Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

What is Elastic Block Storage (EBS)?

EBS allows you to create persistent block-level storage volumes and attach them to EC2 instances. Once attached you can create a file system on top of these volumes, run a database.

EBS is placed in a specific Availability zone where they are automatically replicated to protect you from the failure of a single component. You can also set up snapshots of your EBS to be durably stored in S3.

EBS use cases

Following are the use cases of EBS:

1. OS - Used for Boot/Root Volume, secondary Volumes.
2. Databases – Scales with your performance needs.
3. Enterprise applications – Provides reliable block storage to run mission-critical applications.
4. Business continuity – Minimize data loss and recovery time by regularly backing up using EBS Snapshots.
5. Applications – Install and persist in any application.

Different volumes types

1. General Purpose SSD (GP2) – price and performance balance

2. Provisioned IOPS – SSD (IO1) designed for high I/O applications. For example, large relational + NoSQL DB more than 10,000 IOPS

3. Throughput Optimized HDD (ST1) Magnetic Storage = Old school physical spinning disks. For example, Big Data, & OS processing, data warehousing. Main thing to note is that this cannot be boot volumes.

4. Cold HDD (SC1) (magnetic Storage) Lowest cost storage for infrequently accessed workloads.