What's an EBS volume?¶

• An EC2 machine loses it's root volume (main drive) when it's manually terminated.
• Unexpected terminations might happen from time to time (aws would email you)
• Sometimes, you need a way to store your instance data somewhere
• An EBS (Elastic Block Store) volume is a network drive you can attach to your instances while they run
• It allows your instances to persist data

EBS Volume¶

• It's a network drive (i.e. not a physical drive)
  • It uses the network to communicate the instance, which means there might be a bit of latency
  • It can be detached from an AWS EC2 instance and attached to another one quickly as long as their in the same AZ
• It's locked to an Availability Zone
  • An EBS Volume in us-east-1a cannot be attached to us-east-1b
  • To move a volume across, you first need to snapshot it
• Have a provisioned capacity (size in GBs and IOPS)
  • You get billed for all the provisioned capacity
  • You can increase the capacity of the drive over time