AWS Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS): The Elastic Block Store feature of Amazon allows the user to make use of persistent block storage volumes for integrated use with Amazon EC2 server instances in the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Each Elastic Block Store, or EBS, is replicated within the Availability Zone it is contained in, with this redundancy acting to protect the client’s data from any possible component failure, making it a reliable storage solution with the consistent and low-latency performance that enables the client to properly run the necessary workload.
In addition to this, like most of Amazon’s solutions, it enables the client to automatically scale as needed and only charges the client according to actual use.
Amazon Elastic Block Store(EBS) Benefits
High-performance storage – The client has the ability to choose between solid-state drives or hard disk drive volumes, depending on which solution they feel will better suit their needs.
Availability – Each volume of the elastic block store has a 99.99% availability guarantee and is redundantly backed up within its availability zone in order to deliver on this guarantee.
Security – The EBS solution comes with encryption that allows for support for data at rest and data in transit between EC2 server instances and EBS volumes.
Access Control – The client has the ability to allow or restrict access at varying levels to their EBS volumes, allowing them to ensure that only authorized users can access the data that they store.
Snapshots – The user has the ability to protect their stored data, as they can create snapshots of their volumes at certain points in time, which are backed up using the S3 storage solution of Amazon to further increase data durability.
Amazon EBS Volumes Types
Amazon provides a variety of EBS volume options for different workloads and use cases. The volume backed by the solid-state drive(SSD) or hard disk drive (HDD) and that can be chosen by the customers.
To get high-performance workloads that require low latency and high IOPS the SSD-backed up volumes are used. Whereas the HDD backed up volumes are used for high-volume,throughput-intensive workloads.
Amazon EBS volumes
EBS provisioned IOPs SSD (io 1)
This provides high IOPS per volume and maximum throughput per volume and perfect for database workloads. For these reasons, it is the highest performance option.
ESB General purpose SSD (gp 2)
This specifies high IOPS per volume at a lower rate and the cost of this is more than io1 and it is used for dev-test workloads, virtual desktops, and low latency apps.
Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)
This provides high throughput per volume and large volume size and perfect for data warehouse and log processing.
Cold HDD (sc1)
This is mainly used for less frequently accessed workloads like cold data and also provides low IPOS per volume at the lowest price of all EBS volumes.
This Elastic volume feature enables you to change the size of EBS volumes as per change in application needs or snapshot sizes. If required you can also change any volume type with our downtime. To get full access to EBS volumes IOPS capabilities and reduce latency to ms (milliseconds) for io1 volumes with the help of EBS-optimized EC2 instances.