Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
EBS is a high-performance, network-attached block storage service designed for use with EC2 instances within the AWS ecosystem. It provides the persistent storage required for a wide range of workloads, including relational and non-relational databases, enterprise applications, and big data analytics engines. Unlike Instance Store, which is ephemeral, data on EBS volumes persists independently of the life of the instance to which it is attached.
Volume Types and Performance Characteristics
Amazon categorizes EBS volumes into two main categories: SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads and HDD-backed storage for throughput-intensive workloads. Common types include:
- General Purpose SSD (gp3/gp2): Balances price and performance for a wide variety of transactional workloads.
- Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2/io1): Designed for I/O-intensive database applications requiring low latency and high IOPS.
- Throughput Optimized HDD (st1): A low-cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads like Big Data and log processing.
- Cold HDD (sc1): The lowest-cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads.
Performance can be fine-tuned by selecting EBS-Optimized instances, which provide dedicated bandwidth between EC2 and EBS. Detailed specifications can be found on the AWS Volume Types documentation.
Data Durability and Security
EBS volumes are automatically replicated within their Availability Zone to protect against hardware failure. For further protection, users can create Snapshots, which are incremental backups stored in S3. Security is managed through Encryption, which uses KMS keys to secure data at rest and in transit between the instance and the volume. For more information on security best practices, visit the AWS EBS Resources page.