Troubleshooting IOPS Performance Degradation for Amazon EBS Volumes Created from Snapshots

Investigating and Resolving IOPS Performance Degradation for Amazon EBS Volumes

Question

The Operations team has observed degradation in IOPS performance for Amazon EBS volumes which are created from snapshots.

As a Sysops administrator, you have been assigned to investigate the issue and propose a quick resolution without incurring additional cost. Which of the following fix can be applied to resolve this issue?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

Correct Answer: D.

There can be an initial performance hit when an Amazon EBS volume is created from snapshots.

This can be avoided by either of the following.

Force the immediate initialization of the entire volume.

Enable fast snapshot to restore on a snapshot to ensure that the EBS volumes are fully initialized.

Option A is incorrect as increasing IOPS by increasing volume size will incur additional cost.

Option B is incorrect as Raid 1 will help redundancy; it will not resolve the initial performance hit observed with Amazon EBS volumes created from snapshots.

Option C is incorrect as using EBS optimized EC2 instance will have no impact on the performance of EBS volumes that are created from snapshots.

For more information on initializing Amazon EBS volumes, refer to the following URL,

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-initialize.html

The issue with the degraded IOPS performance for Amazon EBS volumes created from snapshots may occur due to various reasons such as insufficient IOPS provisioned, storage network issues, and others. To resolve the issue, the SysOps administrator needs to identify the root cause and apply the appropriate fix.

Let's go through the answer options one by one:

A. Increase IOPS for the SSD volume by increasing volume size: Increasing the volume size will provide more space for data to be stored, but it does not necessarily increase the IOPS performance. The IOPS performance is determined by the IOPS provisioned for the volume, not the size. Therefore, this option is not a valid fix for the issue.

B. Use RAID 1 to maximize utilization of instance resources: RAID 1 can be used to mirror data across multiple disks to provide redundancy and improve read performance. However, it does not directly address the issue of degraded IOPS performance for EBS volumes created from snapshots. Moreover, implementing RAID 1 may incur additional costs for extra storage resources. Therefore, this option is not the correct fix.

C. Enable EBS optimization for an existing instance: Enabling EBS optimization for an existing instance can improve the performance of EBS volumes, including the IOPS performance. This option is the most appropriate fix for the issue described in the question. EBS optimization improves the network throughput and reduces the latency between the EC2 instance and EBS volume, thus enhancing I/O performance. Enabling EBS optimization incurs no additional cost, and it can be easily enabled through the EC2 console or API.

D. Force Initialization of the entire volume: Forcing initialization of the entire volume does not directly address the issue of degraded IOPS performance. Initialization can help to restore the performance of an EBS volume that has experienced significant write activity or when it is first created. However, it is not a suitable fix for the issue described in the question.

In conclusion, the correct answer is C. Enable EBS optimization for an existing instance.