Amazon Elastic Block Store


Amazon Elastic Block Store provides raw block-level storage that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances and is used by Amazon Relational Database Service.
Amazon EBS provides a range of options for storage performance and cost. These options are divided into two major categories: SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads, such as databases and boot volumes, and disk-backed storage for throughput intensive workloads, such as MapReduce and log processing.

Use case

In a typical use case, using EBS would include formatting the device with a filesystem and mounting it. EBS supports advanced storage features, including snapshotting and cloning. As of June 2014, EBS volumes can be up to 1TB in size.
EBS volumes are built on replicated back end storage, so that the failure of a single component will not cause data loss.

History

EBS was introduced by Amazon in August 2008. As of March 2018 30 GB of free space was included in the free tier of Amazon Web Services 2017.

Volume types

The following table shows use cases and performance characteristics of current generation EBS volumes:
*Default volume type
**io1/gp2 based on 16K I/O size, st1/sc1 based on 1 MB I/O size