Introduction to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability. Amazon EBS volumes offer the consistent and low-latency performance needed to run your workloads. With Amazon EBS, you can scale your usage up or down within minutes – all while paying a low price for only what you provision.

Amazon EBS is designed for application workloads that benefit from fine tuning for performance, cost and capacity. Typical use cases include Big Data analytics engines (like the Hadoop/HDFS ecosystem and Amazon EMR clusters), relational and NoSQL databases (like Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL or Cassandra and MongoDB), stream and log processing applications (like Kafka and Splunk), and data warehousing applications (like Vertica and Teradata).

Benefits

RELIABLE, SECURE STORAGE

Each Amazon EBS volume provides redundancies within its Availability Zone to protect against failures. Encryption and access control policies deliver a strong defense-in-depth security strategy for your data.

CONSISTENT, LOW-LATENCY PERFORMANCE

Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes and Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes deliver low-latency through SSD technology and consistent I/O performance scaled to the needs of your application.

BACKUP, RESTORE, INNOVATE

Protect your data by taking point-in-time snapshots of your Amazon EBS volumes providing long-term durability for your data. Boost the agility of your business by using Amazon EBS snapshots to create new EC2 instances.

QUICKLY SCALE UP, EASILY SCALE DOWN

Amazon EBS allows you to optimize your volumes for capacity, performance, or cost giving you the ability to dynamically adapt to the changing needs of your business.

GEOGRAPHIC FLEXIBILITY

Amazon EBS provides the ability to copy snapshots across AWS regions, enabling geographical expansion, data center migration, and disaster recovery providing flexibility and protecting for your business.

OPTIMIZED PERFORMANCE

An Amazon EBS–optimized instance provides dedicated network capacity for Amazon EBS volumes. This provides the best performance for your EBS volumes by minimizing network contention between EBS and your instance.