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Amazon EBS

Block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances.

What is Amazon EBS?

Amazon EBS volumes are network-attached, and persist independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS provides highly available, highly reliable, predictable storage volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance and exposed as a device within the instance. Amazon EBS is particularly suited for applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block level storage.
Amazon EBS is a tool in the Cloud Storage category of a tech stack.

Who uses Amazon EBS?

Companies
253 companies reportedly use Amazon EBS in their tech stacks, including Airbnb, Amazon, and Instacart.

Developers
397 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Amazon EBS.

Amazon EBS Integrations

Docker for AWS, SignalFx, Cloudcraft, Eucalyptus, and AWS Outposts are some of the popular tools that integrate with Amazon EBS. Here's a list of all 10 tools that integrate with Amazon EBS.
Pros of Amazon EBS
36
Point-in-time snapshots
27
Data reliability
19
Configurable i/o performance
Decisions about Amazon EBS

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Amazon EBS in their tech stack.

Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogNew RelicNew Relic
and
SysdigSysdig

We are looking for a centralised monitoring solution for our application deployed on Amazon EKS. We would like to monitor using metrics from Kubernetes, AWS services (NeptuneDB, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, etc) and application microservice's custom metrics.

We are expected to use around 80 microservices (not replicas). I think a total of 200-250 microservices will be there in the system with 10-12 slave nodes.

We tried Prometheus but it looks like maintenance is a big issue. We need to manage scaling, maintaining the storage, and dealing with multiple exporters and Grafana. I felt this itself needs few dedicated resources (at least 2-3 people) to manage. Not sure if I am thinking in the correct direction. Please confirm.

You mentioned Datadog and Sysdig charges per host. Does it charge per slave node?

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Amazon EBS's Features

  • Amazon EBS allows you to create storage volumes from 1 GB to 1 TB that can be mounted as devices by Amazon EC2 instances. Multiple volumes can be mounted to the same instance.
  • Amazon EBS enables you to provision a specific level of I/O performance if desired, by choosing a Provisioned IOPS volume. This allows you to predictably scale to thousands of IOPS per Amazon EC2 instance.
  • Storage volumes behave like raw, unformatted block devices, with user supplied device names and a block device interface. You can create a file system on top of Amazon EBS volumes, or use them in any other way you would use a block device (like a hard drive).
  • Amazon EBS volumes are placed in a specific Availability Zone, and can then be attached to instances also in that same Availability Zone.
  • Each storage volume is automatically replicated within the same Availability Zone. This prevents data loss due to failure of any single hardware component.
  • Amazon EBS also provides the ability to create point-in-time snapshots of volumes, which are persisted to Amazon S3. These snapshots can be used as the starting point for new Amazon EBS volumes, and protect data for long-term durability. The same snapshot can be used to instantiate as many volumes as you wish. These snapshots can be copied across AWS regions, making it easier to leverage multiple AWS regions for geographical expansion, data center migration and disaster recovery.
  • AWS also enables you to create new volumes from AWS hosted public data sets.
  • Amazon CloudWatch exposes performance metrics for EBS volumes, giving you insight into bandwidth, throughput, latency, and queue depth. The metrics are accessible via the AWS CloudWatch API or the AWS Management Console. For more details, see Amazon CloudWatch.

Amazon EBS Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Amazon EBS?
Amazon EFS
Amazon EFS is easy to use and offers a simple interface that allows you to create and configure file systems quickly and easily. With Amazon EFS, storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files.
MySQL
The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions.
MongoDB
MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.
Redis
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
See all alternatives

Amazon EBS's Followers
540 developers follow Amazon EBS to keep up with related blogs and decisions.