resources. It also offers features such as automated snapshotting, replication, encryption and block cloning, simplifying data protection and Backups without modifying existing applications.
Last but not least, it is backward compatible with current generation EBS volumes providing customers support for various use cases from Test/Dev environments to high-performance workloads .
With these capabilities available through a single interface, the new Amazon Elastic Block Store provides improved flexibility for customers who are looking for enhanced storage performance at AWS re:Invent 2019. It is worth a closer look for any organization that wants to get the most out of their AWS infrastructure.
What other new features are available?
In addition to the new disk size flexibility and st1 Volume support, Amazon EBS has also rolled out other exciting features this year. One enables provisioned IOPS volumes on AWS Fargate; another is Auto-snapshotting for volumes backed with Fargate or Elastic Container Service (ECS) tasks.
With provisioned IOPS volumes on Fargate, customers can specify the number of IOs per second required for a given volume. This helps alleviate issues related to contention and is a great choice for workloads with unpredictable spikes in read/write traffic currently being run on non-provisioned EBS volumes.
Auto-snapshots allow customers to set up rules that could auto-trigger backups of their EBS Volumes without the use of additional configuration management software such as AWS Lambda or Terraform. Customers have more control over exactly when the snapshots occur, since they can set particular time frames ranging from every few minutes, hours, days, months etc., depending on the need and requirements of their application.
For customers working in DevOps environments which make frequent updates to production environments, auto-snapshots ensure these changes are backed up immediately in case something goes wrong or an update needs to be reverted so downtime is kept to a minimum.
Of course auto-snapshots will keep backup costs low by allowing customer’s automatic backups for only certain periods that matters most—eliminating extra overhead costs from running continuous backups unnecessarily.
Best Practices
As Amazon EBS grows and evolves, some best practices can help you get the most out of the service. The AWS re:Invent 2019 conference brought many updates to the service, and in this guide, we’ll cover the best practices for managing and optimizing your Amazon EBS environment.
We’ll break down the latest news and features from Amazon EBS and discuss the best practices for taking advantage of them.
How to optimize your Amazon EBS performance
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a cloud storage resource used to store persistent disk data across multiple Availability Zones, making it ideal for applications that have high-availability or mission-critical system requirements. It’s an essential component of Amazon Web Services (AWS). At AWS re:Invent 2019, Amazon updated their best practices for Amazon EBS, outlined below.
When optimizing Amazon EBS performance, consider the following options:
1. Select the correct instance type and size – The performance you need from your EBS volumes should align with setting up instance types and sizes for your workloads. Selecting the incorrect instance types and sizes can cause problems with availability or latency if you’re not meeting the necessary IOPS requirements.
2. Choose the correct volume type – It’s important to choose an optimized type of EBS volume that meets your needs depending on the workload you are running. For example, general purpose SSD (GP2) will provide sufficient storage and fast response times for internet applications such as web servers or databases, while Provisioned IOPS SSD should be used when extended peaks in performance are required by mission-critical systems.
3. Set up monitoring – Monitoring is essential to troubleshoot potential issues quickly and efficiently before they affect customer experience or cause long-term damage to your application. Utilizing native AWS tools such as CloudWatch can provide detailed information on operations and metrics related to storage throughput measurements like average read/write latency and throughput capacity utilization of EBS volumes attached to instances
4. Set up proper back-ups – Data frequently accumulates over time–backed files that were unused at one point may become vital for further operations down the line–so setting up back-ups is crucial to prevent any loss of valuable data from occurring due to hardware failure or capacity limits being exceeded.
Make sure all backed-up copies are stored at different locations, offsite backups are kept in disaster recovery scenarios, S3 Lifecycle policies are defined appropriately depending on individual needs and AWS services relevant for this process such as Cross Region Replication and Versioning can help with ensuring further measures of protection against data loss in case of infrastructure issues or malicious attacks that have spread beyond a single Point of Presence (PoP).
How to use Amazon EBS snapshots
Amazon EBS snapshots are one of the primary ways to back up an Amazon Elastic Block Store volume. It’s a great way to guarantee data safety and recover quickly from unexpected capacity issues or disasters.
To use Amazon EBS snapshots, you must have an AWS account, and your application must be built to take advantage of the snapshot ability of Amazon EBS. You can use either the AWS Management Console or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) to create snapshots.
Once you create a snapshot, it is stored in Amazon S3, where it is saved as an incremental-backup copy of your data on Amazon EBS. When creating a snapshot, you can also specify whether you want additional encryption for extra security.
Before taking a snapshot, make sure that all writes to the disk are complete so that the image will be accurate; if there are changes not yet committed when the snapshot is created, only the changes written at that point will be included in the image and any data written since then will be lost forever when restoring from this image.
How to use Amazon EBS encryption
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a form of persistent storage offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon EBS encryption provides data-at-rest protection, which guards against unauthorized access to user and system data stored on disk drives.
At AWS re:Invent 2019, all attendees received a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to the new features and capabilities offered by Amazon EBS encryption. This guide walks users through creating encrypted volumes using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). It also explains how to apply Amazon EBS encryption to an entire account or a specified region. Additionally, users can learn how to configure their systems for encrypted snapshots and backups when using Amazon EBS encryption.
Overall, Amazon EBS encryption makes it easy for businesses to securely protect their data from unauthorized access or accidental deletion. With this security measure in place it becomes much harder for attackers or competitors to gain access or use their resources for nefarious purposes. It also ensures businesses’ data is completely secure even if their storage devices are physically stolen or lost due to natural disasters. As such, every business should understand the best practices for setting up and leveraging Amazon EBS Encryption within their environment.
Conclusion
AWS re:Invent 2019 had some exciting announcements related to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). Here is a summary of the new features of Amazon EBS that will enhance the user experience and benefit users in various ways.
First, EBS will now provide a solution called “EBS Direct APIs.” This technology provides direct access to network resources within the cloud, enabling customers to use them in their applications.
Additionally, EBS now supports Provisioned IOPS (I/O-per-second) SSDs. This feature lets customers specify exactly how many IOPS they need for their storage volumes, allowing them to more accurately size their storage needs.
Moreover, EBS now supports Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering storage tier expansion capabilities. With this feature, customers can define additional tiers and monitor utilization levels so that higher performance can be delivered when needed and different tiers can be used for data when appropriate.
Finally, AWS is adding several new APIs for greater automation and simpler orchestration with OpenStack integration and network support directly within AWS Lambda functions. Additionally, new security measures add control measures such as HIPAA compliance options and encryption at rest using customer supplied keys (CMK).
The release of these features at AWS re:Invent 2019 exemplifies Amazon’s commitment to its customers by providing simple cloud solutions with ease-of-use tools that provide enhanced security and improved performance capabilities at an affordable cost.
tags = Security Best Practices, Choosing the right storage, Optimizing Amazon EBS for performance, aws ec2 ebs aws amazonnovetcnbc, deep aws ebs aws amazonnovetcnbc
