EC2: Storage Options

In this lesson, we’ll learn about the different storage options for EC2 and how to create storage volumes through the CLI.

The storage used for EC2 instances is called Elastic Block Store (EBS). This lesson serves as an introduction to EBS and especially the relevant CLI options. In the chapter on storage later in this course, we will do a deep dive into EBS.

Introduction

We have already used EBS storage volumes without thinking about it. When we create a new EC2 instance from an AMI, it automatically creates a root EBS volume for our instance.

If we use the Amazon Linux AMIs, the root volume is 8 GiB in size. The default volume depends on the snapshot size of the AMI we are using.

To create this default root volume, we don’t need to specify any additional CLI parameters. If we don’t specify any storage-related options, the default is used.

Let’s take a quick look at how it looks with the EC2 Launch wizard:

As we can see in the screenshot above, the EC2 Launch wizard has already configured a root volume for this instance based on the selected AMI.

Within the instance, the storage volume is accessible under /dev/xvda, which is the device name.

It uses the snapshot snap-086ea3f68d0a80dfc to create this root volume (the snapshot is part of the AMI).

The “Size” is set to 8 GiB, and the volume type is “General Purpose SSD (gp2)” (this is the default setting). There are other ...