What is Amazon EBS? Define Types of EBS Volume

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is an easy to use, high performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at any scale.

EBS Volume Types

Following are the three types.

EBS General Purpose (SSD)
This volume type is suitable for small and medium workloads like Root disk EC2 volumes, small and medium database workloads, frequently logs accessing workloads, etc. By default, SSD supports 3 IOPS (Input Output Operations per Second)/GB means 1 GB volume will give 3 IOPS, and 10 GB volume will give 30 IOPS. Its storage capacity of one volume ranges from 1 GB to 1 TB. The cost of one volume is $0.10 per GB for one month.


Provisioned IOPS (SSD)
This volume type is suitable for the most demanding I/O intensive, transactional workloads and large relational, EMR and Hadoop workloads, etc. By default, IOPS SSD supports 30 IOPS/GB means 10GB volume will give 300 IOPS. Its storage capacity of one volume ranges from 10GB to 1TB. The cost of one volume is $0.125 per GB for one month for provisioned storage and $0.10 per provisioned IOPS for one month.


EBS Magnetic Volumes
It was formerly known as standard volumes. This volume type is suitable for ideal workloads like infrequently accessing data, i.e. data backups for recovery, logs storage, etc. Its storage capacity of one volume ranges from 10GB to 1TB. The cost of one volume is $0.05 per GB for one month for provisioned storage and $0. 05 per million I/O requests.


Volumes Attached to One Instance
Each account will be limited to 20 EBS volumes. For a requirement of more than 20 EBS volumes, contact Amazon’s Support team. We can attach up to 20 volumes on a single instance and each volume ranges from 1GB to 1TB in size.

In EC2 instances, we store data in local storage which is available till the instance is running. However, when we shut down the instance, the data gets lost. Thus, when we need to save anything, it is advised to save it on Amazon EBS, as we can access and read the EBS volumes anytime, once we attach the file to an EC2 instance.

How to use Amazon EBS

To begin, create an EBS volume, pick a size for it and attach that to any one of your EC2 instances. You can only attach an EBS volume to one instance at a time, but an instance can have multiple volumes attached to it.

You can also take a snapshot of a volume, which captures the data at a point in time to provide the equivalent of a backup. You can also use the snapshot to create another volume that you can attach to another instance.

You can share EBS snapshots with a team member or make them available publicly if you modify the snapshot permissions. Additionally, you can copy EBS snapshots to other AWS regions for disaster recovery and migration purposes.

Amazon EBS Benefits

• Reliable and secure storage: Each of the EBS volume will automatically respond to its Availability Zone to protect from component failure.
  
  
• Secure:
  Amazon’s flexible access control policies allows to specify who can access which EBS volumes. Access control plus encryption offers a strong defense-in-depth security strategy for data.
  
  
• Higher performance:
  Amazon EBS uses SSD technology to deliver data results with consistent I/O performance of application.
  
  
• Easy data backup:
  Data backup can be saved by taking point-in-time snapshots of Amazon EBS volumes.