EBS Snapshots, Encryption, and RAID Architectures
Explore key AWS storage concepts in this lesson including EBS snapshots and their encryption, differences between EBS and instance stores, and RAID architectures like RAID 0 and RAID 1. Understand how to improve storage performance and fault tolerance while managing AWS volumes effectively.
EBS snapshots
Snapshots are point-in-time backups of EBS volumes. These snapshots occupy the same storage space as the EBS volume, but because they’re stored on S3 in the backend, they cost less. When taking snapshots, we don’t need to stop the EC2 instance or detach a volume, but doing either of these steps is recommended to maintain data integrity.
We can copy snapshots across AWS Regions. Therefore, whenever we want to migrate EBS volumes across AWS Regions, we use snapshots.
EBS snapshot features
Let’s look at some key features of EBS snapshots.
- When creating snapshots of root EBS volumes, stopping the instance is recommended but not required.
- It’s unnecessary to stop the EC2 instance to create a snapshot of its non-root volumes.
- Snapshots only capture data that has been written to our EBS volume at the time the snapshot command is issued.
- We can move our old and infrequently used EBS snapshots to the EBS Snapshot Archive, which is a 75% cheaper method of storage. Note that restoring