Ensuring EBS Volume Availability during AWS Region Outages

Answer - B and D.

The AWS Documentation mentions the following.

You can back up the data on your Amazon EBS volumes to Amazon S3 by taking point-in-time snapshots.

Snapshots are incremental backups, which means that only the blocks on the device have changed after your most recent snapshot is saved.

This minimizes the time required to create the snapshot and saves on storage costs by not duplicating data.

When you delete a snapshot, only the data unique to that snapshot is removed.

Each snapshot contains all of the information needed to restore your data (from the moment when the snapshot was taken) to a new EBS volume.

Option A is incorrect since you have to make use of EBS snapshots.

Option C is incorrect since the snapshots need to be made available in another region for such a huge disaster.

It may be rare for the whole AWS region to go down.

But it could cause massive permanent damage if we don't plan for it.

For more information on EBS snapshots, please visit the below URL-

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSSnapshots.html

To ensure that the EBS volumes are available in case of an entire region outage, two possible solutions are:

B. Create snapshots of the EBS Volumes: EBS snapshots are a point-in-time copy of the EBS volume, which can be used to create a new volume or restore an existing one in the same or different availability zone or region. Snapshots are stored in Amazon S3, which provides durability and availability across multiple availability zones within a region. Therefore, if an entire region experiences an outage, the EBS snapshots would still be available in the S3 storage and could be used to create new volumes in a different region or availability zone.

D. Ensure the snapshots are made available in another region: To ensure that the EBS volumes are available even if the entire region experiences an outage, it is recommended to copy the EBS snapshots to another region. AWS provides an automated way to copy EBS snapshots across regions using Amazon EC2 Copy Snapshot API, AWS CLI or AWS Management Console. This way, if the primary region goes down, the EBS snapshots stored in the secondary region could be used to create new volumes and resume operations without any data loss.

A. Configure Amazon Storage Gateway with EBS volumes as the data source and store the backups on premise through the storage gateway: This option is not a recommended solution to ensure EBS volumes availability in case of an entire region outage. Amazon Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that enables on-premises applications to use AWS cloud storage, including EBS volumes. However, if the entire region experiences an outage, the on-premises storage would be unavailable as well, so this solution wouldn't provide a robust disaster recovery strategy.

C. Ensure the snapshots are made available in another availability zone: Although creating EBS snapshots in another availability zone can help to recover EBS volumes if the primary availability zone fails, it doesn't provide a comprehensive solution to ensure EBS volumes' availability in case of an entire region outage. Since availability zones are physically located within the same region, they share the same underlying infrastructure and may be impacted by the same outage events.