Getting started with EBS
Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides EC2 instances access to persistent disk in a filesystem. EBS is fast (much faster than S3), and does not have the same limitations surrounding access and naming that S3 has.
Creating an EBS volume
To create an EBS volume click on the EC2 tab in the AWS console, click on the Volumes link in the Navigation section, and then click on the Create Volume button.
The first thing you will notice in the Create Volume dialog is that you must select an Availability Zone. This is because EBS volumes are locked to a particular availability zone and cannot be accessed in any other zone from an EC2 instance.
Leave the Snapshot field blank for the moment and click on create.
The Volume will appear with a status of creating in the status window:
When it is available, its status will change to available. Before we go any further, make sure you have at least one EC2 instance running so that we can attach the new volume to running in the same availability...