Managing EBS Volumes In The AWS Cloud Computing

To meet the challenge of saving data in the cloud using AWS, IT professionals have to familiarize themselves with the management of Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots and volumes. In this blog, we are going to discuss some important facts of EBS storage in AWS and two approaches for replicating EBS volume across multiple AWS regions.

What is EBS Volume in AWS Cloud?

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is considered as a raw block-level storage service that can be utilized by Amazon EC2 instances. Whenever mounted to EC2 instance, EBS volume could be used like some other raw devices i.e., they will be formatted with a particular file system, host operating systems, and applications, and have different snapshots or clones made from all of them. The EBS volume being provisioned that can be replicated to other storage devices in same availability zone (AZ) for offering the redundancy and high availability.

Different Types of EBS Volumes

There are two major types of Amazon EBS volume such as SSD-backed volume and HDD-backed volume.

• SSD-backed volume is optimized for all transactional workloads, where volume performs a variety of small read or write operations. The performance of such volumes is measured in input/ output operations per second (IOPS).
• HDD-backed volume is programmed for a larger sequential workload where throughput is very important and its performance measurement in MiB/s. Each category contains two subsets i.e., Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or Solid State Drive (SSD).

Steps to Copy EBS Volumes Between Regions

In February 2017, the latest EBS feature, called Elastic Volumes permits the AWS customers to switch between an EBS volume type on the fly and dynamic volume size as well. In order for managing the EBS volumes, all customers can use AWS Management console in the web browser, or enter commands by using AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). The upcoming section demonstrates both techniques to transfer EBS volumes between the AWS regions.

1. Use AWS Management Console to Copy Amazon EBS Between Regions

• Before creating EBS volumes, sign in to AWS account and choose the specific region at the right-side corner of the Web browser. After selecting the region, click on the “Services” at the left-hand corner of the window, find “Compute” area, and choose “EC2.”

• In the left navigation panel, under the “EC2 Dashboard,” navigate to “Elastic Block Store” subsection and choose “Volumes.” Once a new window appears, click on “Create Volume” button.

• In the pop-up screen, you can customize the volume according to type, size, IOPS or throughput and choose the particular Availability Zone, and decide whether or not to utilize encryption.
• After this, proceed to create that volume.

• Once the volumes are ready, attach it with EC2 instance by right-clicking on it and choosing the “Attach” option. Make sure that this volume needs to be formatted within an operating system being used.
• To move an EBS volume to any other region, first, you need to create a snapshot. Then, Right-click on volume and select an option “Create Snapshot.” The below screen will display:

• Type the name of a snapshot and add the entire description (optional). If that volume was not originally encrypted, a snapshot would not be either.
• With the same token, the encrypted volumes will yield to encrypt each snapshot. Once a snapshot is being created, move it to another region. In an Elastic Block Storage subsection under the “EC2 Dashboard” and navigate on the left-hand side of the window, choose “Snapshots.” Find the particular snapshot, and select an option “Copy.” The following pop-up screen will appear:

• In pop-up screen, choose the “Destination Region,” as soon as the option to encrypt a new snapshot. In order to use a new snapshot in the particular region, modify the region at the top corner of the AWS Management Console.

2. Use AWS CLI to Copy Amazon EBS Between Regions

• Before using the AWS CLI, it is necessary to configure the environment.
• Now, you can use “AWS EC2 create-volume” command for creating the EBS volume. Some of the most important arguments are size, region, volume-type, availability-zone, IOPS (when create the SSD volumes) and encrypted (if the crucial data is secured).
• When the volume is generated, attach it with AWS EC2 attach-volume command, and supply --volume-id and --instance-id argument). To switch available volume to any other region, first, you have to create the snapshot with “AWS EC2 create-snapshot” with a single required argument of --volume-id.
• To move a snapshot, you can utilize AWS EC2 copy-snapshot script. This script requires these parameters like
• source-region
• source-snapshot-id
• destination-region (optional, but mandatory for cross-region copy)
• encrypted

Impact of Cross-Regions EBS Replication

To copy EBS snapshot from one region to another is a helpful feature, it is a convenient way to migrate data geographically and a relevant solution for data recovery. Although there are two things to examine when deciding to create various copies:

• Pricing impact: When saving volumes as well as snapshots in both source and destination regions, users need to be charged for both copies, based on their size in GiBs. It does not matter that both copies save the similar data.
• Seamless synchronization impact: The data replicated across certain regions, which is not synced at every time. A Snapshot will capture latest data on the volumes, and then, transferred to a new region, there might be new data on an original source volume. Even scripting the complete process using CLI or APIs, it cannot guarantee that EBS volume in both the regions will consistently sync.

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