EBS Volumes Lab Summary

• Volumes exist on EBS:
• Virtual Hard Disk
• Snapshots exist on S3.
• Snapshots are point in time copies of Volumes.
• Snapshots are incremental - this means that only the blocks that have changed since your last snapshot are moved to S3.
• If this is your first snapshot, it may take some time to create.
• To create a snapshot for Amazon EBS volumes that serve as root devices, you should stop the instance before taking the snapshot.
• However you can take a snap while the instance is running.
• You can create AMI’s from both Volumes and Snapshots.
• You can change EBS volume sizes on the fly, including changing the size and storage type.
• Volumes will ALWAYS be in the same availability zone as the EC2 instance.
• To move an EC2 volume from one AZ/Region to another, take a snap or an image of it, then copy it to the new AZ/Region.

Security

• Snapshots of encrypted volumes are encrypted automatically.
• Volumes restored from encrypted snapshots are encrypted automatically.
• You can share snapshots, but only if they are unencrypted.
• These snapshots can be shared with other AWS accounts or made public.