A Cloudy Journey

EBS Volumes Overview

• EBS = virtual hard disk drive in the cloud
• Snapshots exist on S3
• Snapshots are incremental, only changes data is stored to S3
• Volumes will ALWAYS be in the same region as the EC2 instance
• You can change the volume type and/or size "on the fly" without shutting down or terminating your volume
• If you terminate EC2 instance by default root volume is terminated, additional volumes will persist

How to move EBS to another availability zone??

1. Take snapshot of EBS Volumes
2. Turn snapshot into AMI
3. Luanch instance from AMI, choose which availability zone (subnet) to deploy in

How to move EBS to another region??

1. Take snapshot of EBS Volumes
2. Turn snapshot into AMI
3. Click 'Actions' > 'Copy AMI'
4. Select Region

Instance Store Volumes

• Instance Store Volumes = Ephemeral Storage
• Instance Store Volumes can't be stopped, if host fails you WILL lose data
• EBS back instances can be stopped, will NOT lose data if stopped
• Can reboot both, will not lose data
• By default, both ROOT volumes will be deleted on termination.
• With EBS volumes, can set instance termination behavior to not delete

EBS Volume Encryption

• snapshots of encrypted volumes are encrypted automatically
• volumes restored from encrypted snapshots are encrypted automatically
• you can share snapshots but only if they are encrypted
• snapshots can be shared with other AWS accounts or made public
• It is now possible to encrypt root volume from launch wizard

How to create Encrypted Volume from already created Unecrypted Volume?

1. Create snapshot of unencrypted root device volume
2. create copy of the snapshot and select encrypt option
3. create AMI from encrypted snapshot
4. use that AMI to launch new encrypted instance