[MUSIC] In this video you will understand about the volume group functionality that is available block storage. Generally when you have an instance created, you have a boot volume provision as part of the instance creation. When you use an image and you can attach additional block volumes to that instance. And from the feature listing we have seen earlier, we know we can fire backups or clones for these individual volumes. And as a result, you would have to fire individual backups or individual clones to get all the volumes cloned or all the volumes backed up. From where you can create new volumes sometimes as an application when you have multiple volumes available. You may need a time consistent clone or a time consistent backup such that when you have the new volumes created as part of the cloning or as part of a backup. You create new volumes, they need to be in sync with time for the application to work properly. And sometimes you might have multiple compute instance related volumes to be cloned together or backed up together. Because all the instances together are related to each other from a data standpoint based on the application. Thus, it becomes crucial to have an ability to create a clone or backup of multiple volumes in one go. Which is exactly what volume group enable you to do, volume groups are fundamentally individual block and boot volumes. Grouped into a collection of volumes called volume group and you can fire a backup or a clone at a volume group level. This results in backups getting created either manually or policy based backups or cloning as a group of volume. This is a typical use case for enterprise applications which have one or more instances which have to be in sync. And as a result when you want to clone the entire application stack or a pod, you can use volume groups. Put all volumes from all the instances together and use the volume group functionality. Let's see how do we create these volume groups, when you have a collection of volumes in the form of both. And block volumes within a given region, you can create volume groups from the block storage menu. But remember, a block volume or boot volume from a given ad only can be grouped together. For example, if I say ad one instance volume group and I choose ad one. I can choose a collection of both volume and block volumes which are available within the same ad. Group them into a volume group based on the ad in which they are available. If you have your policies for backups you can associate, so that all the volumes together are fired for a backup. At the same time and create a volume group results in a volume group getting created. Once a volume group is created, actually nothing new is created other than a metadata about the collection of volumes which belong to the volume group. No new volumes are created as a result of a volume group creation, but when you have a volume group, readily available with a collection of volumes. You can use the menu here for example, create a clone at a volume group level, I will call it as cloned volume group. And as a result of doing this operation, all the volumes in the original volume group. Which would include the block volumes, as well as the boot volume that you are associated when you created the volume group will be cloned together. If you actually go to the block storage listing, where you have various volumes listed as part of this region. All the volumes that are available, you will see the original volume is present. Plus a clone is created based on the volume group level cloning that you did let me go to the block volume menu. So you see here there is a clone created based on the ad1 volume that I had and since it is a cloning operation it is within the same ad. And if we look at the timestamp, 6:56 UTC, if I go to the boot volume section, remember the volume group also had the boot volume of that instance. And when I go to the boot volumes we see that a cloned volume is created as of the same time. So with a single click, you were able to achieve a clone of a collection of volumes with the help of volume groups. Similarly, you could use the volume groups to also create a coordinated backup, wherein if you create a volume group specific backup. Please remember, there is nothing called as backup of a volume group as such, just like how cloning resulted in individual clones getting created. You will get individual backups getting created from the individual volumes that are in the volume group, but then they will all be fired as of the same time. Thus, by using volume groups you get the ability to have a coordinated clone or a coordinated time consistent backup. Across a collection of volumes which Would have been difficult to achieve without the idea of a volume group. And the idea the use of volume group does not have any cost because any way no resource asset is provisioned. Other than a metadata about the collection of volumes that are part of this volume group. That is the idea behind volume groups, you use it to take consistent backups or consistent clones of a collection of volumes.
