EC2 & EBS

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Elastic Block Store

EC2

Compute Basics

  • Computational power required to fulfill your workload

  • EC2 launch virtual servers called instances

  • 2 concepts:

    • the amount of virtual hardware

    • the software loaded on the instance

Instance Types

  • Dimensions:

    • Virtual CPUs(vCPU)

    • Memory

    • Storage

    • Network performance

Family

Short for

Use cases

D

Density - Dense Storage

R

RAM - Memory Optimized

for memory-intensive workloads

M

Main choice - General Purpose

C

Compute - Compute Optimized

for workloads requiring significant processing

G

Graphics - Graphic Intensive

intended for graphics and general-purpose GPU compute workloads

I

IOPS - Highspeed Strorage

for workloads requiring high amounts of fast SSD storage

F

FPGA - Field Programmable Gate Array

T

cheap general purpose (t2 micro)

P

Graphic/ General Purpose GPU (Pics)

X

Memory Optimized

Amazon Machine Image (AMIs)

  • Defines the initial software that will be on instance when it is launched

  • Includes

    • The Operating System (OS)

    • The initial state of any patches

    • Application or system software

  • 4 sources

    • Published by AWS

      • default OS settings

    • The AWS Marketplace

      • not need to install the software and the license agreement

      • cost: standard hourly cost for the instance, additional per-hour charge for additional softwares

    • Generated from existing instance

      • generated from the configured instance

    • Uploaded Virtual Servers

      • various virtualization formats: raw, VHD, VMDK, OVA

  • AMIs storage for the Root device (Root Device Volume)

    • Instance Store (EPHEMERAL STORAGE)

      • Can not stop the instance.

      • If the instance failed, basically you lost the instance.

      • The root device for an instance launched from the AMI is an instance store volume created from a template store in Amazon S3.

    • EBS Backed Volumes

      • The root device for an instance launched from the AMI is an Amazon EBS volume created from an EBS snapshot.

      • Can stop the instance. Load Balancer & Health checks

Securely Using an Instance

Addressing an Instance

  • Public Domain Name System (DNS) Name

    • Generated automatically, cannot be specified

    • Persists only while the instance is running

    • Cannot be transferred

  • Public IP

    • Assigned form the addresses reserved, cannot be specified

    • Persist only while the instance is running

    • Cannot be transferred

  • Elastic IP

    • Persist while the customer releases it

    • Can be transferred

Initial Access

  • EC2 using public-key cryptography called key pair

  • Stored in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the instance

  • Best practice: change the initial local administration password

Virtual Firewall Protection

  • Called Security Group

Type of Security Group

Capabilities

EC2-Classic Security Group

control outgoing instance traffic

VPC Security Group

control outgoing and incoming instance traffic

  • EC2 must have at least one and can have multiple Security Group

Attribute

Meaning

Port

The port affected by this rule

Protocol

The communications standard for the traffic affected by this rule

Source/Destination

The other end of the communication, can be either of CIDR block or Security group

  • By default

    • All inbound traffic is blocked

    • All outbound traffic is allowed

  • Security group are stateful firewall → if you create an inbound rule allowing traffic in, that traffic is automatically allowed back out again.

  • Cannot block specific IP addresses using Security Groups, instead use Network Access Control Lists

  • Can specify allow rules, but not deny rules

The Lifecycle of Instances

Launching

  • Bootstraping

    • Configure instances and install applications programmatically

    • Examples

      • Applying patches and updates to the OS

      • Enrolling in a directory service

      • Installing application software

      ...

    • UserData is stored with the instance and is not encrypted → not to include any secrets such as password or keys in UserData

  • VM Import/Export

    • Can only export previously imported instances.

    • Instances launched within AWS from AMIs cannot be exported

  • Instance Metadata

    • Call to http://169.254.169.254/lastest/meta-data

    • Including

      • Associated security group

      • Instance ID

      • Instance type

      • AMI used to launch the instance

Managing instances

  • Up to 10 tags per instance

key

value

Project

TimeEntry

Environment

Production

BillingCode

4004

Monitoring Instances

  • Cloud watch

    • Standard Monitoring = 5 minutes

    • Detailed Monitoring = 1 minutes

    • Dashboard - Create dashboard to see what is happening with your AWS environment

    • Alarms - set Alarms that notify you when particular threshold are hit

    • Events - CloudWatch Events helps you to respond to state changes in your AWS resources.

    • Logs - helps you aggregate, monitor, and store logs.

    • Cloud watch - logging, monitoring of a resources. Cloud Trail monitoring all AWS services.

Modifying Instance

  • Instance Type

    • Can be changed to a different size

    • Stop and restart the instance to change

  • Security Groups

    • Can change which security groups are associated with

    • EC2-Classic (out of AWS VPC) cannot be changed

Termination Protection

  • Termination Protection is off by default

  • Terminate the instance will fail until termination protection is disabled

  • Does not prevent termination by OS shutdown command

Options

Pricing Options

  • On-Demand Instances

    • The least cost effective

    • Provisions a variable level of compute

  • Reserved Instances

    • Capacity reservations for predictable workloads

    • Save up to 75% over the on-demand options

    • Term commitment can be either 1 or 3 years

    • Logger the term, bigger the discount

    • Terms can be changed

      • AZ within a region

      • EC2-VPS → EC2-Classic

      • Instance type (Linux only)

  • Spot Instances

    • Customers can bid price

    • For workloads that

      • Not time critical

      • Tolerant of interruption

    • Offer greatest discount

    • Terminate

      • Customer terminates the instances

      • Spot price goes over the customer bid

      • Not enough unused capacity to meet the demand

    • 2 minutes warning before termination

    • Use cases

      • Analytics

      • Financial modeling

      • Big data

      • Media encoding

      • Scientific computing

      • Testing

Tenancy Options

  • Shared Tenancy

    • default tenancy

    • single host may house instances from different customers

  • Dedicated Instances

    • hardware that's dedicated to a single customer

    • other instances (not designated as dedicated) of the account will run on shared tenancy

  • Dedicated Host

    • Physical server for a single customer's use

    • Best for licensing requirements

    • Can bought with on-demand pricing option (hourly)

    • 70% discount with reservation beforehand

Placement groups

  • Logical grouping of instances within a single Az

  • Low network latency, high network throughput

  • Choose instance type supports enhanced networking and 10 Gbps network performance

Instance Stores

  • Ephemeral Storage provides temporary block-level storage

  • Temporary storage of information that changes frequently: buffers, caches, scratch data,...

  • Very cost-effective solution

  • Do not rely on if the data is valuable or long-term used

EBS

  • Used for workloads requires durable block storage

Elastic Block Store Basics

  • Provides persistent block-level storage volumes for EC2 instances

  • Automatically replicated within its AZ

Types of Amazon EBS Volumes

Characteristic

General-Purpose SSD

Provisioned IOPS SSD

Magnetic

Throughput-Optimized HDD

Cold HDD

Use cases

  • System boot volumes

  • Virtual desktops

  • Small-to-medium sized databases

  • Development and test environments

  • Critical business applications that require sustained IOPS performance or more than 10,000 IOPS or 160MB of throughput per volume

  • Large database workloads

  • Cold workloads where data is infrequently accessed

  • Scenarios where the lowest storage cost is important

  • low-cost HDD, less than General-Purpose SSD

  • frequent-access, throughput-intensive workloads

  • examples: big data, data warehouses and log processing

  • less frequently accessed workloads

  • examples: colder data requiring fewer scans per day

  • less expensive than Throughput-Optimized HDD

Volume size

1GiB - 16GiB

4GiB - 16GiB

1GiB - 1TiB

up-to 16GiB

up-to 16GiB

Maximum throughput

160MB

320MB

40-90MB

500MB

250MB

IOPS performance

Baseline performance of 3IOPS/GiB (up to 10,000 IOPS) with the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS for volumes under 1,000Gib

Consistently performs at provisioned level, up to 20,000 IOPS maximum

Averages 100 IOPS, with the ability to bust to hundreds of IOPS

Maximum IOPS of 500

maximum IOPS of 250

Amazon EBS-Optimized Instances

  • When using any volume type other than magnetic, EBS I/O is of consequence

  • Need to be prepared to take advantage of the I/O of the EBS volume

  • Pay additional hourly charge

Protecting Data

Backup/Recovery (Snapshots)

  • Point-in-time snapshots, incremental backup (only save changed blocks)

  • Taking Snapshots

    • Data stored in an AWS controlled S3 storage

    • Access by AMZ EBS Snapshot

    • Constrain to the region

  • Creating a Volume from a Snapshot

    • Volume is created immediately but loaded lazily

    • Can be used to increase the size of the EBS

Recovering Volumes

  • Detach the volume from the failed instance

  • Can be attached to another instance

Encryption Options

  • Using AWS KMS and AES-256 Algorithms

  • Encrypted volumes are automatically encrypted

Review questions: 75% → NEED TO REVIEW!

  • vm import/export

  • instance store

  • reserved contract

MINDMAP

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