Amazon EBS
Kristian Glass
Jun 24, 2019
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CommentsWhat 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 Infrastructure as a Service category of a tech stack.
Key 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 Pros & Cons
Pros of Amazon EBS
- ✓Point-in-time snapshots
- ✓Data reliability
- ✓Configurable i/o performance
Cons of Amazon EBS
No cons listed yet.
Amazon EBS Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Amazon EBS?
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web
Google Cloud Storage
Google Cloud Storage allows world-wide storing and retrieval of any amount of data and at any time. It provides a simple programming interface which enables developers to take advantage of Google's own reliable and fast networking infrastructure to perform data operations in a secure and cost effective manner. If expansion needs arise, developers can benefit from the scalability provided by Google's infrastructure.
Azure Storage
Azure Storage provides the flexibility to store and retrieve large amounts of unstructured data, such as documents and media files with Azure Blobs; structured nosql based data with Azure Tables; reliable messages with Azure Queues, and use SMB based Azure Files for migrating on-premises applications to the cloud.
