I'm trying to decide on the frequency of making snapshots. Is the AWS system designed in such a way that taking snapshots has a negligible effect on the performance of the volume, or can it significantly reduce the performance due to presumably massive read requests from the underlying physical device?
Does taking EBS snapshots supposed to significantly slow down the performance of the EBS volume
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BTW, be careful using soft mounts:
With soft-mounted filesystems, you have to worry about damaging data due to incomplete writes, losing access to the text segment of a swapped process, and making soft-mounted filesystems more tolerant of variances in server response time.
To guarantee data integrity, all filesystems mounted read-write should be hard-mounted.
Using hard,intr is recommended on all NFS mounted file systems.
From the AWS documentation.
When you create an EBS volume in an Availability Zone, it is automatically replicated within that zone to prevent data loss due to failure of any single hardware component. After you create a volume, you can attach it to any EC2 instance in the same Availability Zone.
Amazon EBS provides the ability to create snapshots (backups) of any EBS volume and write a copy of the data in the volume to Amazon S3, where it is stored redundantly in multiple Availability Zones. The volume does not need be attached to a running instance in order to take a snapshot. As you continue to write data to a volume, you can periodically create a snapshot of the volume to use as a baseline for new volumes. These snapshots can be used to create multiple new EBS volumes or move volumes across Availability Zones.
Here's some background for you about regions and availability zones, which you appear confused in your question.
Amazon EC2 is hosted in multiple locations world-wide. These locations are composed of regions and Availability Zones. Each region is a separate geographic area. Each region has multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones. Amazon EC2 provides you the ability to place resources, such as instances, and data in multiple locations. Resources aren't replicated across regions unless you do so specifically.
Best Answer
While the snapshot is in progress it is possible you will notice performance degradation. As far as I know it is typically recommended by Amazon for customers stop doing read/writes (especially database read/writes) to a volume while it is being snapshotted to ensure data consistence. So I would recommend you not to abuse it. I am doing snapshots twice a day for my instances. As 12 hours span is okay to lose for me some data on DB or on FS if something goes wrong.