EBS

• An EBS (Elastic Block Store) Volume is a network drive you can attach to your instances while they run
  • It uses the network to communicate the instance, which means there might be a bit of latency
  • It can be detached from an EC2 instance and attached to another one quickly
• They are bound to a specific availability zone
  • An EBS Volume in us-east-1a cannot be attached to us-east-1b
  • To move a volume across, you first need to snapshot it
• Have a provisioned capacity (size in GBs, and IOPS)
  • You get billed for all the provisioned capacity, although you can increase over time.

EC2 Instance Store

• EBS volumes are network drives with good but “limited” performance
• EC2 Instance Store has better performance and IOPS then EBS
• EC2 Instance Store lose their storage if they’re stopped (ephemeral)
• Good for buffer / cache / scratch data / temporary content
• Risk of data loss if hardware fails, ( Backup, Replication are your duty )

EBS Volume Types

• gp2 / gp3 (SSD): General purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance for a wide variety of workloads
• io1 / io2 (SSD): Highest-performance SSD volume for mission-critical low-latency or high-throughput workloads
• st1 (HDD): Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads
• sc1 (HDD): Lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently accessed workloads

Only gp2/gp3 and io1/io2 can be used as boot volumes

• General Purpose SSD
  • 1 GiB - 16 TiB
  • Can increase IOPS up to 16,000 and throughput up to 1000 MiB/s
• Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) SSD
  • Critical business applications with sustained IOPS performance
  • applications that need more than 16,000 IOPS
  • Max PIOPS: 64,000 for Nitro EC2 instances & 32,000 for other
  • Supports EBS Multi-attach