Working with Amazon EBS

Task 1: Creating a New EBS Volume

I followed these steps to create a new EBS volume:

• On the AWS Management Console, in the Search bar, I entered and chose EC2 to open the EC2 Management Console.
• In the left navigation pane, I selected "Instances" and found that an EC2 instance named "Lab" had already been launched for me.
• I made note of the Availability Zone for my Lab instance, which was "us-west-2a".
• Tip: I had to scroll right to see the Availability Zone column.
• Then I went to the left navigation pane, clicked on "Volumes" under Elastic Block Store, and saw an existing 8 GiB volume that the EC2 instance was using.
• I clicked "Create volume"
• I selected "General Purpose SSD (gp2)" for Volume type
• I entered "1" for Size (GiB)
• Note: I was restricted from creating large volumes.
• I chose the same Availability Zone as my EC2 instance (us-west-2a)
• In the Tags section, I clicked "Add tag" and set:
  • Key: Name
  • Value: My Volume
• I clicked "Create volume"

A new volume appeared with a "Creating" status in the Volume state column, which soon changed to "Available".

Tip: Have to click Refresh to see new volume.

Task 2: Attaching the Volume to an EC2 Instance

I then attached my volume to the EC2 instance:

• I selected "My Volume"
• From the Actions menu, I chose "Attach volume"
• From the Instance dropdown list, I selected the Lab instance
• The Device name field was already set to "/dev/sdf"
• I would need this device identifier later for commands.
• I clicked "Attach volume"

The Volume state of my new volume changed to "In-use."

Task 3: Connecting to the Lab EC2 Instance

To connect to my instance, I:

• In the AWS Management Console, I searched for and opened the EC2 Management Console
• Selected "Instances" in the navigation pane
• Selected the Lab instance from the list
• Clicked "Connect"
• On the EC2 Instance Connect tab, clicked "Connect"

This opened a new browser tab with the EC2 Instance Connect terminal window.

Note: If the terminal becomes unresponsive, refresh the browser or repeat these steps to connect again.

If you prefer to use an SSH client to connect to the EC2 instance, you can

Task 4: Creating and Configuring the File System

In this task, I added the new volume to my Linux instance as an ext3 file system under the "/mnt/data-store" mount point.

First, I viewed the available storage on my instance by running:

The output looked something like:

This showed the original 8 GB disk volume, but my new volume wasn't shown yet.

To create an ext3 file system on the new volume, I ran:

Then I created a directory to mount the new storage volume:

To mount the new volume, I ran:

The last line in this command ensured that the volume would be mounted even after the instance was restarted.

I viewed the configuration file to see the setting on the last line:

Then I checked the available storage again:

The output now contained an additional line similar to:

To create a file and add some text on the mounted volume, I ran:

To verify that the text had been written to my volume, I ran:

The output displayed the text that I had copied to the file.

Task 5: Creating an Amazon EBS Snapshot

In this final task, I created a snapshot of my EBS volume.

I noted that Amazon EBS snapshots are stored in Amazon S3 for durability. New EBS volumes can be created from snapshots for cloning or restoring backups. Amazon EBS snapshots can also be shared among AWS accounts or copied over AWS Regions.

• I went to the EC2 Management Console
• Selected "Volumes" and chose "My Volume"
• From the Actions menu, I selected "Create snapshot"
• In the Tags section, I clicked "Add tag" and set:
  • Key: Name
  • Value: My Snapshot
• I clicked "Create snapshot"
• I selected "Snapshots" in the left navigation pane

The Snapshot status of my snapshot was initially "Pending" but later changed to "Completed." I learned that only used storage blocks are copied to snapshots, so empty blocks don't use any snapshot storage space.

Back in my EC2 Instance Connect terminal window, I deleted the file I had created on my volume:

Note: If terminal is unresponsive, refresh the browser or reconnect as needed.

To verify that the file had been deleted, I ran:

The following message displayed:

This confirmed that my file had been successfully deleted.