Persistent disks are one of the core concepts when you need to store and handle data that will be used by Compute Engine instances. Persistent disks can be Zonal or Regional. Zonal persistent disks are kept in a single zone within a region; Regional persistent disks are distributed over two different zones within the same region. Persistent disks are very easy to use and offer a lot of good advantages such as high performance, reliability, and the possibility to encrypt data. Persistent disks provide you the possibility to create snapshots in a very smart and efficient way: you create a persistent disk and when you need to create a snapshot you create the first snapshot. This will have the same size of the persistent disk he has been created from. The next snapshot, will only contains information that has changed or added to the last snapshot. An intuitive example is: you create a snapshot of a disk that is 25 GB size; you then create another snapshot of the same disk that now is 26 GB (suppose you have created files and folders). The new snapshot will be 1 GB size. This method is referred to as incremental snapshots.

In this lab, you will create a zonal persistent disk, you will attach it to an existing VM and you will backup it by creating a snapshot.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

• Create a persistent disk
• Attach a persistent disk to a Compute Engine instance
• Perform a persistent disk backup by creating a snapshot

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

• Google Cloud Security Engineer (SE) certification candidates
• Security Engineers who want to keep data backed up and available
• Individuals who want to understand the best practices to handle persistent disks

Prerequisites

This lab has no prerequisites.

Updates

July 2nd, 2024 - Updated lab to use CentOS Stream 9

February 11th, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI