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AWS::EC2::Volume

  • Specifies an Elastic Block Store (EBS)
  • Network drive (not physical) that can be attached to instances on the fly. The drive can then be mounted as volume devices on EC2 instances.
  • The volume can persist independently from the life of the EC2 instance and be attached to any instance
  • EBS volume can be configured to Delete on Termination
  • The configuration of a volume can be dynamically changed
  • It is recommended for data that must be quickly accessible and requires long-term persistence

  • E.g., database-style applications (random read/writes), throughput-intensive applications that perform long, continuous reads/writes

  • Volume Behavior

  • Stop: data on disk (EBS) is kept intact
  • Terminate: root EBS volumes is destroyed
  • Hibernate: RAM is dumped into a file in the encrypted EBS volume. Faster boot

Properties

Type: AWS::EC2::Volume
Properties:
  AutoEnableIO: Boolean
  AvailabilityZone: String
  Encrypted: Boolean
  Iops: Integer
  KmsKeyId: String
  MultiAttachEnabled: Boolean
  OutpostArn: String
  Size: Integer
  SnapshotId: String
  Tags:
    - Tag
  Throughput: Integer
  VolumeType: String

AvailabilityZone

  • Belongs to an AZ and cannot be bound to ec2 instances in other AZ's. To attach the volume to an instance use AWS::EC2::VolumeAttachment

Encrypted

  • Encryption has minimal impact on latency
  • To encryption a volume at later time, you can create a snapshot, copy & encrypt, and then restore it

Iops

  • Capacity and IOPS must be defined in advance

MultiAttachEnabled

  • If not enabled, the EBS volume can only be attached to one instance at a time

VolumeType

  • General Purpose SSD (gp2/gp3)
  • Can be used as boot volume
  • 1GiB - 16 TiB
  • Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1/io2)
  • Can be used as boot volume
  • Low latency
  • For applications with more than 16k IOPS
  • Great for databases
  • Supports multi-attach (within same AZ)
  • io2 Block Express volume achieve maximum IOPS of 256k
  • Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)
  • Max throughput 500MiB/s
  • Cold HDD (sc1)
  • Lowest cost
  • Archive data
  • Max throughput 250MiB/s
  • Magnetic (standard)
  • Can be used as boot volume

SnapshotId

  • Backup the EBS volume
  • Snapshots can be restored to any AZ region (not only the original one)
  • A new volume can be then created from a snapshot

EBS snapshot backup