Volumes

Overview

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS is particularly suited for applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block level storage.

They are off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance.
They are highly available and reliable storage volumes that can be attached to any running instance that is in the same Availability Zone.
Amazon EBS volumes that are attached to an instance are exposed as storage volumes that persist independently from the life of the instance.
They are automatically replicated within the same Availability Zone.
They can be attached to any instance in the same Availability Zone.

Types of EBS volumes

General Purpose SSD (gp2/gp3): General purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance for a wide variety of workloads.
Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1): Highest-performance SSD volume for mission-critical low-latency or high-throughput workloads.
Throughput Optimized HDD (st1): Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads.
Cold HDD (sc1): Lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads.
Magnetic (standard): Previous generation HDD volume that provides the lowest cost per gigabyte of all EBS volume types that is bootable.

Features

Snapshots are point-in-time copies of your volumes, serving as incremental backups where only changed blocks since the last snapshot are saved.
Amazon EBS encryption simplifies securing your EBS volumes without the need to manage your own key infrastructure.
EBS Lifecycle Manager automates the creation, retention, and deletion of snapshots for EBS volumes.
Elastic Volumes allow you to dynamically increase capacity, adjust performance, and change volume types without downtime or performance impact.
Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) enables quick volume restoration from snapshots without waiting for all data to load from Amazon S3.

Use cases

Block storage: Amazon EBS volumes are used for block storage, which is a type of storage that is used to store data in volumes, each of which is treated as an independent hard drive.
Database storage: Amazon EBS volumes are used to store database files, which are used to store data in a structured format.
File storage: Amazon EBS volumes are used to store files, which are used to store data in an unstructured format.
Backup and disaster recovery: Amazon EBS volumes are used to store backups of data, which are used to recover data in case of data loss.

Elastic Block Store Snapshot