Understanding Amazon Elastic Block Store
Block storage is a foundational storage technology that has been around since the early days of computing. The hard drive in your laptop, the memory in your mobile phone, and all other forms of data storage, from USB thumb drives to storage arrays that organizations place in their data centers, are all based on block storage.
Persistent block storage that can be used with Amazon EC2 instances is provided by Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). When using EC2, you have the option to use local instance storage or EBS for block storage:
- Instance storage is great for high-performance (over 80K IOPS and over 1,750 MB/s throughput) and low-latency (under 1 ms) applications. However, instance storage is ephemeral, which means when you stop, hibernate, or terminate an EC2 instance, every block of storage in the instance store is reset. Therefore, do not rely on instance storage for valuable, long-term data.
- EBS volumes provide excellent...