Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a block-level storage service designed for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. It provides raw block-level storage that can be attached to EC2 instances and is used by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). EBS volumes behave like raw, unformatted block devices and are used for data that needs to persist.
Some key features of Amazon EBS include:
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High Performance: 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.
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Scalability: EBS volumes can be dynamically attached, detached, and scaled with any EC2 instance, just like a physical block storage drive.
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Availability: EBS offers the same high availability and low-latency performance within the selected availability zone, allowing users to scale storage capacity at low subscription-based pricing model. The data volumes can be dynamically attached, detached and scaled with any EC2 instance.
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Snapshots: EBS snapshots are incremental data backups that save on storage costs by not duplicating data. The first backup of a volume backups all the data. Every next backup copies only a block of data that has changed since the last snapshot.
Amazon EBS is well-suited to both database-style applications that rely on random reads and writes, and to throughput-intensive applications that perform long, continuous reads and writes. EBS volumes can be created as encrypted volumes to meet a wide range of data-at-rest encryption requirements for regulated/audited data and applications.
Overall, Amazon EBS provides a reliable and scalable storage solution for EC2 instances, with features such as high performance, scalability, and availability, as well as the ability to create snapshots for incremental data backups.
