Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

  • Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides block level storage volumes for use with EC2 instances.

  • EBS volumes behave like raw, unformatted block devices.

  • You can mount these volumes as devices on your instances.

  • EBS volumes that are attached to an instance are exposed as storage volumes that persist independently from the life of the instance.

  • You can create a file system on top of these volumes, or use them in any way you would use a block device (such as a hard drive).

  • AWS recommend Amazon EBS for data that must be quickly accessible and requires long-term persistence.

  • EBS volumes are particularly well-suited for use as the primary storage for file systems, databases, or for any applications that require fine granular updates and access to raw, unformatted, block-level storage.

  • To make a volume available outside of the Availability Zone, you can create a snapshot and restore that snapshot to a new volume anywhere in that Region.

  • EBS Volumes - Availability Zone

    • Amazon EBS volume is tied to its Availability Zone.

    • It can only be attached to instances in the same Availability Zone.

  • EBS Snapshot - Regional

    • An EBS snapshot is tied to its region.

    • It can only be used to create volumes in the same region and has to be copied from one region to another if needed.

Pricing

  • AWS Free Tier includes 30GB of Storage, 2 million I/Os, and 1GB of snapshot storage with Amazon EBS.

  • With Amazon EBS, you pay for what you provisioned; it doesn't matter if you used it or not.

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