What is elastic block store (EBS) in AWS?

Overview

As we know, instances on Amazon web servers require storage. Storage is important for so many reasons.

When you create an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), there are two memory types available:

• in-memory
• elastic block store

They both serve the same purpose, but in a different way. The main difference is that the elastic block provides an increase in storage. The benefit of EBS over in-memory is that you are able to persist data even after the EC2 data is terminated or shut down.

The elastic block store (EBS)

The EBS is a physical hard drive in the form of a Solid State Drive (SSD) or Hard Disk Drive (HDD) that is attached to an EC2 instance before storing of data begins.

Unlike in-memory storage, EBS is a storage that can outlive an instance after its termination. This means that the EBS storage still exists even after the instance it is attached to is no longer available.

Here are the specifics of the EBS:

• Data stored on it is still accessible even after the instance it is attached to is terminated.
• It helps increase storage.
• There is a replication of EBS on the availability zones of your instance. This ensures that there is no component failure of your instance.