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Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Overview: Empowering Secure and Scalable Cloud Networks Part 1

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Overview: Empowering Secure and Scalable Cloud Networks Part 1.

With Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), you can launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network that you’ve defined.

VPC Fundamentals

A VPC, virtual private cloud is a virtual network dedicated to your AWS account. It is logically isolated from other virtual networks in the AWS Cloud. You can specify an IP address range for the VPC, add subnets, add gateways, and associate security groups. 

Subnets

Allow you to partition your network inside your VPC. It’s a range of IP addresses in your VPC. You launch AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, into your subnets. Subnets are at the Availability Zone level.

You can connect a subnet to the internet, other VPC’s, and your own data Centers, and route traffic to and from your subnets using route tables.

A public subnet is a subnet that is accessible from the internet

A private subnet is a subnet that is not accessible from the interne

To define access to the internet and between subnets, we use Route Tables.

Route tables

A route table contains a set of rules, called routes, that are used to determine where network traffic from your VPC is directed. You can explicitly associate a subnet with a particular route table. Otherwise, the subnet is implicitly associated with the main route table.

Each route in a route table specifies the range of IP addresses where you want the traffic to go (the destination) and the gateway, network interface, or connection through which to send the traffic (the target).

Access the internet

You control how the instances that you launch into a VPC access resource outside the VPC.

Internet Gateway and NAT Gateways

Internet Gateways help our VPC instances connect to the internet

Public subnet has a route to the internet gateway

NAT Gateways (AWS managed) and NAT Instances (self-managed) allow your instances in your Private Subnets to access the internet while remaining private.

NAT Gateways allow an instance in your VPC to initiate outbound connections to the internet but prevent unsolicited inbound connections from the internet. NAT maps multiple private IPv4 addresses to a single public IPv4 address. You can configure the NAT device with an Elastic IP address and connect it to the internet through an internet gateway. This makes it possible for an instance in a private subnet to connect to the internet through the NAT device, routing traffic from the instance to the internet gateway and any responses to the instance.

A default VPC includes an internet gateway, and each default subnet is a public subnet. Each instance that you launch into a default subnet has a private IPv4 address and a public IPv4 address. These instances can communicate with the internet through the internet gateway. An internet gateway enables your instances to connect to the internet through the Amazon EC2 network edge.

By default, each instance that you launch into a nondefault subnet has a private IPv4 address, but no public IPv4 address, unless you specifically assign one at launch, or you modify the subnet’s public IP address attribute. These instances can communicate with each other, but can’t access the internet.

You can enable internet access for an instance launched into a nondefault subnet by attaching an internet gateway to its VPC.

If you associate an IPv6 CIDR block with your VPC and assign IPv6 addresses to your instances, instances can connect to the internet over IPv6 through an internet gateway. Alternatively, instances can initiate outbound connections to the internet over IPv6 using an egress-only internet gateway.

IPv6 traffic is separate from IPv4 traffic; your route tables must include separate routes for IPv6 traffic.

NACL (Network ACL)

A firewall that controls the traffic from and to the subnet (i.e., the first mechanism of defence of our public subnet)

Can have ALLOW and DENY rules

Are attached at the Subnet level

Rules only include IP addresses

To establish internet connectivity inside a subnet:

The network ACLs associated with the subnet must have rules to allow inbound and outbound traffic — The network access control lists (ACLs) that are associated with the subnet must have rules to allow inbound and outbound traffic on port 80 (for HTTP traffic) and port 443 (for HTTPS traffic). This is a necessary condition for Internet Gateway connectivity

Security Groups

A firewall that controls the traffic to and from an Elastic network interface (ENI) or an EC2 Instance (i.e., a second mechanism of defense)

Can only have ALLOW rules

Rules can include IP addresses as well as other security groups.

Egress-Only Internet Gateways

VPC component that allows outbound communication over IPv6 from instances in your VPC to the Internet, and prevents the Internet from initiating an IPv6 connection with your instances.

You cannot associate a security group with an egress-only Internet gateway.

You can use a network ACL to control the traffic to and from the subnet for which the egress-only Internet gateway routes traffic.

VPC Flow Logs

Capture information about network traffic: VPC Flow Logs, Subnet Flow Logs & Elastic Network Interface Flow Logs

DHCP Options Sets

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) provides a standard for passing configuration information to hosts on a TCP/IP network.

You can assign your own domain name to your instances, and use up to four of your own DNS servers by specifying a special set of DHCP options to use with the VPC.

Creating a VPC automatically creates a set of DHCP options, which are domain-name-servers=AmazonProvidedDNS, and domain-name=domain-name-for-your-region, and associates them with the VPC.

DNS

AWS provides instances launched in a default VPC with public and private DNS hostnames that correspond to the public IPv4 and private IPv4 addresses for the instance.

AWS provides instances launched in a non-default VPC with a private DNS hostname and possibly a public DNS hostname, depending on the DNS attributes you specify for the VPC and if your instance has a public IPv4 address.

From the Settings, click on “Create Volume.”

Set VPC attributes enableDnsHostnames and enableDnsSupport to true so that your instances receive a public DNS hostname and the Amazon-provided DNS server can resolve Amazon-provided private DNS hostnames.

VPC Peering

Connect two VPC’s privately using the AWS network

Make them behave as if the two VPC’s are in the same network.

We do this by setting up a VPC peering connection between them.

The two VPC’s must not have overlapping CIDR (IP address range)

VPC Peering is not transitive. If we have a peering connection between (VPC A and VPC B) and (VPC A and VPC C) this does not mean that VPC C can communicate with VPC B (this means there is no transitivity)

VPC Endpoints

Use when you need private access from within your VPC to an AWS services

Endpoints allow you to connect to AWS services using a private network instead of the public network.

This gives you increased security and lower latency to access AWS services

Use VPC Endpoint Gateway for S3 and DynamoDB. Only these two services have a VPC Gateway Endpoint (remember all the other ones have an Interface endpoint (powered by Private Link — means a private IP).

Use VPC Endpoint Interface for the rest of the services

Site to Site VPN & Direct Connect

Site-to-Site VPN: On-premise VPN to AWS over the public internet. The connection is automatically encrypted

Direct Connect (DX): Establish a private secure and fast physical connection between on-premise and AWS

Stay tuned for more.

If you have any questions concerning this article or have an AWS project that requires our assistance, please reach out to us by leaving a comment below or email us at. sales@accendnetworks.com

Thank you!

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Boosting Performance: The Power of Read Replicas in Database Management.

Boosting Performance: The Power of Read Replicas in Database Management.

Introduction

In the ever-evolving landscape of data-driven applications, performance is a critical factor that can make or break user experiences. Database management plays a pivotal role in this scenario, and one effective strategy for enhancing performance is the use of read replicas. If your database server goes down or is incredibly choked due to high volume and starts grinding to a halt, it doesn’t really matter if your application servers are still up — they wouldn’t be able to do useful things for your user without talking to the database server.

The Cloud gives us a really easy way to scale database compute capacity and resilience: the Read Replica!

What’s a Read Replica?

A read replica is a read-only copy of a DB instance. You can reduce the load on your primary DB instance by routing queries from your applications to the read replica. In this way, you can elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads.

In AWS, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) allows you to create read replicas of your primary DB instance with basically zero effort. RDS uses asynchronous replication to keep the read replicas up-to-date with the master. The specific replication technology used varies, depending on what database engine your primary DB uses (e.g., MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc)

Read replicas have distinct endpoints, different from the primary DB instance. Your application will have to be configured to connect to the correct endpoint (primary vs read replica), depending on what it needs to do. That means read-write workloads are directed to the primary DB endpoint, while your read-only workloads (e.g., dashboards and report generation) are directed to the read replica.

Read replicas are not free — they are priced just like a primary instance. If your read replica is the same size as your primary instance, then it would cost the same. If it is larger or smaller (read replicas don’t need to be exactly the same size as the primary DB instance), then the pricing adjusts as you would expect.

OK, So What’s a Read Replica Good For?

The primary benefit of a read replica is making your database more performant. Since a read replica is effectively a duplicate server, you get that extra compute capacity for your database needs.

And it’s not just that you get twice the computing power — it’s how you get it.

If you doubled the size of your primary DB instance, instead of adding a read replica to it, sure, you’d get equivalent total specs. But with the read replica setup, you can effectively partition your workloads so that heavy read processing can’t bog down your critical transaction processing. If you merely doubled the size of the primary DB instance, a surge of heavy report generation and dashboarding could suddenly slow down the entire DB instance and affect other areas of your application.

And that’s not all! Read replicas also give you an availability improvement. If you wanted Availability Zone (AZ)-level high availability, you could place your read replica in a different AZ from your primary DB instance. When your primary DB goes down, whether just an instance problem or a legitimate AZ-level service disruption, your read replica can be promoted to be a standalone DB, becoming the new primary DB instance. This takes only minutes — a lot faster than if you had to manually create a new primary DB instance from scratch using a backup.

How read replicas work

When you create a read replica, you first specify an existing DB instance as the source. Then Amazon RDS takes a snapshot of the source instance and creates a read-only instance from the snapshot. Amazon RDS then uses the asynchronous replication method for the DB engine to update the read replica whenever there is a change to the primary DB instance.

The read replica operates as a DB instance that allows only read-only connections. An exception is the RDS for the Oracle DB engine, which supports replica databases in mounted mode. A mounted replica doesn’t accept user connections and so can’t serve a read-only workload. The primary use for mounted replicas is cross-region disaster recovery. For more information, see Working with Read Replicas for Amazon RDS for Oracle.

Applications connect to a read replica just as they do to any DB instance. Amazon RDS replicates all databases from the source DB instance

Read replicas in a multi-AZ deployment

You can configure a read replica for a DB instance that also has a standby replica configured for high availability in a multi-AZ deployment. Replication with the standby replica is synchronous. Unlike a read replica, a standby replica can’t serve read traffic.

In the following scenario, clients have read/write access to a primary DB instance in one AZ. The primary instance copies update asynchronously to a read replica in a second AZ and also copies them synchronously to a standby replica in a third AZ. Clients have read access only to the read replica.

For more information about high availability and standby replicas, see Configuring and managing a Multi-AZ deployment.

Cross-Region read replicas

In some cases, a read replica resides in a different AWS Region from its primary DB instance. In these cases, Amazon RDS sets up a secure communications channel between the primary DB instance and the read replica. Amazon RDS establishes any AWS security configurations needed to enable the secure channel, such as adding security group entries.

Some commendable features of the Read Replicas:

  • At most, we can have up to 5 read replicas of any particular database.
  • In a bigger organization, where the data is humongous in amount, we can also create read replicas of the Read replicas but this feature comes along with a latency constraint.
  • For making, it more scalable at times of heavy workloads, these replicas can also be transformed into independent databases.
  • Whenever some hardware failure occurs on the primary database, at that time one of the replicas is promoted as primary in order to reduce the amount of loss that occurred by the failure.

Let us go through the steps involved in creating a read replica.

Note: As we all know, the concept of replicas is useful for huge organizations as they have a large database to work with. Thus, AWS has not allotted this facility for free tier accounts as we individuals do not need this service.

Login into your AWS account, in the search box type RDS then select RDS under service.

Select the database you want to make read replicas of. From “Actions” choose “Read Replicas”.

In the create-read replica DB instance dashboard, align all the configurations as per your requirements.

When you find everything appropriately configured as per the needs. Click on “Create Read Replica”.

Make sure to pull everything down, to avoid surprise bills.

If you have any questions concerning this article or have an AWS project that requires our assistance, please reach out to us by leaving a comment below or email us at. sales@accendnetworks.com

Thank you!

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CREATING EBS VOLUME FROM SNAPSHOTS AND TRANSFER OF SNAPSHOTS BETWEEN REGIONS.

Creating EBS Volume From Snapshots And Transfer Of Snapshots Between Regions.

Embarking on a cloud-driven journey requires not only innovation but also the ability to seamlessly manage and transfer data across diverse landscapes. Today, we explore a pivotal aspect of this journey — the art of creating EBS volumes from snapshots and orchestrating the seamless transfer of snapshots between AWS regions.

To back up the data in your EBS volumes, Amazon has developed EBS snapshots. This disaster recovery solution works by copying your EBS volumes at specific points in time. Should disaster strike, you can restore your data from the latest snapshot.

How Do AWS EBS Snapshots Work?

EBS snapshots work as an incremental storage system that captures and stores each moment-in-time snapshot of your EBS volume. All snapshots are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). The next time a snapshot is taken, only data that was not included in the previous snapshot will be stored.

EBS snapshots can thus be used to track how your EBS volumes have changed over time, whether a new volume was created or an old volume modified.

The advantages of Using EBS Snapshots

The main advantages of using AWS’ EBS snapshots are:

  • Comprehensive backup— having a solid system for backing up your data is critical. EBS snapshots allow you to restore your data to any point in time when a snapshot was taken and enables you to delete old snapshots without worrying about data loss for valid data.
  • Reliability of Amazon S3— when you are backing up your data with a third party, you want to make sure you are in good hands. Amazon’s S3 is an industry-leading cloud storage service. The infrastructure is reliable and it is generally cost-effective.
  • Time savings— because EBS snapshots are an incremental back-up system, backing up will be a fairly quick process. Once all your block-level data is saved to your S3, only changes on the block level will be recorded. This is much quicker than a full back-up.
  • Cost-efficiency— storage costs money and costs can balloon as your company grows. The incremental nature of snapshots eliminates redundancy in your backups, which can help reduce your storage costs. Likewise, they take up much less storage space and are thus cheaper than the heavier EBS volumes they capture.

An EBS Snapshot is nothing more than a backup of an EBS Volume. It can’t be attached to an instance, the user can’t read any data from it, and it’s not possible to utilize it for anything but creating other EBS Snapshots or EBS Volumes. Therefore, the key step in this equation is creating an EBS Volume from an EBS Snapshot. This is what we’re going to cover in this blog.

Prerequisites

A basic knowledge of EBS Volumes. You can follow our previous post on EBS volumes.

Select an EBS Snapshot and create a Volume

From the EC2 Dashboard, click on “Snapshots.” From the list of EBS Snapshots, choose the desired snapshot, click on

From the top menu, click on “Actions.” then click Create volume from snapshot.

You will be brought to a new page to confirm the parameters of the new volume.

Confirm EBS Volume Parameters & Confirm Deployment

Note that during the volume creation process, you’ll encounter the same parameters we’ve covered in the main EBS — Elastic Block blog. If you’re uncertain about any of them, make sure to refer to that page.

From the Settings, confirm the “Snapshot ID.”

From the Settings, select the “Volume type.”

From the Settings, input the “Size.”

2.4 — From the Settings, select the “IOPS.”

Note: depending on the “Volume type,” this option may not be available, as shown in the example.

Remember our snapshot was encrypted with the default encryption, so our volume from the snapshot will be automatically encrypted.

From the Settings, click on “Create Volume.”

You’ll receive a confirmation that a volume has been created. If you navigate to the EBS > Volumes tab, you’ll notice that you now have a volume that is tagged with the ID of the snapshot we’ve just utilized.

Conclusion on Creating an EBS Volume from an EBS Snapshot

The snapshot can’t be utilized by any application or service. To attach the data/storage to an EC2 instance, it must be in the form of an EBS Volume. In this article, we’ve taken a snapshot and walked through the steps of creating an EBS Volume from it.

Remember we have created this EBS volume in the same availability zone, but on the same note we would create this EBS volume from the snapshot in a different availability zone, this is very simple, under availability zone you would simply select the availability zone where you would want to create the snapshot.

COPYING SNAPSHOT TO A DIFFERENT AWS REGION.

EBS Volumes are created inside of a specific AZ. It isn’t possible to move an EBS Volume from one AZ to another directly. An EBS Snapshot will create a backup of an EBS Volume at the time of inception.

An EBS Snapshot can be used to create an EBS Volume in a different Availability Zone.

EBS Snapshot in One Availability Zone

Initial State

we’re looking at the EBS Snapshots page in the US-east-1 region — we can clearly see that we have EBS Snapshot in this region.

When we come to the Ohio region, Us-eat-2 we can see we have no snapshots there.

Creating a Copy of an EBS Snapshot into a Different Availability Zone

Select an EBS Snapshot & Copy

From the list of EBS Snapshots, choose the desired snapshot, I will choose the snapshot I just created. click on it.

From the top menu, click on “Actions.”

From the drop-down menu, click on “Copy snapshot.”

You will be brought to a new page to confirm the parameters of the new snapshot.

Configure Snapshot & Confirm Copy

From the Settings, choose the desired Availability Zone, for this tutorial, we’re using us-east-2.

On the bottom of the page, click on “Copy snapshot.”

You’ll receive a confirmation that a snapshot has been created. If you navigate to the target region (In this case us-east-2) you’ll see that there’s a new entry with the snapshot

Conclusion on Copying EBS Snapshots between Availability Zones

In this blog, we’ve covered why you might want to copy an EBS Snapshot from one Availability Zone to another. We’ve also covered the exact steps to take and showcased a move from us-east-1 to us-east-2.

Pull down and stay tuned for more.

If you have any questions concerning this article or have an AWS project that requires our assistance, please reach out to us by leaving a comment below or email us at. sales@accendnetworks.com

Thank you!

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Deployment of SDDC using VMware Cloud on AWS Services

Deployment of SDDC using VMware Cloud on AWS Services

VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware’s enterprise-class Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) software to the AWS Cloud and enables customers to run production applications across VMware vSphere-based private, public, and hybrid cloud environments with optimized access to AWS.

Benefits of VMware Cloud on AWS

Often enterprises are given a binary choice between private and public cloud as their deployment options. In these cases, many enterprises have a hybrid environment where two different teams manage two separate hosting platforms. VMware Cloud on AWS offers a hybrid platform where IT organizations have access to both public and private while retaining the ability to shift workloads seamlessly between them. Being able to live migrate and extend into a virtual machine without having to reconfigure an application provides a much more flexible environment.

VMware Cloud on AWS allows access to the range of AWS services as an extension of an existing VMware solution. IT organizations can rent a VMware SDDC using some of the latest technologies with the flexibility of the pay-as-you-go model. Companies can quickly add capacity to a new project or move workloads hosted on dedicated hardware to the cloud.

Prerequisites and Limitations for VMWare Cloud on AWS

The following are some prerequisites that you will need to consider before deploying VMware Cloud on AWS:

MyVMware Account: This profile will need to be completely filled out before you can even start your initial deployment.

AWS Account: This account needs to have administrative privileges for some of the reasons in deployment.

Activation Link: This link will be sent to the email address correlated with your MyVMware profile.

VMC on AWS offers many capabilities that have some limitations at maximum and minimum levels, and these limits are considered hard limits (can’t be changed) unless otherwise indicated.

The Architecture of VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Cloud on AWS is based on VMware software stack such as vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, designed to run on AWS bare-metal dedicated infrastructure. It enables businesses to manage VMware-based resources and tools on AWS with seamless integration with other Amazon services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Direct Connect, Amazon RDS, and Amazon DynamoDB.

VMware Cloud on AWS allows you to create vSphere data centers on Amazon Web Services. These vSphere data centers include vCenter Server for managing your data center, vSAN for storage, and VMware NSX for networking. Using Hybrid Linked Mode, you can connect an on-premises data center to your cloud SDDC and manage both from a single vSphere Client interface. With your connected AWS account, you can access AWS services such as EC2 and S3 from virtual machines in your SDDC.

Organizations that adopt VMware Cloud on AWS will see these benefits:

· A broad set of AWS services and infrastructure elasticity for VMware SDDC environments.

· Flexibility to strategically choose where to run applications based on business needs.

· Proven capabilities of VMware SDDC software and AWS Cloud to deliver customer value.

· Seamless, fast, and bi-directional workload portability between private and public clouds.

When you deploy an SDDC on VMware Cloud on AWS, it’s created within an AWS account and VPC dedicated to your organization. The Management Gateway is an NSX Edge Security gateway that provides connectivity to the vCenter Server and NSX Manager running in the SDDC. The internet-facing IP address is assigned from a pool of AWS public IP addresses during SDDC creation. The Compute Gateway provides connectivity for VMs, and VMware Cloud on AWS creates a logical network to provide networking capability for these VMs. A connection to an AWS account is required, and you need to select a VPC and subnet within that account. You can only connect an SDDC to a single Amazon VPC, and an SDDC has a minimum of four hosts.

Steps before SDDC Deployment in VMware Cloud on AWS

Creating a New VPC

Choose the correct region to deploy your VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC.

Straight away in the search box type VPC, then select VPC under services.

once in the VPC dashboard, select VPC’s then click Create VPC.

Enter the VPC details such as Name tag, IPv4 CIDR block, Tenancy as Default, and click Create.

There we go, we have successfully created VPC, click close.

Creating a Private Subnet

You will now create a private subnet

Open the Amazon VPC console, and select Subnets.

Select Create Subnet.

In the Create Subnet dashboard, select the VPC to create the subnet then provide, a Name tag, select the desired Availability Zone, IPv4 CIDR block, and click on Create.

Repeat steps to create desired subnets for each remaining Availability Zone in the region and click Close.

Activate VMware Cloud on AWS Service

You can now activate your VMware Cloud on AWS service. When the purchase is processed, AWS sends a welcome email to the specified email address and starts the process using the following steps:

  • Select the Activate Service link after receiving the Welcome email from AWS.
  • Log in with MyVMware credentials.
  • Review the terms and conditions for the use of services, and select the check box to accept.
  • Select Next to complete the account activation process successfully, and you will be redirected to the VMware Cloud on AWS console.
  • Create an organization that is linked to the MyVMware account.
  • Enter the Organization Name and Address for logical distinction.
  • Select Create Organization to complete the process.

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Assign privileged access to specific users to access the Cloud Services and SDDC console, SDDC, and NSX components. There are two types of Organization Roles; Organization Owner and Organization Member available.

The Organization Role with Organization Owner can add, modify, and remove users and access to VMware Cloud Services. The Organization Role with Organization Member can access Cloud Services but not add, remove, or modify users.

Deployment of SDDC on VMware Cloud on AWS

Sign in to Cloud Services Portal (CSP) to start the deployment of SDDC on VMC on AWS. Log in to the VMC Console.

Select VMware Cloud on AWS Service from the available services.

Select Create SDDC.

Enter the SDDC properties such as AWS Region, Deployment (either Single Host, Multi-Host, or Stretched Cluster), Host Type, SDDC Name, Number of Hosts, Host Capacity, and Total Capacity, and click Next.

Connect to a new AWS account, and click NEXT.

Select your previously configured VPC and subnet, and NEXT.

Enter the Management Subnet CIDR block for the SDDC, and click NEXT.

Click the two checkboxes to acknowledge to take responsibility for the costs, and click DEPLOY SDDC.

You’ll be charged when you click on DEPLOY SDDC and can’t pause or cancel the deployment process once it starts and will take some time to complete.

Your VMware-based is ready on AWS.

Stay tuned for more.

If you have any questions concerning this article or have an AWS project that requires our assistance, please reach out to us by leaving a comment below or email us at. sales@accendnetworks.com

Thank you!

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Unlocking the Power of AWS EBS Volumes: A Comprehensive Introduction

Unlocking the Power of AWS EBS Volumes: A Comprehensive Introduction.

EBS is a popular cloud-based storage service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

EBS, called Elastic Block Store, is a block storage system used to store data. Designed for mission-critical systems, EBS provides easy scalability to petabytes of data.

What Is EBS?

Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a block storage service based in the AWS cloud. EBS stores huge amounts of data in blocks, which work like hard drives (called volumes). You can use it to store any type of data, including file systems, transactional data, NoSQL and relational databases, backup instances, containers, and applications.

EBS volumes are virtual disk drives that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances, providing durable block-level storage.

What Is an EBS Volume?

It’s a Network drive attached to one EC2 instance at a time and works like a hard drive.
 An EBS Volume is a network drive (not a physical drive) you can attach to EC2 instances while they run.

This means to communicate between EC2 instance and EBS volume it will be using the network.

EBS volume because of their network drive, can be detached from one EC2 instance and attached to another one quickly.
 It allows EC2 instances to persist (continue to exist) data, even after the instance is terminated.
 EBS volumes can be mounted to one instance at a time (at the CCP level).
 EBS volumes are bound up/ linked/ tied to specific AZ’s. An EBS volume in us-east-1a cannot be attached to us-east-1b. But if we do a snapshot then we are able to move an EBS volume across different availability zones.

common use cases for EBS volumes:

Frequent updates — storage of data that needs frequent updates. For example: database applications, and instances’ system drives.

Throughput-intensive applications — that need to perform continuous disk scans.

EC2 instances — once you attach an EBS volume to an EC2 instance, the EBS volume serves the function of a physical hard drive.

Types of EBS Volumes

The performance and pricing of your EBS storage will be determined by the type of volumes you choose. Amazon EBS offers four types of volumes, which serve different functions.

Solid State Drives (SSD)-based volumes

General Purpose SSD (gp2) — the default EBS volume, configured to provide the highest possible performance for the lowest price. Recommended for low-latency interactive apps, and dev and test operations.

Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) — configured to provide high performance for mission-critical applications. Ideal for NoSQL databases, I/O-intensive relational loads, and application workloads.

What is IOPS?

IOPS, which stands for Input/Output Operations Per Second, is a measure of the performance or speed of an EBS (Elastic Block Store) volume in Amazon Web Services (AWS). In simple terms, it represents how quickly data can be read from or written to the volume.

Think of IOPS as the number of tasks the EBS volume can handle simultaneously. The higher the IOPS, the more tasks it can handle at once, resulting in faster data transfers. It is particularly important for applications that require a lot of data access, such as databases or applications that deal with large amounts of data.

Hard Disk Drives (HDD)-based volumes

Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) — provides low-cost magnetic storage. Recommended for large, sequential workloads that define performance in throughput.

Cold HDD (sc1) — uses a burst model to adjust capacity, thus offering the cheapest magnetic storage. Ideal for cold large sequential workloads.

The Beginner’s Guide to Creating EBS Volumes Prerequisite: an AWS account.

If you don’t have an AWS account, you can follow the steps explained here.

How to Create a New (Empty) EBS Volume via the Amazon EC2 Console

Go to the Amazon EC2 console.

Locate the navigation bar, then select a Region. Region selection is critical. An EBS volume is restricted to its Availability Zone (AZ). That means you won’t be able to move the volume or attach it to an instance from another AZ. Additionally, each region is priced differently. So do this wisely, and choose in advance prior to initiating the volume.

In the console, type EC2 in the search box and select EC2 under services.

In the EC2 dashboard on the left side under Elastic block store, select volumes then click create volume.

Choose the volume type. If you know what you’re doing, and you know which volume you need, this is where you can choose the volume type of your choice. If you’re not sure what type you need, or if you’re just experimenting, go with the default option (which is set to gp2)

Under availability zone, select the dropdown and choose your availability zone, keep in mind that you can attach EBS volumes only to EC2 instances located in the same AZ. I will move with us-east-1a

EBS volumes are not encrypted automatically. If you want to do that, now is the time.

For EBS encryption, tick the box, for Encrypt this volume, then choose default CMK for EBS encryption. This type of encryption is offered at no additional cost.

For customized encryption, choose Encrypt this volume, then choose a different CMK from Master Key. Note that this is a paid service and you’ll be charged with additional costs.

Tag your volume. This is not a must, and you’ll be able to initiate your EBS volume without tagging it. We will leave this section as optional.

Choose Create Volume.

Success you now have a new empty EBS volume. You can now use it to store data or attach the volume to an EC2 instance.

 

Conclusion:

Amazon EBS volumes are a fundamental component of the AWS ecosystem, providing scalable and durable block storage for a wide range of applications. By understanding the features, use cases, and best practices associated with EBS volumes, users can make informed decisions to meet their specific storage needs in the AWS cloud environment.

Pull down and stay tuned for more.

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