Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
💽 What is Amazon EBS?
Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) is a persistent block storage service used with Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).
It provides durable, high-performance disk volumes for your virtual machines (EC2 instances).
💡 Think of it like a virtual hard disk for your cloud-based servers.
🧩 Key Features:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Persistent | Data remains even after EC2 instance stops |
| Block-level storage | Like a raw disk; used by OS as a normal hard drive |
| Attachable | Can attach to one EC2 instance at a time (except for multi-attach volumes) |
| Snapshots | You can take point-in-time backups (stored in Amazon S3) |
| Encryption | Built-in encryption using AWS KMS |
| Resizable | Volumes can be resized without downtime |
🔧 Volume Types:
| Volume Type | Use Case | Performance |
|---|---|---|
| gp3 (General Purpose SSD) | Balanced cost/performance | Up to 16,000 IOPS |
| io2/io2 Block Express | High-performance, I/O-intensive | Up to 256,000 IOPS |
| st1 (Throughput HDD) | Big data, logs, data lakes | High throughput, low IOPS |
| sc1 (Cold HDD) | Infrequently accessed data | Lowest cost, low throughput |
📦 Common Use Cases:
- Boot volumes for EC2 instances
- Databases (e.g., MySQL, MongoDB)
- File systems (e.g., NTFS, ext4)
- Backup and disaster recovery (via snapshots)
- Application logs and data storage
🔐 Security:
- Data-at-rest and in-transit encryption
- Integration with AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
- IAM policies to control access
🧠 Summary:
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Type | Block storage |
| Persistence | ✅ Yes |
| Integration | EC2, Auto Scaling, AMIs, Snapshots |
| Performance | Scalable IOPS, different volume types |
| Billing | Pay-per-GB provisioned per month |