How to synchronize data between 2 EBS volumes in AWS?

Question

I have 2 EBS volumes in 2 availability zones in the same region, one is primary and another is backup. Generally, I just read and write data from primary volume. Is it possible to synchronize data from primary to back up EBS volume? if yes, how can I do that?

Thanks

Answer 1

1 year after this question has been posted but I hope it helps anyone looking into this.

Amazon EFS is a great solution. An alternative for what you require is using Snapshots. With AWS Backup you can schedule Amazon EBS snapshots and have them shared across AZ or even different accounts.

As very well proposed in the previous answer, you should first try to understand your performance requirements for the workload and also the RPO and RTO requirements.

Comparing EFS and EBS, I could say that: A. EFS (Elastic File System) is a managed parallel NFS (based on NFSv4). You are going to mount it as a directory. EFS leverages the same technology as EBS, and the disks are replicated in the AZ and also between AZ. You don’t chose or control the disks, just what performance you expect from the managed service.

B. EBS (Elastic Block Storage) is also network attached but is a block storage, which means that your OS will see it as a disk and not a directory. You have to format it as a file system (or group it with other EBS and create LVM, RAID, etc) before you can use it. EBS are replicated within the same AZ but not across AZ. You can have snapshots of your EBS and copy them to the other AZ, for example.

So you have to take into account not only the performance you require but also what type of storage (block or file) your application need.

Answer 2

Can you use EFS for this? You might be able to avoid having to replicate the data is you can have the primary and backup instance/applications looking at the same data volume.