EBS SOA

Volume Resizing¶

We can only increase an EBS volume's size or IOPS.
- We can also change the volume type like from gp2 to gp3.
After resizing an EBS volume, we need to repartition your drive.
After increasing the size, it's possible for the volume to be in the "optimisation" phase for a long time. The volume is still usable.
- There are 3 stages: modifying, optimising, completed.

We CANNOT decrease the size of an EBS volume.

We can create a smaller volume and then migrate the data.

Resizing of an instance is only possible if the root device for your instance is an EBS volume.

If the root device for your instance is an EBS volume, you can change the size of the instance simply by changing its instance type, which is known as resizing it.
If the root device for your instance is an instance store volume, you must migrate your application to a new instance (by creating an AMI) with the instance type that you need.

An Amazon EBS gp2 volume is running low on space. How can this be resolved with MINIMAL effort?

With Elastic Volumes, you can dynamically modify the size, performance, and volume type of your Amazon EBS volumes without detaching them.

Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR)¶

EBS Snapshots stored in S3
By default, there's a latency of I/O operations the first time each block is accessed since the block must be pulled from S3.
Solution:
- Force the initialisation of the entire volume (using the dd or fio command), or
- Enable FSR
FSR helps you to create a volume from a snapshot that is fully initialised at creation (no I/O latency).
Enabled for a snapshot in a particular AZ (billed per minute - very expensive)
Can be enabled on snapshots created by Data Lifecycle Manager.

Questions¶

An e-commerce company runs its web application on Amazon EC2 instances backed by Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. An Amazon S3 bucket is used for storing sharable data. A developer has attached an Amazon EBS to an Amazon EC2 instance, but it’s still in the "attaching" state after 10-15 minutes. As a SysOps Administrator, what solution will you suggest to fix this issue with the EBS volume?

Check that the device name you specified when you attempted to attach the EBS volume isn't already in use. Attempt to attach the volume to the instance, again, but use a different device name.

An EBS-backed Amazon EC2 instance has a data volume with a status of impaired. I/O has also been disabled due to data consistency issues. Which first step should a SysOps Administrator take to recover the volume?

Perform a consistency check on the volume attached to the instance.

An Amazon EBS volume has a status of error. What can a SysOps Administrator do to bring the volume back online?

Create a new volume from a recent snapshot.

A large online business uses multiple Amazon EBS volumes for their storage requirements. According to the company guidelines, the EBS snapshots have to be taken every few minutes to retain the business-critical data in case of failure. As a SysOps Administrator, can you suggest an effective way of addressing this requirement?

Use Amazon CloudWatch events to schedule automated EBS Snapshots.¶

There is no such thing as automated EBS snapshots in the EC2 console.

After configuring Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, a systems administrator had tried to launch the Auto Scaling Group. But, the following launch failure message was displayed - Client.InternalError: Client error on launch. What is the cause of this error and how can it be fixed?

This error can be caused when an Auto Scaling group attempts to launch an instance that has an encrypted EBS volume, but the service-linked role does not have access to the customer-managed CMK used to encrypt it.

Your gp2 drive of 8TB is reaching its peak performance of 10,000 IOPS while being almost fully utilized. How can you increase the performance while keeping the costs at the same level?

Create two 4 TB gp2 drives and mount them in RAID 0 on the EC2 instance.

Last updated: 2023-03-24