Understanding performance metrics and performance tuning is often a challenging task. In this fifth course of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) deep dive series, you explore the different metrics, tools, and troubleshooting steps used to improve and optimize your Amazon EBS volumes. You learn how to calculate IOPS and throughput and how these values change based on your volume type, size, and the Amazon EC2 instance used to connect to them. This course helps guide you to reach your performance optimization goals.

• Course level: Advanced
• Duration: 60 minutes

Activities

This course includes interactive lessons, demonstrations, and knowledge check questions.

Course objectives

In this course, you will learn to:

• Benchmark the performance of your cloud application infrastructures
• Select the best Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) instance type for your workload
• Identify the best Amazon EBS volume types for your applications
• Determine how sequential and random I/O operations impact performance
• Examine applicable monitoring metrics for use in tuning workload performance
• Troubleshoot Amazon EBS performance issues

Intended audience

This course is intended for:

• Cloud architects
• IT professionals

Prerequisites

We recommend that attendees of this course have:

• Completed the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Primer course

Course outline

Lesson 1: Introduction

• How to Use This Course
• Course Introduction

Lesson 2: Defining Performance Measurements

• What is block size
• Define IOPS
• Explain throughput
• Identify I/O and throughput limitations
• Analyze latency

Lesson 3: Understanding Your Workload

• Benchmarking
• Right-Sizing for performance
• Performance tuning versus performance choices

Lesson 4: Choosing the Best Amazon EC2 Instance for Your Workload

• Amazon EC2 instance options
• Amazon EBS-optimized instances
• Understanding burst versus baseline performance
• When to use and not use bursting
• How do credits work?
• Baseline utilization
• Monitor your CPU credits

Lesson 5: Determining the Best Amazon EBS Volume for Your Workload

• Elastic volumes
• Items to verify before modifying a volume
• Using unsupported instances with Elastic Volumes
• Monitor the progress of volume modifications
• Automating Amazon EBS volume resizing

Lesson 6: Identifying Factors that Affect Performance

• Random versus sequential operations
• Designing for performance
• Frequently asked questions
• Lab: Benchmarking Amazon EBS volumes

Lesson 7: Tuning Amazon EBS Performance

• RAID levels
• Using RAID with Amazon EBS
• Mixing volume types

Lesson 8: Best Practices for Optimizing Performance

• Tips for implementing best practices
• Guidelines for your applications

Lesson 9: Troubleshooting Amazon EBS Performance

• Using ClouldWatch to troubleshoot EBS performance
• Micro-bursting
• Additional troubleshooting resources

Lesson 10: Knowledge Check

• Assessment

Lesson 11: Resources and Feedback

• Resources
• Feedback