Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Volume Types

  1. SSD-Backed Volumes (Optimized for IOPS)
    1. General Purpose SSD (gp3): Cost-effective option for a broad range of workloads, including boot volumes, databases, and development/test environments.
    2. General Purpose SSD (gp2): Default choice for general-purpose workloads.
    3. Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1/io2): Ideal for mission-critical applications such as high-performance databases requiring sustained IOPS.
  2. HDD-Backed Volumes (Optimized for Throughput)
    1. Throughput Optimized HDD (st1 - standard throughput): Suited for high-throughput workloads like big data and log processing.
    2. Cold HDD (sc1 -standard cold): Best for infrequently accessed data, such as backups and archival storage.
  3. st1 (Throughput Optimized HDD) and sc1 (Cold HDD) cannot be used as boot volumes. These volume types are specifically designed for high-throughput workloads and infrequent access use cases
  4. Operating system initialization and operation require high IOPS and low latency to ensure fast boot times and smooth system performance. SSD-backed volume types like gp2, gp3, or io1/io2 are designed to meet these needs

EBS-backed instances

  1. EBS-backed instances can be stopped. When stopped, the instance is shut down, and the associated EBS volume is preserved, meaning the data on the EBS volume is not lost.
  2. When the instance is started again, the same EBS volume is reattached to the new instance, and the instance resumes from where it left off, preserving the data stored on the volume.
  3. When an EBS-backed instance is stopped, the instance itself (i.e., the virtual machine) is not deleted, it is just powered down. When restarted, it might be moved to a different physical host depending on AWS availability

Question

A company maintains a searchable repository of items on its website. The data is stored in an Amazon RDS for MySQL database table that contains more than 10 million rows. The database has 2 TB of General Purpose SSD storage. There are millions of updates against this data every day through the company's website. The company has noticed that some insert operations are taking 10 seconds or longer. The company has determined that the database storage performance is the problem. Which solution addresses this performance issue?

  1. Change the storage type to Provisioned IOPS SSD. (Correct Ans)
  2. Change the DB instance to a memory optimized instance class.
  3. Change the DB instance to a burstable performance instance class.
  4. Enable Multi-AZ RDS read replicas with MySQL native asynchronous replication