Book Image

Designing AWS Environments

By : Mitesh Soni, Wayde Gilchrist
Book Image

Designing AWS Environments

By: Mitesh Soni, Wayde Gilchrist

Overview of this book

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides trusted,cloud-based solutions to help you meet your business needs. Running your solutions in the AWS Cloud can help you get your applications up and running faster while providing the security to meet your compliance requirements. This book begins by familiarizing you with the key capabilities to architect and host applications, websites, and services on AWS. We explain the available options for AWS free tier with virtual instances and demonstrate how you can launch and connect them. Using practical examples, you’ll be able to design and deploy networking and hosting solutions for large deployments. Finally, the book focuses on security and important elements of scalability and high availability using AWS VPC, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto scaling. By the end of this book, you will have handson experience of working with AWS instances,VPC, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto scalingrelated tasks on Amazon Web Services.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

EC2 storage options


In the previous section, we looked at the available instance types. In this section, we're going to look at the options for filesystem storage for our instance. We will cover the available options, which include local instance storage and network-attached elastic block storage.

Instance storage

Instance storage is SSD, or hard disk storage, that is installed in the host machine. Since it is local, you can get high disk throughput and high input/output per second, known as IOPS. However, one big caveat is the ephemeral, temporary nature of instance storage. When your instance is running, it is occupying a slot in the hypervisor of a host server. So, it has access to its share of the host machine's local storage.

However, when an instance is stopped or terminated, it is removed from the hypervisor slot, and that frees the slot for another instance to occupy it. So, to make sure that no one will be able to access your data, the local storage for your instance is wiped, and...