Getting the Most From AWS Ephemeral Volumes

I had mentioned in How to Use LVM and LUKS with EBS Volumes that I used LVM and LUKS for the ephemeral volumes at Lucid Software. I have made the associated scripts public on Github, with an Apache 2.0 license. I'll take just a minute and describe what the script is and how we use it at Lucid.

How to Use LVM and LUKS with EBS Volumes

A while back, I had posted my findings on encryption at rest using LUKS. Circling back, here's the procedure I used. Although I was operating on Ubuntu 12.04 and EBS volumes, this same procedure can be used in many different scenarios.

Encryption at Rest using LUKS

At past companies, encryption at rest was done at the application layer. Only part of the data had to be encrypted, so code was inserted into the model that would encrypt the sensitive data before inserting into the database and decrypt after retrieval. This approach worked, and had no impact on the database - the hardest layer to scale.

At Lucidchart, we have failed to close large sales due to lack of encryption. Large companies want to make sure that their proprietary information is transmitted and stored using industry standard encryption. I took on the task to find a method of encryption that made the most sense for our use case, and had little overhead on our systems. After a lot of testing, benchmarking, and evaluating, I came to the conclusion that encrypting the disks on our database servers using LUKS was, and still is, the best solution.