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EBS Overview

What's an EBS Volume?

  • An EBS (Elastic Block Storage) Volume is a network drive you can attach to your instances while they run
  • It allows your instances to persist data, event after their termination
  • They can only be mounted to one instance at a time (at the Certified Cloud Practicioner level, for Solutions Architect, Developer, SysOpes - there is multi-attach feature for some EBS).
  • They are bound to a specific availability zone

Free tier: 30 GB of free EBS storage of type General Purpose (SSD) or Magnetic per month.

EBS Volume

  • It's a network drive (i.e. not a physical drive)
    • It uses the network to communicate to the instance, which means there might be a bit of latency
    • It can be detached from an EC2 instance and attached to another one quickly
  • It's locked to an Availability Zone (AZ)
    • 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

EBS - Delete on Termination attribute

When creating EC2 instances, there is an option to choose Delete on Termination option, which will delete the EBS volume once the instance is terminated.

By default it is enabled for the root volume, but isn't for any custom added volume.