Amazon Elastic Block Store: A Comprehensive Guide

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a highly available, durable, and flexible block-level storage service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows you to create and manage volumes that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances.

EBS volumes can be created in various sizes, ranging from 1 GiB to 16 TiB, and can be attached to EC2 instances in a matter of seconds. This makes it an ideal choice for applications that require high-performance storage.

One of the key benefits of EBS is its ability to provide high I/O performance, with some volumes offering up to 10,000 IOPS. This is particularly useful for applications that require low-latency and high-throughput storage, such as databases and file systems.

Amazon Elastic Block Store, or Amazon EBS for short, is a raw block-level storage service designed to work seamlessly with Amazon EC2 instances.

Amazon EBS volumes can be used like any other raw block device, allowing you to format them with a specific file system, host operating systems and applications, and even make snapshots or clones from them.

Every Amazon EBS volume that's provisioned will be automatically replicated to other storage devices in the same Availability Zone to offer redundancy and high availability, which Amazon guarantees at a rate of 99.999%.

Amazon EBS offers seamless encryption of data at rest, both for boot and data volumes, using Amazon-managed keys or keys customers create through Amazon Key Management Service (KMS).

Amazon EBS offers highly available, high-performance, persistent block storage for Amazon EC2 instances. It provides a strong defense-in-depth security strategy with encryption and access control policies.

EBS volumes can be up to 2 TiB in size using the MBR partitioning scheme, and up to 16 TiB using the GPT partitioning scheme. They're built on replicated back-end storage, so the failure of a single component won't cause data loss.

Amazon EBS is an excellent choice for applications that need persistent block storage, ideal for databases, data warehousing, and big data applications that demand high IOPS or throughput and low latency.

Amazon EBS is a game-changer for applications that need persistent block storage. It's ideal for databases, data warehousing, and big data applications that demand high performance.

Amazon EBS can scale with your performance needs, supporting millions of gaming customers or billions of e-commerce transactions.

Relational databases like Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL are widely deployed on Amazon EBS.

Amazon EBS provides reliable block storage for mission-critical applications like Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft SharePoint.

With Amazon EBS, you can provision, duplicate, scale, or archive your development, test, and production environments with just a few clicks.

Amazon EBS volumes offer consistent and low-latency performance for NoSQL databases.

Regularly backing up your data and log files across different geographic regions can minimize data loss and recovery time.

Amazon EBS provides highly available, high performance, persistent block storage for Amazon EC2.

Each Amazon EBS volume provides redundancies within its Availability Zone to protect against failures.

Amazon EBS volumes deliver low-latency through SSD technology and consistent I/O performance scaled to the needs of your application.

You can protect your data by taking point-in-time snapshots of your Amazon EBS volumes.

Amazon EBS snapshots provide long-term durability for your data and can be used to create new EC2 instances.

With Amazon EBS, you can quickly scale up or down to adapt to the changing needs of your business.

Amazon EBS allows you to copy snapshots across AWS regions, enabling geographical expansion, data center migration, and disaster recovery.

An Amazon EBS–optimized instance provides dedicated network capacity for Amazon EBS volumes, minimizing network contention and providing the best performance for your EBS volumes.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) offers a range of features and functionality to help you manage your data, backups, and performance. One key feature is the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager, which automates data backups and creates EBS snapshots on a predefined schedule.

You can also use Elastic Volumes to dynamically increase capacity, tune performance, and change the type of live EBS volumes. This can be especially useful for applications that require high performance and flexibility.

EBS volume tagging allows you to find and filter EBS resources on the Amazon Console and CLI, making it easier to manage your resources. Additionally, EBS encryption provides seamless support for data-at-rest and data-in-transit between EC2 instances and EBS volumes.

Here are some key features of EBS:

General Purpose SSD (gp2) is a great choice for most use cases, offering balanced price and performance. It's suitable for boot volumes, development and testing environments, and even low latency production apps that don't require high IOPS.

Volumes have I/O "credits" that represent available bandwidth for bursting up to a higher IOPS value over time. These credits accumulate over time and can be saved for future use.

Credits are depleted when the volume reaches its baseline performance rate, which is directly correlated with volume size. Customers receive three IOPS per GB of volume size.

gp2 volumes can vary in size from 1 GiB to 16 TiB, with a maximum throughput of 160 MiB/s.

Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) is the SSD volume type to use for critical production applications and databases that need high performance. It can provision a desired IOPS value, with a maximum ratio of 50:1.

Io1 volumes can provision up to 32,000 IOPS, which is much higher than gp2 volumes. All volumes bigger than 400 GiB can provision this maximum IOPS value.

Io1 volume sizes vary from 4 GiB to 16 TiB, with a maximum throughput of 500 MiB/s. AWS guarantees customers that their Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes will operate at maximum 10% of loss of performance at 99.9% SLA on a yearly basis.

Amazon EBS offers several features that make data management, backups, and performance tuning a breeze. The Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager is an automated mechanism that can back up data from EBS volumes, creating and deleting EBS snapshots on a predefined schedule.

One of the standout features of Amazon EBS is Elastic Volumes, which makes it possible to adapt volume size to an application's current needs. This is achieved using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Lambda to automate volume changes.

Amazon EBS Encryption encrypts data at rest for EBS volumes and snapshots, providing an additional layer of security without having to manage a separate secure key infrastructure.

Software-level RAID arrays make it possible to create groups of EBS volumes with high performance network throughput between them, using the standard RAID protocol.

Here are some of the key features of Amazon EBS:

Instance Store provides temporary, non-persistent block-level storage for your instance, located on disks physically attached to the host computer. It's ideal for temporary storage of information that changes frequently, such as buffers, caches, and scratch data.

You can specify instance store volumes for an instance only when you launch it, and they're included as part of the instance's usage cost. Some instance types use NVMe or SATA-based solid-state drives (SSD) to deliver high random I/O performance.

Instance store-backed instances cannot be stopped, and if the underlying host fails, the data will be lost. On the other hand, EBS-backed instances can be stopped without losing data, and EBS volumes can be detached and reattached to other EC2 instances.

Here are the main differences between EBS and Instance Store:

Instance store provides temporary block-level storage for your instance, located on disks physically attached to the host computer.

This is different from EBS, which offers persistent storage. Instance store is ideal for temporary storage of information that changes frequently, such as buffers, caches, and scratch data.

You can specify instance store volumes for an instance only when you launch it. Instance store volumes are included as part of the instance's usage cost.

Some instance types use NVMe or SATA-based SSDs to deliver high random I/O performance. This is a good option when you need storage with very low latency, but you don't need the data to persist when the instance terminates.

Instance store volumes can't be detached from one instance and attached to a different instance. The instance type determines the size of the instance store available, and the type of hardware used for the instance store volumes.

Instance stores offer high performance and low latency, making them a good solution for high performance/low latency requirements. They can be more cost-effective than EBS Provisioned IOPS, especially if you can afford to lose an instance.

Instance store and ephemeral storage are two types of temporary storage options available on AWS. Instance store provides temporary block-level storage for your instance, located on disks physically attached to the host computer.

Instance store is ideal for temporary storage of information that changes frequently, such as buffers, caches, scratch data, and other temporary content. It's also suitable for data that is replicated across a fleet of instances, such as a load-balanced pool of web servers.

You can specify instance store volumes for an instance only when you launch it, and instance store volumes are included as part of the instance's usage cost. Some instance types use NVMe or SATA-based solid-state drives (SSD) to deliver high random I/O performance.

Instance store-backed instances cannot be stopped, and if the underlying host fails, the data will be lost. In contrast, EBS-backed instances can be stopped without losing data, and EBS volumes can be detached and reattached to other EC2 instances.

Here are some key differences between instance store and EBS-backed storage:

Instance store-backed instances are often used for temporary storage needs, while EBS-backed instances are better suited for long-term storage and data persistence.

EC2 Block Storage is a crucial aspect of running instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS). EBS-backed instances have a root volume that's an EBS volume, making storage persistent.

You have two options for EBS-backed instances: EBS volumes can be detached and reattached to other EC2 instances, while instance store volumes cannot be detached or reattached. This makes EBS-backed instances more flexible.

Instance store-backed instances, on the other hand, have a root volume that's an instance store volume and storage is not persistent. This means you won't lose data when you reboot the instance, but you will lose it if the underlying host fails.

By default, both root volumes will be deleted on termination unless you configure otherwise. This is something to keep in mind when setting up your instances.

EBS-backed instances can be stopped, and you won't lose data on the instance. This is a big advantage over instance store-backed instances, which cannot be stopped without losing data.

General Purpose (SSD) volumes are cost-effective for a broad range of applications, while Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes are ideal for performance-intensive workloads.

If you're using a General Purpose (SSD) volume, it can be a boot volume and supports up to 16,000 IOPS per volume.

Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes, on the other hand, are designed for high-performance workloads and can burst up to 64,000 IOPS per volume.

To right-size your EBS volume types, use AWS tools such as EC2 Instance Advisor and AWS Compute Optimizer to identify underutilized volumes and resize them to a more cost-effective size.

Here's a quick reference to help you choose the right EBS volume type for your workload:

By choosing the right EBS volume type for your workload, you can optimize costs and improve performance.