Storage in AWS

Storage in AWS




There are 3 major storage type in AWS :

  • Block storage (Elastic Block Storage - EBS)
  • File storage (Elastic File Storage - EFS)
  • Object storage (S3 bucket)
HDD and SSD are the main storage units for all these three. 

Block storage - HDD and SSD are the devices that uses blocks to store information inside. Blocks are small fragment/cluster of data. Basically AWS provides this so that we can partition and format it easily. They are ideal for applications that require low-latency access to data, such as databases and enterprise applications.

File Storage - Is different than block storage, while under the hood it depends on block based storage units, it is connected to internet so that we upload/download files over internet. SSD and/or HDD units are inserted Network Attached Storage Servers so that is how it works. It is ideal for content management systems, web serving, and big data analytics.

Object Storage - S3 is unlike the others mentioned above. With the help of REST API or aws cli tool we can download or upload files easily. There is no format restrictions we can upload file of any kind.


Let's create our own EBS unit and use it.


  1. First need to create EC2 instance, click to the volumes section.






  2. And then create a volume, attach it to the EC2 instance we just created.







  3. Let's move on to the instance terminal and list all block storage available attached to this instance by lsblk  command. We will be able to see the block storage we just attached. it is 17 GB.


  4. Since this unit has no file system whatsoever our OS won't able to mount it, so we need to make file system by mkfs command as below.




  5. And then need to mount to the OS


  6. Let's create a file and save secret message into it.








  7. And detach the volume.




When we create a new EC2 instance and then attach volume to it, instead of making file-system again (If you use mkfs command again this will result to format that volume again eventually data loss) we just need to mount it directly to that instance. Finally we will able to see edit all the files, and of course our message file as well.



We can use EBS for other purposes as well, we can create AMI image snapshot and based on that create new EC2 instances easily.

  1.   Click to create image button.
     

  2. Name it and finish the operation. You will be able to see your AMI created here 



  3. Check out the snapshots, here is the EBS snapshot taken to create new image from it.



  4. All the  custom AMI's located in My AMI's section in the EC2 instance creation phase.


Consider that since the EBS snapshots are exact copy of the volume itself, this kind of mistakes might occur. If we create our EC2 instance based on the user-data I have provided to you and then create AMI from it. Previous EC2 instance's IP address will be shown in the index.html file. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Identity Access Management - How to create user in IAM ?!

Image
Introduction IAM stands for Identity and Access Management. IAM is essential component of AWS allows you to create and manage access of user, role, application and control authentication/authorization. There are 4 essential components of IAM :  Users - are individuals or applications want to access to your AWS resources. Groups - are collection of users. By this you can assign permissions to group instead individual users. Roles - are special access type in IAM that allows user/resource to access another resource via temporary credentials. For example EC2 instance can access to DynamoDB or S3 bucket resources without using permanent credentials. This is possible only via Role which is great security point of view. Policies - are JSON documents that define permissions. In policies we define what actions are allowed or should be denied. This can be attached to users, groups, roles. Hands on IAM exercises :  Login to your AWS account and search for IAM :  After clicking IAM icon, you wil
Read more

EC2 - User data

Image
User data Functionality in EC2 service is important and very handy tool. This allows us to execute script right after EC2 instance creation phase. By that we can execute,install any program we want or update, upgrade operating system on that virtual machine. User data functionality will run once just after completion of the instance creation sequence.  First we need to create an EC2 instance with extra steps. Choose Amazon Linux OS so we don't have to install aws-cli tool which we will need in the next steps.    Click to advanced options and add script below also tick the metadata options as well. With new metadata service it is not possible to send request to metadata service without secret key. That is why we need to use old metadata service for the demonstration purposes. Script is at the end of the page !!! We need one more thing to do, since by default all the ports are closed state. We need to add firewall allow line to open port 80 to serve our page to the public web. Click
Read more

IAM - Roles

Image
IAM Roles Roles in AWS has special meaning. With this functionality you can define different variety of roles and assign it users or your application/service can use them. Roles are specifically important for AWS security. Because roles use temporary credentials with services. So that we don't need to use own permanent credentials to do some operations. If somehow hackers got access to AWS infrastructure they won't able to access our cached permanent  credentials. Here are some of advantages of using roles : Reduced Risk of Credential Exposure Least Privilege Principle Cross-Account Access  Let's create a role and assign it to the user  Click to "IAM" , "Roles" and then "Create role" button.  We need ARN (we talked about this in the previous post) of the user. Copy 12 digit unique ID. During role creation select "AWS account" since we are planning to add this role to user. Enter the ID we got from previous step. This ID defines our us
Read more