Immersion Day
Working with Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes
May 2018
Immersion Day
Working with Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes
Table of Contents
Overview ..................................................................................................................................................... 3
Prerequisites ............................................................................................................................................ 3
Lab Steps ..................................................................................................................................................... 3
Create and attach EBS Volume ................................................................................................................ 4
Run a Disk-heavy Workload ..................................................................................................................... 4
Modify EBS Volume Attributes ................................................................................................................ 5
Cleanup ....................................................................................................................................................... 5
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................... 6
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Immersion Day
Working with Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes
Overview
The purpose of this AWS Immersion Day hands-on lab is to familiarize you with the Amazon Elastic
Block Store (EBS) service. EBS is a block storage service that enables you to create volumes, and attach
/ detach them to Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. You can create EBS volumes with different
volume types, such as: Provisioned IOPS (io1), General Purpose Solid State (gp2), Throughput
Optimized HDD (st1), or Cold HDD (sc1), depending on the performance characteristics of your
application. Once an EBS volume has been created, you can switch between different volume types,
using the ModifyVolume API. Keep in mind that EBS volume modifications are limited to once every six
(6) hours.
During this lab, you'll create an EBS volume, attach it to an EC2 instance, format and mount the
volume, generate some ongoing disk activity, and then modify the volume attributes to increase its
performance.
For more information about EBS volume types, pricing, and links to service documentation, please visit
the EBS Pricing Page. Visit the announcement about EBS Elastic Volumes, enabling EBS volume
attributes to be modified on-the-fly.
Prerequisites
In order to fulfill this lab, you'll need an Amazon EC2 instance running Ubuntu Linux, and the SSH
private key to connect to that EC2 instance.
Lab Steps
• Create and attach EBS volume
• Run a disk-heavy workload
• Modify EBS volume attributes
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Immersion Day
Working with Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes
Create and attach EBS Volume
The first thing you’ll do is create a new Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume. You’ll simply specify the initial
size for the volume, and assign it the default General Purpose SSD volume type. Next, you’ll attach the
new EBS volume to an EC2 instance.
1. Open the AWS Management Console
2. Navigate to the Amazon EC2 service and click on Instances
3. Note the InstanceID and Availability Zone of your EC2 instance; you'll need this in a moment
4. Under the Elastic Block Store heading, click Volumes
5. Click on the Create Volume button
6. Choose Volume Type: General Purpose SSD (gp2)
7. Size: 100 GB
8. Availability Zone: Use the Availability Zone noted in Step #3
9. Click the link containing the new EBS VolumeId
10. Right-click the new volume and click Attach Volume
11. Search for your InstanceID
12. Click the Attach button
At this point, your new EBS volume should be created and attached to your EC2 instance.
Run a Disk-heavy Workload
Now that you've created an EBS volume, and attached it to an EC2 instance, you'll generate some
ongoing disk activity. In the steps below, you'll log into your EC2 instance, create a filesystem on the
EBS volume, mount the volume, and then initiate some disk activity.
1. Log into the EC2 instance via SSH:
ssh -i ~/privatekey.pem ubuntu@ipaddress
2. Find the disk drive using the lsblk command
3. Create a filesystem on the disk, using the device name from step #2:
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdf
4. Mount the filesystem using the mount command:
mkdir ~/ebstest; cd ~/ebstest; sudo mount /dev/xvdf ~/ebstest
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Immersion Day
Working with Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes
5. Run this Bash command to generate disk activity:
while [ true ]; do uuid=$(uuidgen); echo $uuid | sudo tee $uuid.json > /dev/null; done;
The Bash script will write some random JSON files to disk drive. Let the previous Bash command run
while you move onto the next step.
Modify EBS Volume Attributes
While the Bash script is still running on your EC2 instance, generating new data, you'll modify the
attributes of the Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume, to scale it up to a different volume type and increase
its IOPS.
1. Open the AWS Management Console
2. Navigate to the Amazon EC2 service
3. Under the Elastic Block Store heading, click Volumes
4. Right-click your volume and click Modify Volume
5. For Volume Type, choose Provisioned IOPS SSD (IO1)
6. For Iops, type 500
7. Click the Modify button, then Yes to confirm
Your volume will take some time to change its attributes to the newly specified volume type and IOPS
performance level. Notice that the disk activity on your Linux EC2 instance continues to run while the
EBS volume is being modified.
Cleanup
After completing this lab, make sure you clean up any resources that you created during execution of
the lab steps.
1. Detach the EBS volume from the EC2 instance
2. Delete the EBS volume
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Immersion Day
Working with Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes
Conclusion
After completing this lab, you should be familiar with the essentials of the Amazon Elastic Block Store
(EBS) service. You’ve learned how to create a new EBS volume and attach it to an EC2 instance. Next,
you logged into your EC2 instance and partitioned and mounted the disk, and generated some mock
disk activity. Finally, you used the AWS Management Console to reconfigure the EBS volume’s
attributes to change the volume type and increase its performance.
To learn more about Amazon Elastic Block Store, visit the service documentation.
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