Creating PIOPS volume for Oracle Database

When running your Oracle Database on AWS EC2, you may find that you need additional IOPS for your database and which to add an EBS volume to your Oracle instances for some of your highly accessed tables that require high IO.  Here are the steps to create a new PIOPS volume and attached it your EC2 instance.

1. aws ec2 stop-instances --instance-id i-NewDBServer
2. aws ec2 create-volume --availability-zone az-asdf-1a --size 200 --volume-type io1 --iops 2000

3. aws ec2 attach-volume --volume-id vol-FastDrive --instance-id i-NewDBServer - -device /dev/xvdb

Get the OS in order for your EC2 instance to recognize your volume by running the following commands:

1. sudo mkdir /mnt/piops1

2. sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/xvdb

3. sudo mount /dev/xvdb /mnt/piops1

4. df -h (to see the newly mounted piops volume)

You would then create an Oracle tablespace on this new volume and move your tables to this new tablespace.

AWS Bastion host as single point of attack?

Bastion host could open you up to a single point of attack?  It can, but here are two ways to secure your bastion host:

• AWS security WP recommends only allowing access through the corporate network(VPN access):
• http://awsmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/AWS_Security_Whitepaper.pdf (page 17)
• This video talks about separate security credentials for bastion host:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhYX06RmMHc&list=PLhr1KZpdzukcPA0A7h3FKDcMfKNPytXVf&feature=player_detailpage#t=837s  (this could be a separate user name password or more likely another PEM/PPK private key file)

Having only one point of attack is way better then opening up more than one or all of your EC2 instances for port 22 (SSH..assuming Linux) to 0.0.0.0/0 CIDR block.