#ec2instances

Types of Instances in AWS

Amazon Elastic Block Store: High-performance, user-friendly block storage at any size

What is Amazon EBS?

Amazon Elastic Block Store provides high-performance, scalable block storage with Amazon EC2 instances. AWS Elastic Block Store can create and manage several block storage resources:

Amazon EBS volumes: Amazon EC2 instances can use Amazon EBS volumes. A volume associated to an instance can be used to install software and store files like a local hard disk.

Amazon EBS snapshots: Amazon EBS snapshots are long-lasting backups of Amazon EBS volumes. You can snapshot Amazon EBS volumes to backup data. Afterwards, you can always restore new volumes from those snapshots.

Advantages of the Amazon Elastic Block Store

Quickly scale

For your most demanding, high-performance workloads, including mission-critical programs like Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle, scale quickly.

Outstanding performance

With high availability features like replication within Availability Zones (AZs) and io2 Block Express volumes’ 99.999% durability, you can guard against failures.

Optimize cost and storage

Decide which storage option best suits your workload. From economical dollar-per-GB to high performance with the best IOPS and throughput, volumes vary widely.

Safeguard

You may encrypt your block storage resources without having to create, manage, and safeguard your own key management system. Set locks on data backups and limit public access to prevent unwanted access to your data.

Easy data security

Amazon EBS Snapshots, a point-in-time copy that can be used to allow disaster recovery, move data across regions and accounts, and enhance backup compliance, can be used to protect block data storage both on-site and in the cloud. With its integration with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager, AWS further streamlines snapshot lifecycle management by enabling you to establish policies that automate various processes, such as snapshot creation, deletion, retention, and sharing.

How it functions

A high-performance, scalable, and user-friendly block storage solution, Amazon Elastic Block Store was created for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).Image credit to AWS

Use cases

Create your cloud-based, I/O-intensive, mission-critical apps

Switch to the cloud for mid-range, on-premises storage area network (SAN) applications. Attach block storage that is both high-performance and high-availability for applications that are essential to the mission.

Utilize relational or NoSQL databases

Install and expand the databases of your choosing, such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, and SAP HANA.

Appropriately scale your big data analytics engines

Detach and reattach volumes effortlessly, and scale clusters for big data analytics engines like Hadoop and Spark with ease.

Features of Amazon EBS

It offers the following features:

Several volume kinds: Amazon EBS offers a variety of volume types that let you maximize storage efficiency and affordability for a wide range of uses. There are two main sorts of volume types: HDD-backed storage for workloads requiring high throughput and SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads.

Scalability: You can build Amazon EBS volumes with the performance and capacity requirements you want. You may adjust performance or dynamically expand capacity using Elastic Volumes operations as your needs change, all without any downtime.

Recovery and backup: Back up the data on your disks using Amazon EBS snapshots. Those snapshots can subsequently be used to transfer data between AWS accounts, AWS Regions, or Availability Zones or to restore volumes instantaneously.

Data protection: Encrypt your Amazon EBS volumes and snapshots using Amazon EBS encryption. To secure data-at-rest and data-in-transit between an instance and its connected volume and subsequent snapshots, encryption procedures are carried out on the servers that house Amazon EC2 instances.

Data availability and durability: io2 Block Express volumes have an annual failure rate of 0.001% and a durability of 99.999%. With a 0.1% to 0.2% yearly failure rate, other volume types offer endurance of 99.8% to 99.9%. To further guard against data loss due to a single component failure, volume data is automatically replicated across several servers in an Availability Zone.

Data archiving: EBS Snapshots Archive provides an affordable storage tier for storing full, point-in-time copies of EBS Snapshots, which you must maintain for a minimum of ninety days in order to comply with regulations. and regulatory purposes, or for upcoming project releases.

Related services

These services are compatible with Amazon EBS:

In the AWS Cloud, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud lets you start and control virtual machines, or EC2 instances. Like hard drives, EBS volumes may store data and install software.

You can produce and maintain cryptographic keys with AWS Key Management Service, a managed service. Data saved on your Amazon EBS volumes and in your Amazon EBS snapshots can be encrypted using AWS KMS cryptographic keys.

EBS snapshots and AMIs supported by EBS are automatically created, stored, and deleted with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager, a managed service. Backups of your Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon EBS volumes can be automated with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager.

EBS direct APIs: These services let you take EBS snapshots, write data to them directly, read data from them, and determine how two snapshots differ or change from one another.

Recycle Bin is a data recovery solution that lets you recover EBS-backed AMIs and mistakenly erased EBS snapshots.

Accessing Amazon EBS

The following interfaces are used to build and manage your Amazon EBS resources:

Amazon EC2 console

A web interface for managing and creating snapshots and volumes.

AWS Command Line Interface

A command-line utility that enables you to use commands in your command-line shell to control Amazon EBS resources. Linux, Mac, and Windows are all compatible.

AWS Tools for PowerShell

A set of PowerShell modules for scripting Amazon EBS resource activities from the command line.

Amazon CloudFormation

It’s a fully managed AWS service that allows you describe your AWS resources using reusable JSON or YAML templates, and then it will provision and setup those resources for you.

Amazon EC2 Query API

The HTTP verbs GET or POST and a query parameter called Action are used in HTTP or HTTPS requests made through the Amazon EC2 Query API.

Amazon SDKs

APIs tailored to particular languages that let you create apps that interface with AWS services. Numerous well-known programming languages have AWS SDKs available.

Amazon EBS Pricing

You just pay for what you provision using Amazon EBS. See Amazon EBS pricing for further details.

AWS Console to Code

AWS Console-to-Code, which makes it simple to turn AWS console actions into reusable code, is now generally available (GA). When you launch an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, for example, you can record your actions and workflows in the console using AWS Console-to-Code. You can then evaluate the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) commands for your console actions.

Using the infrastructure-as-code (IaC) format of your choosing, such as the AWS CloudFormation template (YAML or JSON) or the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) (TypeScript, Python, or Java), Amazon Q can generate code for you with a few clicks. This may be included into pipelines, further tailored for your production workloads, and utilized as a foundation for infrastructure automation.

Customers have responded well to AWS Console-to-Code since it revealed the preview last year. Since it has been working backwards from customer feedback, it has been significantly enhanced in this GA version.

GA’s new features

Encouragement of additional services Amazon EC2 was the sole service that was supported during the preview. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) are now supported by AWS Console-to-Code at GA.

Simplified experience: Customers can now more easily handle the workflows for prototyping, recording, and code creation with the updated user interface.

Preview code: Customers can now create code for EC2 instances and Auto Scaling groups without actually establishing them with updates to the launch wizards.

Advanced code generation: Amazon Q machine learning models power the creation of code for AWS CDK and CloudFormation.

How to begin using AWS Console-to-Code

Let’s start with a straightforward example of starting an Amazon EC2 instance. Open the Amazon EC2 console first. To begin recording, find the AWS Console-to-Code widget on the right and select Start recording.

Next, use the Amazon EC2 console’s launch instance wizard to start an Amazon EC2 instance. To finish the recording, select Stop once the instance has been launched.

Examine the recorded actions in the Recorded actions table. To filter by write actions (Write), utilize the Type dropdown list. Select the action RunInstances. To copy the relevant AWS CLI command, select Copy CLI.

It is simple to change this command. For this example, You can modify it to start two instances (–count 2) of type t3.micro (–instance-type). Although this is a simplified example, other workflows can use the same method.

You can use AWS CloudShell to run the command, and it launched two t3.micro EC2 instances as planned:

The API commands used when actions were conducted (during the EC2 instance launch) form the basis of the single-click CLI code creation experience. It’s intriguing to see that when you finish operations in the console, the companion screen displays the recorded actions. Additionally, it is simple to clearly scope activities for prototyping because of the interactive user interface’s start and stop capabilities.

Creating IaC with AWS CDK

An open-source framework called AWS CDK is used to specify cloud architecture in code and provision it using AWS CloudFormation. You may create AWS CDK code for your infrastructure workflows with AWS Console-to-Code. Currently available in Java, Python, and TypeScript.

Let’s move on to the use case for the EC2 launch instance. Locate the AWS Console-to-Code widget on the right side of the Amazon EC2 console, select Start recording, and then start an EC2 instance if you haven’t already. Once the instance has started, select the RunInstances action from the Recorded actions table and select Stop to finish the recording.

Select the Generate CDK Python button from the dropdown menu to begin generating AWS CDK Python code.

You can modify the code to make it production-ready for your particular use case, or you can use it as a starting point.

You made a new Python CDK project since you already had the AWS CDK installed:

Then entered the code that was generated into the Python CDK project. To make sure the code was correct for this example, modified the EC2 instance type, refactored the code into an AWS CDK Stack, and made a few other little adjustments. Using CDK deploy, was able to deploy it successfully.

You can replicate the same outcome by launching an EC2 instance from the console action and then going all the way to the AWS CDK.

Additionally, you can create CloudFormation templates in JSON or YAML format:

Preview code

Additionally, you may use the Preview code capability in Amazon EC2 and the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group launch experience to directly access AWS Console-to-Code. This implies that you can obtain the infrastructure code without actually creating the resource.

Try this out by following the instructions to use a launch template to build an Auto Scaling group. But click Preview code rather than Create Auto Scaling group. The options to replicate the AWS CLI command or produce infrastructure code should now be visible to you.

Things to be aware of

When using AWS Console-to-Code, keep the following points in mind:

To create AWS CLI commands for their infrastructure operations, anyone can use AWS Console-to-Code. There is a free monthly limit of 25 generations for the code generation feature for AWS CDK and CloudFormation formats; after that, an Amazon Q Developer subscription is required.

Prior to deployment, it is advised that you test and validate the generated IaC code.

Only actions in the Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, and Amazon RDS consoles are recorded by AWS Console-to-Code at GA.

Actions from past sessions or other tabs are not retained by the Recorded actions table in AWS Console-to-Code; it only shows actions made within the current browser tab. Keep in mind that all recorded actions will be lost once the browser tab is refreshed.

Currently accessible

All commercial regions offer AWS Console-to-Code. The Amazon Q Developer user manual contains additional information about it. Try it out in the Amazon EC2 console and email the AWS re:Post for Amazon EC2 or your regular AWS Support contacts with your thoughts.