Amazon AWS introduction – EBS

EBS (Elastic block store) is like a virtual hard drive you can use with your Amazon EC2 instances.

The advantage of using EBS is:

•  Keep you data separated from your computer instances
•  Can be attached to your instances only when needed
•  When EC2 instances failed, the data on the EBS won’t be lost

The EBS varies from 1G to 1T, it is created on an Amazon AZ (Availability Zone), replicated over AZ to prevent data lost. One EBS can only be attached to one EC2 instance at a time. It is very similar to a hard drive and any other storage device. In practice, you can add multiple EBS to EC2 instance that can stripe IO and increase READ/WRITE performance especially for data-intensive applications such as database.

How to use EBS

In AWS console, go to EC2 Dashboard – ELASTIC BLOCK STORE – Volumes.

Click “Create Volume” and assign the size of storage you want., the AZ and type.

The you will need to attach the EBS volume to the EC2 instance by right click the EBS and select attach volume.

Then you can create file system using fdisk and LVM tools as it is a normal local disk or SAN disk