Understanding Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Introduction

Elastic Block Store (EBS) is akin to a network drive, easily attachable to your running instances, providing the flexibility and durability needed for various computing tasks. Let's dive into the details of EBS and understand its significance in the AWS ecosystem.

What is an EBS Volume?

Imagine a "network USB stick" that you can plug into your cloud instances. That's an EBS volume in a nutshell. Here are its key features:

• Persistent Storage: EBS volumes allow our instances to retain data, even after termination.
• Single Instance Mounting: An EBS volume can be mounted to only one instance at a time, ensuring dedicated and secure storage.
• Availability Zone Specific: They are bound to a specific availability zone, ensuring data locality and robustness.

The Free Tier Advantage

AWS offers a free tier, providing 30 GB of EBS storage of either General Purpose (SSD) or Magnetic type per month, a great way to start for new users.

EBS as a Network Drive

Network-Driven Communication

Unlike physical drives, EBS volumes use the network for communication with instances, which might introduce a bit of latency.

Flexibility and Mobility

• Detach and Attach: You can quickly detach an EBS volume from one EC2 instance and attach it to another.
• Availability Zone Constraint: An EBS volume is locked to an Availability Zone. For instance, a volume in us-east-1a can't be directly attached to an instance in us-east-1b.

Capacity and Billing

• Provisioned Capacity: You choose the size in GBs and IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) based on your requirement.
• Billing: Charges are based on the provisioned capacity, regardless of usage.
• Scalability: The capacity of the drive can be increased over time to accommodate growing needs.

EBS – Delete on Termination Attribute

This critical feature controls what happens to your EBS volumes when an EC2 instance terminates.

• Root Volume: By default, the root EBS volume of an instance is deleted upon termination.
• Additional Volumes: Any additional attached EBS volumes do not get deleted automatically.
• Control Mechanism: This behavior can be adjusted via the AWS console or AWS CLI.
• Use Case: For instance, you might want to preserve the root volume for data analysis after an instance is terminated.

Advanced EBS Features

EBS Snapshots

Snapshots are a way to back up your EBS volume at a specific point in time. This feature is essential for disaster recovery and data duplication.

Read more about EBS Snapshots at cloudericks.com/blog/understanding-amazon-ebs-snapshots.

EBS Volume Types

AWS offers various EBS volume types, catering to different use cases:

• General Purpose (SSD): Balanced price/performance for a wide variety of workloads.
• Provisioned IOPS (SSD): For I/O-intensive operations, like large relational or NoSQL databases.
• Throughput Optimized HDD: Ideal for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads.
• Cold HDD: Best for less frequently accessed data.

Read more about Amazon EBS volume types at cloudericks.com/blog/understanding-amazon-ebs-volume-types.

EBS Multi-Attach

This feature allows you to attach a single EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances within the same Availability Zone, useful for achieving higher availability or for clustered applications.

Read more about EBS multi-attach at cloudericks.com/blog/understanding-amazon-ebs-multi-attach-feature.

EBS Encryption

For enhanced security, AWS offers EBS encryption. It ensures data at rest and in transit between the volume and the instance is encrypted, safeguarding your sensitive information.

Read more about Amazon EBS Encryption at cloudericks.com/blog/understanding-encryption-of-ebs-volumes-and-snapshots.

Conclusion

AWS EBS provides a flexible, durable, and secure block storage option, ideal for both small-scale applications and large enterprise solutions. Its range of features, from snapshots to encryption, caters to a wide array of needs, ensuring your data is not only stored efficiently but also remains secure and readily accessible. As cloud computing continues to evolve, EBS stands as a crucial component in the AWS suite, empowering users to build and scale applications with confidence.