9 EBS and EFS Storage

EBS and EFS Storage

AWS EBS (Elastic Block Store)

EBS Basics

• Block-level storage service used with AWS EC2 instances
• EBS volumes are bound to a specific Availability Zone (AZ)
  • Just like EC2, you can’t attach across AZs

Warning

📌 Root volume (/dev/xvda) is deleted on instance termination by default Other attached EBS volumes are not deleted unless specified

Snapshots

• EBS Snapshots are point-in-time backups of EBS volumes

Recycle Bin

• Protects EBS Snapshots and AMIs from accidental deletion
• You can set retention policies

Encryption

• You can encrypt an EBS volume using AWS-managed KMS key (aws/ebs)

Tip

💡 Use copy snapshot to: Create an encrypted snapshot from an unencrypted one

EBS Volume Types for Root Device

📌 Allowed types for boot volume:

• gp2 / gp3 – General Purpose SSD
• io1 / io2 – Provisioned IOPS SSD

Using lsblk to View Block Devices

[ec2-user@ip-10-0-0-180 ~]$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda   202:0  0  8G 0 disk
└─xvda1  202:1  0  8G 0 part /
xvdb   202:16  0  5G 0 disk
xvdf   202:80  0 100G 0 disk

• xvda: Root disk
  • Mounted at /
• xvdb and xvdf: Additional attached volumes
  • Not mounted by default - but you can mount it

Mounting xvdf (Quick Steps)

# 1. Check if it has a filesystem
sudo file -s /dev/xvdf
 
# 2. Format as ext4 (⚠️ Only if needed!)
sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdf
 
# 3. Create a mount point
sudo mkdir /mnt/xvdf
 
# 4. Mount the volume
sudo mount /dev/xvdf /mnt/xvdf
 
# 5. (Optional) Add to /etc/fstab To auto-mount it after every reboot,
echo "/dev/xvdf /mnt/xvdf ext4 defaults,nofail 0 2" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

EBS Volume Types Comparison

Volume Type	Cost	Volume Size Range	Max IOPS	Max Throughput	Durability	Use Cases
General Purpose SSD (gp3)	$	1 GiB – 16 TiB	16,000	1,000 MiB/s	99.8%–99.9%	Boot volumes, small to medium databases, development and test environments
Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2)	$$$	4 GiB – 64 TiB	256,000	4,000 MiB/s	99.999%	High-performance databases, mission-critical applications requiring low latency
Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)	$	500 GiB – 16 TiB	500	500 MiB/s	99.8%–99.9%	Big data, data warehouses, log processing, streaming workloads
Cold HDD (sc1)	$ (cheapest)	500 GiB – 16 TiB	250	250 MiB/s	99.8%–99.9%	Infrequently accessed data, archival storage, backups

EBS Use Case Recommendations

Scenario	Recommended EBS Type	Reason
Boot volume for EC2	gp3	Balanced performance and cost.
High-performance DBs (Oracle, SQL Server) - for database workloads	io2/io1	Low latency, high IOPS support.
Log processing or streaming	st1	High throughput required for large datasets.
Long-term data archiving	sc1	Cost-effective for rarely accessed data.

AWS EFS (Elastic File System)

Related Topics

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• 5 AMI
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