Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) supports a wide range of both transaction-intensive and throughput-intensive workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this fourth course of the Amazon EBS deep dive, you learn how to manage your EBS volumes, how to back up and restore volumes, and best practices for working with volumes. The course introduces you to how Amazon uses AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to encrypt and decrypt your volumes and snapshots, and how to restore volumes using different encryptions keys. Finally, this course explains the value of monitoring and auditing Amazon EBS using tools such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail.

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:

Configure and manage EBS volumes and file systems

Modify size, performance, and type of your deployed EBS volumes

Troubleshoot common EBS volume issues

Implement automated snapshot and snapshot deletion policies

Manage Amazon EBS volume encryption

Audit EBS volume activity

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: Working with EBS volumes

• Review of Amazon EBS volumes
• Comparing SSD options
• Comparing HHD options

Lesson 3: Working with EBS Volumes

• Organizing resources using tags
• Amazon EBS specific tagging options
• Root volume considerations
• Termination settings
• Differences between Amazon EBS and Instance store volumes
• Amazon EC2 instance support for volumes
• Attaching volumes
• Formatting and using volumes
• Attaching volumes to a Windows instance
• Practice building volumes: Self-paced lab

Lesson 4: Managing Snapshots

• How Amazon EBS Snapshots work
• Snapshot terms and functions
• Automating the snapshot lifecycle

Lesson 5: Best Practices for Managing Volumes and Snapshots

• A Well-Architected environment
• Using compute optimizer
• Tagging resources
• Managing volumes and snapshots
• Deleting instances and snapshots

Lesson 6: Managing Amazon EBS Encryption

• Amazon EBS encryption terms
• How encryption works
• Encryption FAQs
• Encryption by default
• Encryption scenarios

Lesson 7: Monitoring Amazon EBS

• EBS volume status checks
• EBS volume events
• Working with an impaired volume

Lesson 8: Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch

• Metrics and Amazon EBS
• Monitoring to optimize storage costs
• Additional metrics for monitoring
• Nitro-based metrics

Lesson 9: Collecting Metrics from Amazon EC2 Using CloudWatch Agent

• What is the Amazon CloudWatch agent?
• Systems that support the agent
• Installing CloudWatch agent for Linux
• Installing CloudWatch agent for Windows Server
• Creating and editing the configuration file
• Discussing agent specific metrics

Lesson 10: Auditing Amazon EBS Activity

• What is AWS CloudTrail?
• AWS CloudTrail features
• Supported Amazon EBS API actions
• Understanding Event record details

Lesson 11: Knowledge Check

• Knowledge check questions

Lesson 12: Resources and Feedback

• Resources
• Feedback