Amazon EBS Elastic Block Store

    Amazon Elastic Block Store

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Each Amazon EBSvolume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability. Amazon EBS volumes offer the consistent and low-latency performance needed to run your workloads. With Amazon EBS, you can scale your usage up or down within minutes – all while paying a low price for only what you provision.

Amazon EBS is designed for application workloads that benefit from fine tuning for performance, cost and capacity. Typical use cases include Big Data analytics engines (like the Hadoop/HDFS ecosystem and Amazon EMR clusters), relational and NoSQL databases (like Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL or Cassandra and MongoDB), stream and log processing applications (like Kafka and Splunk), and data warehousing applications

Amazon EBS Features

Persistent block storage for Amazon EC2 delivering capabilities and performance for the most demanding applications

High Performance Volumes

Choose between SSD-backed or HDD-backed volumes that can deliver the performance you need for your most demanding applications.

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Availability

Each Amazon EBS volume is designed for 99.999% availability and automatically replicates within its Availability Zone to protect your applications from component failure.

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Encryption

Amazon EBS encryption provides seamless support for data-at-rest and data-in-transit between EC2 instances and EBS volumes.

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Access Management

Amazon’s flexible access control policies allow you to specify who can access which EBS volumes ensuring secure access to your data.

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Snapshots

Protect your data by creating point-in-time snapshots of EBS volumes, which are backed up to Amazon S3 for long-term durability.

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Elastic Volumes

Dynamically increase capacity, tune performance, and change the type of live EBS volumes. 

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Amazon EBS Benefits

Highly available, high performance, persistent block storage for Amazon EC2.

Reliable, Secure Storage

Each Amazon EBS volume provides redundancies within its Availability Zone to protect against failures. Encryption and access control policies deliver a strong defense-in-depth security strategy for your data.

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Consistent, Low-latency Performance

Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes and Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes deliver low-latency through SSD technology and consistent I/O performance scaled to the needs of your application.

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Backup, Restore, Innovate

Protect your data by taking point-in-time snapshots of your Amazon EBS volumes providing long-term durability for your data. Boost the agility of your business by using Amazon EBS snapshots to create new EC2 instances.

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Quickly Scale Up, Easily Scale Down

Amazon EBS allows you to optimize your volumes for capacity, performance, or cost giving you the ability to dynamically adapt to the changing needs of your business.

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Geographic Flexibility

Amazon EBS provides the ability to copy snapshots across AWS regions, enabling geographical expansion, data center migration, and disaster recovery providing flexibility and protecting for your business.

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Optimized Performance

An Amazon EBS–optimized instance provides dedicated network capacity for Amazon EBS volumes. This provides the best performance for your EBS volumes by minimizing network contention between EBS and your instance.

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Amazon EBS Customer References

Amazon EBS technology is a critical infrastructure component for today's hottest companies across every industry.

Amazon EBS Use Cases

Amazon EBS is an excellent choice for applications that need persistent block storage ideal for databases, data warehousing, big data applications and other low latency interactive applications that demand the highest IOPS or throughput and low latency with consistent, predictable performance.

Relational Databases

Amazon EBS scales with your performance needs, whether you are supporting millions of gaming customers or billions of e-commerce transactions. Databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL are widely deployed on Amazon EBS.

Learn about Supercell's use of high-performance relational databases on Amazon EBS

Enterprise Applications

Amazon EBS meets the diverse needs of your organization by providing reliable block storage to run mission-critical applications such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint.

Learn about LIONSGATE’s deployment of SAP and SharePoint on Amazon EBS

Development and Test

Amazon EBS enables your organization to be more agile and responsive to customer needs. Provision, duplicate, scale, or archive your development, test and production environments with a few clicks.

Learn about test and development environments in AWS

NoSQL Databases

Amazon EBS volumes provide the consistent and low-latency performance your application needs when running NoSQL databases.

Learn how to leverage Provisioned IOPS for MongoDB

Business Continuity

Minimize data loss and recovery time by regularly backing up your data and log files across different geographic regions. Copy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and EBS Snapshots to launch applications in new AWS regions.

Learn about Haven Power’s use of Amazon EBS as part of their business continuity plan

 

Creating an Amazon EBS Volume

Creating an Amazon EBS Volume. You can create an Amazon EBS volume that you can then attach to any EC2 instance within the same Availability Zone. You can choose to create an encrypted EBS volume, but encrypted volumes can only be attached to selected instance types.

You can create an Amazon EBS volume that you can then attach to any EC2 instance within the same Availability Zone. You can choose to create an encrypted EBS volume, but encrypted volumes can only be attached to selected instance types. For more information, see Supported Instance Types. You can use IAM policies to enforce encryption on new volumes. For more information, see the example IAM policies in 4. Working with Volumes and 5: Launching Instances (RunInstances).

You can also create and attach EBS volumes when you launch instances by specifying a block device mapping. For more information, see Launching an Instance and Block Device Mapping. You can restore volumes from previously created snapshots. For more information, see Restoring an Amazon EBS Volume from a Snapshot.

You can apply tags to EBS volumes at the time of creation. With tagging, you can simplify tracking of your Amazon EC2 resource inventory. Tagging on creation can be combined with an IAM policy to enforce tagging on new volumes. For more information, see Tagging Your Resources.

If you are creating a volume for a high-performance storage scenario, you should make sure to use a Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volume and attach it to an instance with enough bandwidth to support your application, such as an EBS-optimized instance or an instance with 10-Gigabit network connectivity. The same advice holds for Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1) volumes. For more information, see Amazon EC2 Instance Configuration.

New EBS volumes receive their maximum performance the moment that they are available and do not require initialization (formerly known as pre-warming). However, storage blocks on volumes that were restored from snapshots must be initialized (pulled down from Amazon S3 and written to the volume) before you can access the block. This preliminary action takes time and can cause a significant increase in the latency of an I/O operation the first time each block is accessed. For most applications, amortizing this cost over the lifetime of the volume is acceptable. Performance is restored after the data is accessed once. For more information, seeInitializing Amazon EBS Volumes.

To create an EBS volume using the console

1.    Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2.    From the navigation bar, select the region in which you would like to create your volume. This choice is important because some Amazon EC2 resources can be shared between regions, while others can't. For more information, see Resource Locations.

3.    In the navigation pane, choose ELASTIC BLOCK STORE, Volumes.

4.    Choose Create Volume.

5.    For Volume Type, choose a volume type. For more information, see Amazon EBS Volume Types.

Note

Some AWS accounts created before 2012 might have access to Availability Zones in us-west-1 or ap-northeast-1 that do not support Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volumes. If you are unable to create an io1 volume (or launch an instance with an io1 volume in its block device mapping) in one of these regions, try a different Availability Zone in the region. You can verify that an Availability Zone supports io1 volumes by creating a 4 GiB io1 volume in that zone.

6.    For Size (GiB), type the size of the volume.

7.    With a Provisioned IOPS SSD volume, for IOPS, type the maximum number of input/output operations per second (IOPS) that the volume should support.

8.    For Availability Zone, choose the Availability Zone in which to create the volume. EBS volumes can only be attached to EC2 instances within the same Availability Zone.

9.    (Optional) To create an encrypted volume, select the Encrypted box and choose the master key you want to use when encrypting the volume. You can choose the default master key for your account, or you can choose any customer master key (CMK) that you have previously created using the AWS Key Management Service. Available keys are visible in the Master Key menu, or you can paste the full ARN of any key that you have access to. For more information, see the AWS Key Management Service Developer Guide.

Note

Encrypted volumes can only be attached to selected instance types. For more information, see Supported Instance Types.

10.  (Optional) Choose Create additional tags to add tags to the volume. For each tag, provide a tag key and a tag value.

11.  Choose Create Volume.

To create an EBS volume using the command line

You can use one of the following commands. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Accessing Amazon EC2.

·         create-volume (AWS CLI)

·         New-EC2Volume (AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell)

Amazon Machine Images (AMI)

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides the information required to launch an instance, which is a virtual server in the cloud. You specify an AMI when you launch an instance, and you can launch as many instances from the AMI as you need. You can also launch instances from as many different AMIs as you need.

An AMI includes the following:

·         A template for the root volume for the instance (for example, an operating system, an application server, and applications)

·         Launch permissions that control which AWS accounts can use the AMI to launch instances

·         A block device mapping that specifies the volumes to attach to the instance when it's launched

Using an AMI

The following diagram summarizes the AMI lifecycle. After you create and register an AMI, you can use it to launch new instances. (You can also launch instances from an AMI if the AMI owner grants you launch permissions.) You can copy an AMI to the same region or to different regions. When you are finished launching instances from an AMI, you can deregister the AMI.

You can search for an AMI that meets the criteria for your instance. You can search for AMIs provided by AWS or AMIs provided by the community. For more information, see AMI Typesand Finding a Linux AMI.

When you are connected to an instance, you can use it just like you use any other server. For information about launching, connecting, and using your instance, see Amazon EC2 Instances.

Creating Your Own AMI

You can customize the instance that you launch from a public AMI and then save that configuration as a custom AMI for your own use. Instances that you launch from your AMI use all the customizations that you've made.

The root storage device of the instance determines the process you follow to create an AMI. The root volume of an instance is either an Amazon EBS volume or an instance store volume. For information, see Amazon EC2 Root Device Volume.

To create an Amazon EBS-backed AMI, see Creating an Amazon EBS-Backed Linux AMI. To create an instance store-backed AMI, see Creating an Instance Store-Backed Linux AMI.

To help categorize and manage your AMIs, you can assign custom tags to them. For more information, see Tagging Your Amazon EC2 Resources.

Buying, Sharing, and Selling AMIs

After you create an AMI, you can keep it private so that only you can use it, or you can share it with a specified list of AWS accounts. You can also make your custom AMI public so that the community can use it. Building a safe, secure, usable AMI for public consumption is a fairly straightforward process, if you follow a few simple guidelines. For information about how to create and use shared AMIs, see Shared AMIs.

You can purchase AMIs from a third party, including AMIs that come with service contracts from organizations such as Red Hat. You can also create an AMI and sell it to other Amazon EC2 users. For more information about buying or selling AMIs, see Paid AMIs.

Deregistering Your AMI

You can deregister an AMI when you have finished with it. After you deregister an AMI, you can't use it to launch new instances. For more information, see Deregistering Your Linux AMI.

Amazon Linux AMIs

The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by AWS. The following are some of the features of Amazon Linux:

·         A stable, secure, and high-performance execution environment for applications running on Amazon EC2.

·         Provided at no additional charge to Amazon EC2 users.

·         Repository access to multiple versions of MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, Ruby, Tomcat, and many more common packages.

·         Updated on a regular basis to include the latest components, and these updates are also made available in the yum repositories for installation on running instances.

·         Includes packages that enable easy integration with AWS services, such as the AWS CLI, Amazon EC2 API and AMI tools, the Boto library for Python, and the Elastic Load Balancing tools.

For more information, see Amazon Linux.

Creating an Amazon EBS Snapshot

To create a snapshot using the console

1.    Choose Snapshots in the navigation pane.

2.    Choose Create Snapshot.

3.    In the Create Snapshot dialog box, select the volume to create a snapshot for, and then choose Create.

A point-in-time snapshot of an EBS volume, can be used as a baseline for new volumes or for data backup. If you make periodic snapshots of a volume, the snapshots are incremental—only the blocks on the device that have changed after your last snapshot are saved in the new snapshot. Even though snapshots are saved incrementally, the snapshot deletion process is designed so that you need to retain only the most recent snapshot in order to restore the entire volume.

Snapshots occur asynchronously; the point-in-time snapshot is created immediately, but the status of the snapshot is pending until the snapshot is complete (when all of the modified blocks have been transferred to Amazon S3), which can take several hours for large initial snapshots or subsequent snapshots where many blocks have changed. While it is completing, an in-progress snapshot is not affected by ongoing reads and writes to the volume.

Important

Although you can take a snapshot of a volume while a previous snapshot of that volume is in the pending status, having multiple pending snapshots of a volume may result in reduced volume performance until the snapshots complete.

There is a limit of five pending snapshots for a single gp2, io1, or Magnetic volume, and one pending snapshot for a single st1 or sc1 volume. If you receive a ConcurrentSnapshotLimitExceeded error while trying to create multiple concurrent snapshots of the same volume, wait for one or more of the pendingsnapshots to complete before creating another snapshot of that volume.

Snapshots that are taken from encrypted volumes are automatically encrypted. Volumes that are created from encrypted snapshots are also automatically encrypted. The data in your encrypted volumes and any associated snapshots is protected both at rest and in motion. For more information, see Amazon EBS Encryption.

By default, only you can create volumes from snapshots that you own. However, you can share your unencrypted snapshots with specific AWS accounts, or you can share them with the entire AWS community by making them public. For more information, see Sharing an Amazon EBS Snapshot.

You can share an encrypted snapshot only with specific AWS accounts. For others to use your shared, encrypted snapshot, you must also share the CMK key that was used to encrypt it. Users with access to your encrypted snapshot must create their own personal copy of it and then use that copy to restore the volume. Your copy of a shared, encrypted snapshot can also be re-encrypted with a different key. For more information, see Sharing an Amazon EBS Snapshot.

When a snapshot is created from a volume with an AWS Marketplace product code, the product code is propagated to the snapshot.

You can take a snapshot of an attached volume that is in use. However, snapshots only capture data that has been written to your Amazon EBS volume at the time the snapshot command is issued. This might exclude any data that has been cached by any applications or the operating system. If you can pause any file writes to the volume long enough to take a snapshot, your snapshot should be complete. However, if you can't pause all file writes to the volume, you should unmount the volume from within the instance, issue the snapshot command, and then remount the volume to ensure a consistent and complete snapshot. You can remount and use your volume while the snapshot status is pending.

To create a snapshot for an Amazon EBS volume that serves as a root device, you should stop the instance before taking the snapshot.

To unmount the volume in Linux, use the following command, where device_name is the device name (for example, /dev/sdh):

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umount -d device_name

After you've created a snapshot, you can tag it to help you manage it later. For example, you can add tags describing the original volume from which the snapshot was created, or the device name that was used to attach the original volume to an instance. For more information, see Tagging Your Amazon EC2 Resources.

To create a snapshot using the console

1.    Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2.    Choose Snapshots in the navigation pane.

3.    Choose Create Snapshot.

4.    In the Create Snapshot dialog box, select the volume to create a snapshot for, and then choose Create.

To create a snapshot using the command line

You can use one of the following commands. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Accessing Amazon EC2.

·         create-snapshot (AWS CLI)

·         New-EC2Snapshot (AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell)

Deleting an Amazon EBS Snapshot

When you delete a snapshot, only the data referenced exclusively by that snapshot is removed. Deleting previous snapshots of a volume does not affect your ability to restore volumes from later snapshots of that volume.

Deleting a snapshot of a volume has no effect on the volume. Deleting a volume has no effect on the snapshots made from it.

If you make periodic snapshots of a volume, the snapshots are incremental, which means that only the blocks on the device that have changed after your last snapshot are saved in the new snapshot. Even though snapshots are saved incrementally, the snapshot deletion process is designed so that you need to retain only the most recent snapshot in order to restore the volume.

Deleting a snapshot might not reduce your organization's data storage costs. Other snapshots might reference that snapshot's data, and referenced data is always preserved. If you delete a snapshot containing data being used by a later snapshot, costs associated with the referenced data are allocated to the later snapshot. For more information about how snapshots store data, see How Incremental Snapshots Work and the example below.

In the following diagram, Volume 1 is shown at three points in time. A snapshot has captured each of the first two states, and in the third, a snapshot has been deleted.

·         In State 1, the volume has 10 GiB of data. Because Snap A is the first snapshot taken of the volume, the entire 10 GiB of data must be copied.

·         In State 2, the volume still contains 10 GiB of data, but 4 GiB have changed. Snap B needs to copy and store only the 4 GiB that changed after Snap A was taken. The other 6 GiB of unchanged data, which are already copied and stored in Snap A, are referenced by Snap B rather than (again) copied. This is indicated by the dashed arrow.

·         In state 3, the volume has not changed since State 2, but Snapshot A has been deleted. The 6 GiB of data stored in Snapshot A that were referenced by Snapshot B have now been moved to Snapshot B, as shown by the heavy arrow. As a result, you are still charged for storing 10 GiB of data—6 GiB of unchanged data preserved from Snap A, and 4 GiB of changed data from Snap B.

Example 1: Deleting a Snapshot with Some of its Data Referenced by Another Snapshot

Note that you can't delete a snapshot of the root device of an EBS volume used by a registered AMI. You must first deregister the AMI before you can delete the snapshot. For more information, see Deregistering Your Linux AMI.

To delete a snapshot using the console

1.    Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2.    Choose Snapshots in the navigation pane.

3.    Select a snapshot and then choose Delete from the Actions list.

4.    Choose Yes, Delete.

To delete a snapshot using the command line

You can use one of the following commands. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Accessing Amazon EC2.

·         delete-snapshot (AWS CLI)

·         Remove-EC2Snapshot (AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell)

Note

Although you can delete a snapshot that is still in progress, the snapshot must complete before the deletion takes effect. This may take a long time. If you are also at your concurrent snapshot limit (five snapshots in progress), and you attempt to take an additional snapshot, you may get the ConcurrentSnapshotLimitExceeded error.

Copying an Amazon EBS Snapshot

With Amazon EBS, you can create point-in-time snapshots of volumes, which we store for you in Amazon S3. After you've created a snapshot and it has finished copying to Amazon S3 (when the snapshot status is completed), you can copy it from one AWS region to another, or within the same region. Amazon S3 server-side encryption (256-bit AES) protects a snapshot's data in-transit during a copy operation. The snapshot copy receives an ID that is different than the ID of the original snapshot.

For information about copying an Amazon RDS snapshot, see Copying a DB Snapshot in theAmazon Relational Database Service User Guide.

If you would like another account to be able to copy your snapshot, you must either modify the snapshot permissions to allow access to that account or make the snapshot public so that all AWS accounts may copy it. For more information, see Sharing an Amazon EBS Snapshot.

For pricing information about copying snapshots across regions and accounts, see Amazon EBS Pricing. Note that snapshot copy operations within a single account and region do not copy any data and are cost-free as long as the following conditions apply:

·         The encryption status of the snapshot copy does not change.

·         For encrypted snapshots, both the source snapshot and the copy are encrypted with the default EBS CMK.

Use Cases

·         Geographic expansion: Launch your applications in a new region.

·         Migration: Move an application to a new region, to enable better availability and to minimize cost.

·         Disaster recovery: Back up your data and logs across different geographical locations at regular intervals. In case of disaster, you can restore your applications using point-in-time backups stored in the secondary region. This minimizes data loss and recovery time.

·         Encryption: Encrypt a previously unencrypted snapshot, change the key with which the snapshot is encrypted, or, for encrypted snapshots that have been shared with you, create a copy that you own in order to restore a volume from it.

·         Data retention and auditing requirements: Copy your encrypted EBS snapshots from one AWS account to another to preserve data logs or other files for auditing or data retention. Using a different account helps prevent accidental snapshot deletions, and protects you if your main AWS account is compromised.

Prerequisites

·         You can copy any accessible snapshots that have a completed status, including shared snapshots and snapshots that you've created.

·         You can copy AWS Marketplace, VM Import/Export, and AWS Storage Gateway snapshots, but you must verify that the snapshot is supported in the destination region.

Limits

·         Each account can have up to 5 concurrent snapshot copy requests to a single destination region.

·         User-defined tags are not copied from the source snapshot to the new snapshot. After the copy operation is complete, you can apply user-defined tags to the new snapshot. For more information, see Tagging Your Amazon EC2 Resources.

·         Snapshots created by the CopySnapshot action have an arbitrary volume ID that should not be used for any purpose.

Incremental Copy

The first snapshot copy to another region is always a full copy. Each subsequent snapshot copy is incremental (which makes the copy process faster), meaning that only the blocks in the snapshot that have changed after your last snapshot copy to the same destination are transferred. Support for incremental snapshots is specific to a cross=region pair where a previous complete snapshot copy of the source volume is already available in the destination region, and it is limited to the default EBS CMK for encrypted snapshots. For example, if you copy an unencrypted snapshot from the US East (N. Virginia) region to the US West (Oregon) region, the first snapshot copy of the volume is a full copy and subsequent snapshot copies of the same volume transferred between the same regions are incremental.

Encrypted Snapshots

When you copy a snapshot, you can choose to encrypt the copy (if the original snapshot was not encrypted) or you can specify a CMK different from the original one, and the resulting copied snapshot uses the new CMK. However, changing the encryption status of a snapshot or using a non-default EBS CMK during a copy operation always results in a full (not incremental) copy, which may incur greater data transfer and storage charges.

To copy an encrypted snapshot from another account, you must have permissions to use the snapshot and you must have permissions to use the customer master key (CMK) that was used to encrypt the original snapshot. For more information, see Sharing an Amazon EBS Snapshot.

When copying an encrypted snapshot that was shared with you, you should consider re-encrypting the snapshot during the copy process with a different key that you control. This protects you if the original key is compromised, or if the owner revokes the key for any reason, which could cause you to lose access to the volume you created.

Copy a Snapshot

Use the following procedure to copy a snapshot using the Amazon EC2 console.

To copy a snapshot using the console

1.    Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2.    In the navigation pane, choose Snapshots.

3.    Select the snapshot to copy, and then choose Copy from the Actions list.

4.    In the Copy Snapshot dialog box, update the following as necessary:

·         Destination region: Select the region where you want to write the copy of the snapshot.

·         Description: By default, the description includes information about the source snapshot so that you can identify a copy from the original. You can change this description as necessary.

·         Encryption: If the source snapshot is not encrypted, you can choose to encrypt the copy. You cannot decrypt an encrypted snapshot.

·         Master Key: The customer master key (CMK) that to be used to encrypt this snapshot. You can select from master keys in your account or type/paste the ARN of a key from a different account. You can create a new master encryption key in the IAM console.

5.    Choose Copy.

6.    In the Copy Snapshot confirmation dialog box, choose Snapshots to go to the Snapshotspage in the region specified, or choose Close.

To view the progress of the copy process, switch to the destination region, and then refresh the Snapshots page. Copies in progress are listed at the top of the page.

To check for failure

If you attempt to copy an encrypted snapshot without having permissions to use the encryption key, the operation fails silently. The error state is not displayed in the console until you refresh the page. You can also check the state of the snapshot from the command line. For example:

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aws ec2 describe-snapshots --snapshot-id snap-0123abcd

If the copy failed because of insufficient key permissions, you see the following message: "StateMessage": "Given key ID is not accessible".

When copying an encrypted snapshot, you must have DescribeKey permissions on the default CMK. Explicitly denying these permissions results in copy failure. For information about managing CMK keys, see Controlling Access to Customer Master Keys.

To copy a snapshot using the command line

You can use one of the following commands. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Accessing Amazon EC2.

·         copy-snapshot (AWS CLI)

·         Copy-EC2Snapshot (AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell)

Viewing Amazon EBS Snapshot Information

You can view detailed information about your snapshots.

To view snapshot information using the console

1.    Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2.    Choose Snapshots in the navigation pane.

3.    To reduce the list, choose an option from the Filter list. For example, to view only your snapshots, choose Owned By Me. You can filter your snapshots further by using the advanced search options. Choose the search bar to view the filters available.

4.    To view more information about a snapshot, select it.

To view snapshot information using the command line

You can use one of the following commands. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Accessing Amazon EC2.

·         describe-snapshots (AWS CLI)

·         Get-EC2Snapshot (AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell)

Sharing an Amazon EBS Snapshot

By modifying the permissions of the snapshot,you can share your unencrypted snapshots with your co-workers or others in the AWS community Users that you have authorized can use your unencrypted shared snapshots as the basis for creating their own EBS volumes. If you choose, you can also make your unencrypted snapshots available publicly to all AWS users.

You can share an encrypted snapshot with specific AWS accounts, though you cannot make it public. For others to use the snapshot, you must also share the custom CMK key used to encrypt it. Cross-account permissions may be applied to a custom key either when it is created or at a later time. Users with access can copy your snapshot and create their own EBS volumes based on your snapshot while your original snapshot remains unaffected.

Important

When you share a snapshot (whether by sharing it with another AWS account or making it public to all), you are giving others access to all the data on the snapshot. Share snapshots only with people with whom you want to share all your snapshot data.

Several technical and policy restrictions apply to sharing snapshots:

·         Snapshots are constrained to the region in which they were created. To share a snapshot with another region, copy the snapshot to that region. For more information about copying snapshots, see Copying an Amazon EBS Snapshot.

·         If your snapshot uses the longer resource ID format, you can only share it with another account that also supports longer IDs. For more information, see Resource IDs.

·         AWS prevents you from sharing snapshots that were encrypted with your default CMK. Snapshots that you intend to share must instead be encrypted with a custom CMK. For information about creating keys, see Creating Keys.

·         Users of your shared CMK who are accessing encrypted snapshots must be grantedDescribeKey and ReEncrypt permissions. For information about managing and sharing CMK keys, see Controlling Access to Customer Master Keys.

·         If you have access to a shared encrypted snapshot and you want to restore a volume from it, you must create a personal copy of the snapshot and then use that copy to restore the volume. We recommend that you re-encrypt the snapshot during the copy process with a different key that you control. This protects your access to the volume if the original key is compromised, or if the owner revokes the key for any reason.

To modify snapshot permissions using the console

1.    Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2.    Choose Snapshots in the navigation pane.

3.    Select a snapshot and then choose Modify Permissions from the Actions list.

4.    Choose whether to make the snapshot public or to share it with specific AWS accounts:

a.    To make the snapshot public, choose Public.

This is not a valid option for encrypted snapshots or snapshots with AWS Marketplace product codes.

b.    To expose the snapshot to only specific AWS accounts, choose Private, enter the ID of the AWS account (without hyphens) in the AWS Account Number field, and choose Add Permission. Repeat until you've added all the required AWS accounts.

Important

If your snapshot is encrypted, you must ensure that the following are true:

·         The snapshot is encrypted with a custom CMK, not your default CMK. If you attempt to change the permissions of a snapshot encrypted with your default CMK, the console displays an error message.

·         You are sharing the custom CMK with the accounts that have access to your snapshot.

5.    Choose Save. Now a user logged into the permitted account can locate the shared snapshot by choosing Private Snapshots in the filter menu.

To view and modify snapshot permissions using the command line

To view the createVolumePermission attribute of a snapshot, you can use one of the following commands. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Accessing Amazon EC2.

·         describe-snapshot-attribute (AWS CLI)

·         Get-EC2SnapshotAttribute (AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell)

To modify the createVolumePermission attribute of a snapshot, you can use one of the following commands.

·         modify-snapshot-attribute (AWS CLI)

·         Edit-EC2SnapshotAttribute (AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell)

Amazon EBS–Optimized Instances

An Amazon EBS–optimized instance uses an optimized configuration stack and provides additional, dedicated capacity for Amazon EBS I/O. This optimization provides the best performance for your EBS volumes by minimizing contention between Amazon EBS I/O and other traffic from your instance.

Amazon EBS–optimized instances deliver dedicated bandwidth to Amazon EBS, with options between 425 Mbps and 14,000 Mbps, depending on the instance type you use. When attached to an Amazon EBS–optimized instance, General Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes are designed to deliver within 10% of their baseline and burst performance 99% of the time in a given year, and Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volumes are designed to deliver within 10% of their provisioned performance 99.9% of the time in a given year. Both Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1) guarantee performance consistency of 90% of burst throughput 99% of the time in a given year. Non-compliant periods are approximately uniformly distributed, targeting 99% of expected total throughput each hour. For more information, see Amazon EBS Volume Types.

When you enable Amazon EBS optimization for an instance that is not optimized by default, you pay an additional low usage fee for the dedicated capacity. For pricing information, see EBS-optimized Instances on the Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing page.

Contents

• Instance Types That Support Amazon EBS Optimization
• Enabling Amazon EBS Optimization at Launch
• Modifying Amazon EBS Optimization for a Running Instance

Instance Types That Support Amazon EBS Optimization

The following table shows which instance types support Amazon EBS optimization, the dedicated bandwidth to Amazon EBS, the maximum number of IOPS the instance can support if you are using a 16 KiB I/O size, and the typical maximum aggregate throughput that can be achieved on that connection in MiB/s with a streaming read workload and128 KiB I/O size. Choose an Amazon EBS–optimized instance that provides more dedicated Amazon EBSthroughput than your application needs; otherwise, the connection between Amazon EBS and Amazon EC2 can become a performance bottleneck.

Some instance types are Amazon EBS–optimized by default. For those instances, there is no need to enable Amazon EBS optimization. There is no effect if you disable Amazon EBS optimization using the CLI or API. You can enable Amazon EBS optimization for the other instance types that support it when you launch the instances, or enable it after the instances are running.

Note

Some instances with 10-gigabit network interfaces, such as i2.8xlarge and r3.8xlarge, do not offer EBS-optimization, and therefore do not have dedicated Amazon EBS bandwidth available. They are not listed here. On these instances, network traffic and Amazon EBS traffic is shared on the same 10-gigabit network interface. Some other 10-gigabit network instances, such as c4.8xlarge and d2.8xlarge, offer dedicated Amazon EBS bandwidth in addition to a 10-gigabit interface that is used exclusively for network traffic.

Instance type	Amazon EBS-optimized by default	Max. bandwidth (Mbps)*	Expected throughput (MB/s)**	Max. IOPS (16 KB I/O size)**
c1.xlarge		1,000	125	8,000
c3.xlarge		500	62.5	4,000
c3.2xlarge		1,000	125	8,000
c3.4xlarge		2,000	250	16,000
c4.large	Yes	500	62.5	4,000
c4.xlarge	Yes	750	93.75	6,000
c4.2xlarge	Yes	1,000	125	8,000
c4.4xlarge	Yes	2,000	250	16,000
c4.8xlarge	Yes	4,000	500	32,000
d2.xlarge	Yes	750	93.75	6,000
d2.2xlarge	Yes	1,000	125	8,000
d2.4xlarge	Yes	2,000	250	16,000
d2.8xlarge	Yes	4,000	500	32,000
f1.2xlarge	Yes	1,700	212.5	12,000
f1.16xlarge	Yes	14,000	1,750	75,000
g2.2xlarge		1,000	125	8,000
g3.4xlarge	Yes	3,500	437.5	20,000
g3.8xlarge	Yes	7,000	875	40,000
g3.16xlarge	Yes	14,000	1,750	80,000
i2.xlarge		500	62.5	4,000
i2.2xlarge		1,000	125	8,000
i2.4xlarge		2,000	250	16,000
i3.large	Yes	425	53.13	3000
i3.xlarge	Yes	850	106.25	6000
i3.2xlarge	Yes	1,700	212.5	12,000
i3.4xlarge	Yes	3,500	437.5	16,000
i3.8xlarge	Yes	7,000	875	32,500
i3.16xlarge	Yes	14,000	1,750	65,000
m1.large		500	62.5	4,000
m1.xlarge		1,000	125	8,000
m2.2xlarge		500	62.5	4,000
m2.4xlarge		1,000	125	8,000
m3.xlarge		500	62.5	4,000
m3.2xlarge		1,000	125	8,000
m4.large	Yes	450	56.25	3,600
m4.xlarge	Yes	750	93.75	6,000
m4.2xlarge	Yes	1,000	125	8,000
m4.4xlarge	Yes	2,000	250	16,000
m4.10xlarge	Yes	4,000	500	32,000
m4.16xlarge	Yes	10,000	1,250	65,000
p2.xlarge	Yes	750	93.75	6,000
p2.8xlarge	Yes	5,000	625	32,500
p2.16xlarge	Yes	10,000	1,250	65,000
p3.2xlarge	Yes	1,750	218	10,000
p3.8xlarge	Yes	7,000	875	40,000
p3.16xlarge	Yes	14,000	1,750	80,000
r3.xlarge		500	62.5	4,000
r3.2xlarge		1,000	125	8,000
r3.4xlarge		2,000	250	16,000
r4.large	Yes	425	53.13	3,000
r4.xlarge	Yes	850	106.25	6,000
r4.2xlarge	Yes	1,700	212.25	12,000
r4.4xlarge	Yes	3,500	437.5	18,750
r4.8xlarge	Yes	7,000	875	37,500
r4.16xlarge	Yes	14,000	1,750	75,000
x1.16xlarge	Yes	7,000	875	40,000
x1.32xlarge	Yes	14,000	1,750	80,000
x1e.32xlarge	Yes	14,000	1,750	80,000

* These instance types must be launched as Amazon EBS–optimized to consistently achieve this level of performance.

** This value is a rounded approximation based on a 100% read-only workload and it is provided as a baseline configuration aid. Amazon EBS–optimized connections are full-duplex, and can drive more throughput and IOPS in a 50/50 read/write workload where both communication lanes are used. In some cases, network, file system, and Amazon EBS encryption overhead can reduce the maximum throughput and IOPS available.

Enabling Amazon EBS Optimization at Launch

You can enable optimization for an instance by setting its Amazon EBS–optimized attribute.

To enable Amazon EBS optimization when launching an instance using the console

1.    Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2.    Choose Launch Instance.

3.    In Step 1: Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), select an AMI.

4.    In Step 2: Choose an Instance Type, select an instance type that is listed as supporting Amazon EBS optimization.

5.    In Step 3: Configure Instance Details, complete the fields that you need and choose Launch as EBS-optimized instance. If the instance type that you selected in the previous step doesn't support Amazon EBS optimization, this option is not present. If the instance type that you selected is Amazon EBS–optimized by default, this option is selected and you can't deselect it.

6.    Follow the directions to complete the wizard and launch your instance.

To enable EBS optimization when launching an instance using the command line

You can use one of the following options with the corresponding command. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Accessing Amazon EC2.

·         --ebs-optimized with run-instances (AWS CLI)

·         -EbsOptimized with New-EC2Instance (AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell)

Modifying Amazon EBS Optimization for a Running Instance

You can enable or disable optimization for a running instance by modifying its Amazon EBS–optimized instance attribute.

To enable EBS optimization for a running instance using the console

1.    Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

2.    In the navigation pane, click Instances, and select the instance.

3.    Click Actions, select Instance State, and then click Stop.

Warning

When you stop an instance, the data on any instance store volumes is erased. Therefore, if you have any data on instance store volumes that you want to keep, be sure to back it up to persistent storage.

4.    In the confirmation dialog box, click Yes, Stop. It can take a few minutes for the instance to stop.

5.    With the instance still selected, click Actions, select Instance Settings, and then click Change Instance Type.

6.    In the Change Instance Type dialog box, do one of the following:

·         If the instance type of your instance is Amazon EBS–optimized by default, EBS-optimized is selected and you can't change it. You can choose Cancel, because Amazon EBS optimization is already enabled for the instance.

·         If the instance type of your instance supports Amazon EBS optimization, choose EBS-optimized, Apply.

·         If the instance type of your instance does not support Amazon EBS optimization, you can't choose EBS-optimized. You can select an instance type from Instance Typethat supports Amazon EBS optimization, and then choose EBS-optimized, Apply.

7.    Choose Actions, Instance State, Start.

To enable EBS optimization for a running instance using the command line

You can use one of the following options with the corresponding command. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Accessing Amazon EC2.

·         --ebs-optimized with modify-instance-attribute (AWS CLI)

·         -EbsOptimized with Edit-EC2InstanceAttribute (AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell)

Amazon EBS Encryption

Amazon EBS encryption offers you a simple encryption solution for your EBS volumes without the need for you to build, maintain, and secure your own key management infrastructure. When you create an encrypted EBS volume and attach it to a supported instance type, the following types of data are encrypted:

·         Data at rest inside the volume

·         All data moving between the volume and the instance

·         All snapshots created from the volume

The encryption occurs on the servers that host EC2 instances, providing encryption of data-in-transit from EC2 instances to EBS storage.

Amazon EBS encryption uses AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) customer master keys (CMK) when creating encrypted volumes and any snapshots created from them. The first time you create an encrypted volume in a region, a default CMK is created for you automatically. This key is used for Amazon EBS encryption unless you select a CMK that you created separately using AWS KMS. Creating your own CMK gives you more flexibility, including the ability to create, rotate, and disable keys to define access controls, and to audit the encryption keys used to protect your data. For more information, see the AWS Key Management Service Developer Guide.

This feature is supported with all EBS volume types (General Purpose SSD [gp2], Provisioned IOPS SSD [io1], Throughput Optimized HDD [st1], Cold HDD [sc1], and Magnetic [standard]). You can expect the same IOPS performance on encrypted volumes as you would with unencrypted volumes, with a minimal effect on latency. You can access encrypted volumes the same way that you access unencrypted volumes. Encryption and decryption are handled transparently and they require no additional action from you, your EC2 instance, or your application.

Snapshots that are taken from encrypted volumes are automatically encrypted. Volumes that are created from encrypted snapshots are also automatically encrypted. Public snapshots of encrypted volumes are not supported, but you can share an encrypted snapshot with specific accounts if you take the following steps:

1.    Use a custom CMK, not your default CMK, to encrypt your volume.

2.    Give the specific accounts access to the custom CMK.

3.    Create the snapshot.

4.    Give the specific accounts access to the snapshot.

For more information, see Sharing an Amazon EBS Snapshot.

Amazon EBS encryption is only available on certain instance types. You can attach both encrypted and unencrypted volumes to a supported instance type. For more information, see Supported Instance Types.

Contents

• Encryption Key Management
• Supported Instance Types
• Changing the Encryption State of Your Data
• Amazon EBS Encryption and CloudWatch Events

Encryption Key Management

Amazon EBS encryption handles key management for you. Each newly created volume is encrypted with a unique 256-bit key. Any snapshots of this volume and any subsequent volumes created from those snapshots also share that key. These keys are protected by AWS key management infrastructure, which implements strong logical and physical security controls to prevent unauthorized access. Your data and associated keys are encrypted using the industry standard AES-256 algorithm.

You cannot change the CMK that is associated with an existing snapshot or encrypted volume. However, you can associate a different CMK during a snapshot copy operation (including encrypting a copy of an unencrypted snapshot) and the resulting copied snapshot use the new CMK.

The AWS overall key management infrastructure is consistent with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-57 recommendations and uses cryptographic algorithms approved by Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2.

Each AWS account has a unique master key that is stored separately from your data, on a system that is surrounded with strong physical and logical security controls. Each encrypted volume (and its subsequent snapshots) is encrypted with a unique volume encryption key that is then encrypted with a region-specific secure master key. The volume encryption keys are used in memory on the server that hosts your EC2 instance; they are never stored on disk in plaintext.

Supported Instance Types

Amazon EBS encryption is available on the instance types listed in the table below. These instance types leverage the Intel AES New Instructions (AES-NI) instruction set to provide faster and simpler data protection. You can attach both encrypted and unencrypted volumes to these instance types simultaneously.

Instance family	Instance types that support Amazon EBS encryption
General purpose	t2.nano | t2.micro | t2.small | t2.medium | t2.large | t2.xlarge | t2.2xlarge | m3.medium | m3.large | m3.xlarge | m3.2xlarge | m4.large | m4.xlarge | m4.2xlarge | m4.4xlarge | m4.10xlarge | m4.16xlarge
Compute optimized	c3.large | c3.xlarge | c3.2xlarge | c3.4xlarge | c3.8xlarge | c4.large | c4.xlarge | c4.2xlarge | c4.4xlarge | c4.8xlarge
Memory optimized	r3.large | r3.xlarge | r3.2xlarge | r3.4xlarge | r3.8xlarge | r4.large | r4.xlarge | r4.2xlarge | r4.4xlarge | r4.8xlarge | r4.16xlarge | x1.16xlarge | x1.32xlarge | x1e.32xlarge | cr1.8xlarge
Storage optimized	d2.xlarge | d2.2xlarge | d2.4xlarge | d2.8xlarge | i2.xlarge | i2.2xlarge | i2.4xlarge | i2.8xlarge | i3.large | i3.xlarge | i3.2xlarge | i3.4xlarge | i3.8xlarge | i3.16xlarge
Accelerated computing	f1.2xlarge | f1.16xlarge | g2.2xlarge | g2.8xlarge | g3.4xlarge | g3.8xlarge | g3.16xlarge | p2.xlarge | p2.8xlarge | p2.16xlarge | p3.2xlarge | p3.8xlarge | p3.16xlarge

For more information about these instance types, see Instance Type Details.

Changing the Encryption State of Your Data

There is no direct way to encrypt an existing unencrypted volume, or to remove encryption from an encrypted volume. However, you can migrate data between encrypted and unencrypted volumes. You can also apply a new encryption status while copying a snapshot:

·         While copying an unencrypted snapshot of an unencrypted volume, you can encrypt the copy. Volumes restored from this encrypted copy are also encrypted.

·         While copying an encrypted snapshot of an encrypted volume, you can re-encrypt the copy using a different CMK. Volumes restored from the encrypted copy are only accessible using the newly applied CMK.

You cannot remove encryption from an encrypted snapshot.

Migrate Data between Encrypted and Unencrypted Volumes

When you have access to both an encrypted and unencrypted volume, you can freely transfer data between them. EC2 carries out the encryption or decryption operations transparently.

To migrate data between encrypted and unencrypted volumes

1.    Create your destination volume (encrypted or unencrypted, depending on your need) by following the procedures in Creating an Amazon EBS Volume.

2.    Attach the destination volume to the instance that hosts the data to migrate. For more information, see Attaching an Amazon EBS Volume to an Instance.

3.    Make the destination volume available by following the procedures in Making an Amazon EBS Volume Available for Use. For Linux instances, you can create a mount point at/mnt/destination and mount the destination volume there.

4.    Copy the data from your source directory to the destination volume. It may be most convenient to use a bulk-copy utility for this.

Linux

Use the rsync command as follows to copy the data from your source to the destination volume. In this example, the source data is located in /mnt/source and the destination volume is mounted at /mnt/destination.

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[ec2-user ~]$ sudo rsync -avh --progress /mnt/source/ /mnt/destination/

Windows

At a command prompt, use the robocopy command to copy the data from your source to the destination volume. In this example, the source data is located in D:\ and the destination volume is mounted at E:\.

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PS C:\> robocopy D:\ E:\ /e /copyall /eta

Apply Encryption While Copying a Snapshot

Because you can apply encryption to a snapshot while copying it, another path to encrypting your data is the following procedure.

To encrypt a volume's data by means of snapshot copying

1.    Create a snapshot of your unencrypted EBS volume. This snapshot is also unencrypted.

2.    Copy the snapshot while applying encryption parameters. The resulting target snapshot is encrypted.

3.    Restore the encrypted snapshot to a new volume, which is also encrypted.

For more information, see Copying an Amazon EBS Snapshot.

Re-Encrypt a Snapshot with a New CMK

The ability to encrypt a snapshot during copying also allows you to re-encrypt an already-encrypted snapshot that you own. In this operation, the plaintext of your snapshot is encrypted using a new CMK that you provide. Volumes restored from the resulting copy are only accessible using the new CMK.

In a related scenario, you may choose to re-encrypt a snapshot that has been shared with you. Before you can restore a volume from a shared encrypted snapshot, you must create your own copy of it. By default, the copy is encrypted with the key shared by the snapshot's owner. However, we recommend that you re-encrypt the snapshot during the copy process with a different key that you control. This protects your access to the volume if the original key is compromised, or if the owner revokes the key for any reason.

The following procedure demonstrates how to re-encrypt a snapshot that you own.

To re-encrypt a snapshot using the console

1.    Create a custom CMK. For more information, see AWS Key Management Service Developer Guide.

2.    Create an EBS volume encrypted with (for this example) your default CMK.

Amazon EBS Volume Performance on Linux Instances

Several factors, including I/O characteristics and the configuration of your instances and volumes, can affect the performance of Amazon EBS. Customers who follow the guidance on our Amazon EBS and Amazon EC2 product detail pages typically achieve good performance out of the box. However, there are some cases where you may need to do some tuning in order achieve peak performance on the platform. This topic discusses general best practices as well as performance tuning that is specific to certain use cases. We recommend that you tune performance with information from your actual workload, in addition to benchmarking, to determine your optimal configuration. After you learn the basics of working with EBS volumes, it's a good idea to look at the I/O performance you require and at your options for increasing Amazon EBS performance to meet those requirements.

Contents

• Amazon EBS Performance Tips
• Amazon EC2 Instance Configuration
• I/O Characteristics and Monitoring
• Initializing Amazon EBS Volumes
• RAID Configuration on Linux
• Benchmark EBS Volumes

Amazon EBS Performance Tips

These tips represent best practices for getting optimal performance from your EBS volumes in a variety of user scenarios.

Use EBS-Optimized Instances

On instances without support for EBS-optimized throughput, network traffic can contend with traffic between your instance and your EBS volumes; on EBS-optimized instances, the two types of traffic are kept separate. Some EBS-optimized instance configurations incur an extra cost (such as C3, R3, and M3), while others are always EBS-optimized at no extra cost (such as M4, C4, and D2). For more information, see Amazon EC2 Instance Configuration.

Understand How Performance is Calculated

When you measure the performance of your EBS volumes, it is important to understand the units of measure involved and how performance is calculated. For more information, see I/O Characteristics and Monitoring.

Understand Your Workload

There is a relationship between the maximum performance of your EBS volumes, the size and number of I/O operations, and the time it takes for each action to complete. Each of these factors (performance, I/O, and latency) affects the others, and different applications are more sensitive to one factor or another. For more information, see Benchmark EBS Volumes.

Be Aware of the Performance Penalty When Initializing Volumes from Snapshots

There is a significant increase in latency when you first access each block of data on a new EBS volume that was restored from a snapshot. You can avoid this performance hit by accessing each block prior to putting the volume into production. This process is called initialization(formerly known as pre-warming). For more information, see Initializing Amazon EBS Volumes.

Factors That Can Degrade HDD Performance

When you create a snapshot of a Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) or Cold HDD (sc1) volume, performance may drop as far as the volume's baseline value while the snapshot is in progress. This behavior is specific to these volume types. Other factors that can limit performance include driving more throughput than the instance can support, the performance penalty encountered while initializing volumes restored from a snapshot, and excessive amounts of small, random I/O on the volume. For more information about calculating throughput for HDD volumes, see Amazon EBS Volume Types .

Your performance can also be impacted if your application isn’t sending enough I/O requests. This can be monitored by looking at your volume’s queue length and I/O size. The queue length is the number of pending I/O requests from your application to your volume. For maximum consistency, HDD-backed volumes must maintain a queue length (rounded to the nearest whole number) of 4 or more when performing 1 MiB sequential I/O. For more information about ensuring consistent performance of your volumes, see I/O Characteristics and Monitoring

Increase Read-Ahead for High-Throughput, Read-Heavy Workloads on st1 and sc1

Some workloads are read-heavy and access the block device through the operating system page cache (for example, from a file system). In this case, to achieve the maximum throughput, we recommend that you configure the read-ahead setting to 1 MiB. This is a per-block-device setting that should only be applied to your HDD volumes. The following examples assume that you are on an Amazon Linux instance.

To examine the current value of read-ahead for your block devices, use the following command:

Copy

[ec2-user ~]$ sudo blockdev --report /dev/<device>

Block device information is returned in the following format:

RO    RA   SSZ   BSZ   StartSec            Size   Device

rw   256   512  4096       4096      8587820544   /dev/<device>

The device shown reports a read-ahead value of 256 (the default). Multiply this number by the sector size (512 bytes) to obtain the size of the read-ahead buffer, which in this case is 128 KiB. To set the buffer value to 1 MiB, use the following command:

Copy

[ec2-user ~]$ sudo blockdev --setra 2048 /dev/<device>

Verify that the read-ahead setting now displays 2,048 by running the first command again.

Only use this setting when your workload consists of large, sequential I/Os. If it consists mostly of small, random I/Os, this setting will actually degrade your performance. In general, if your workload consists mostly of small or random I/Os, you should consider using a General Purpose SSD (gp2) volume rather than st1 or sc1.

Use a Modern Linux Kernel

Use a modern Linux kernel with support for indirect descriptors. Any Linux kernel 3.11 and above has this support, as well as any current-generation EC2 instance. If your average I/O size is at or near 44 KiB, you may be using an instance or kernel without support for indirect descriptors. For information about deriving the average I/O size from Amazon CloudWatch metrics, see I/O Characteristics and Monitoring.

To achieve maximum throughput on st1 or sc1 volumes, we recommend applying a value of 256 to the xen_blkfront.max parameter (for Linux kernel versions below 4.6) or the xen_blkfront.max_indirect_segments parameter (for Linux kernel version 4.6 and above). The appropriate parameter can be set in your OS boot command line.

For example, in an Amazon Linux AMI with an earlier kernel, you can add it to the end of the kernel line in the GRUB configuration found in /boot/grub/menu.lst:

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kernel /boot/vmlinuz-4.4.5-15.26.amzn1.x86_64 root=LABEL=/ console=ttyS0 xen_blkfront.max=256

For a later kernel, the command would be similar to the following:

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kernel /boot/vmlinuz-4.9.20-11.31.amzn1.x86_64 root=LABEL=/ console=tty1 console=ttyS0 xen_blkfront.max_indirect_segments=256

Reboot your instance for this setting to take effect.

For more information, see Configuring GRUB. Other Linux distributions, especially those that do not use the GRUB boot loader, may require a different approach to adjusting the kernel parameters.

For more information about EBS I/O characteristics, see the Amazon EBS: Designing for Performance re:Invent presentation on this topic.

Use RAID 0 to Maximize Utilization of Instance Resources

Some instance types can drive more I/O throughput than what you can provision for a single EBS volume. You can join multiple gp2, io1, st1, or sc1 volumes together in a RAID 0 configuration to use the available bandwidth for these instances. For more information, see RAID Configuration on Linux.

Track Performance with Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon Web Services provides performance metrics for Amazon EBS that you can analyze and view with Amazon CloudWatch and status checks that you can use to monitor the health of your volumes. For more information, see Monitoring the Status of Your Volumes.