Amazon EBS provides persistent block-level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances.Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure.
Types of Amazon EBS Volumes
Magnetic Volumes
A magnetic Amazon EBS volume can range in size from 1 GB to 1 TB and will average 100 IOPS,but has the ability to burst to hundreds of IOPS. They are best suited for:
Workloads where data is accessed infrequently
Sequential reads
Situations where low-cost storage is a requirement
Magnetic volumes are billed based on the amount of data space provisioned, regardless of how much data you actually store on the volume.
General-Purpose SSD
A general-purpose SSD volume can range in size from 1 GB to 16 TB and provides a baseline performance of three IOPS per gigabyte provisioned, capping at 10,000 IOPS.
General-purpose SSD volumes are billed based on the amount of data space provisioned, regardless of how much data you actually store on the volume. They are suited for a wide range of workloads where the very highest disk performance is not critical, such as:
System boot volumes
Small- to medium-sized databases
Development and test environments
Provisioned IOPS SSD
Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes are designed to meet the needs of I/O-intensive workloads.
A Provisioned IOPS SSD volume can range in size from 4 GB to 16 TB.
up to the lower of the maximum of 30 times the number of GB of the volume, or 20,000 IOPS.
Pricing is based on the size of the volume and the amount of IOPS reserved.
An additionalmonthly fee is applied based on the number of IOPS provisioned, whether they are consumed or not.
Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes provide predictable, high performance and are well suited for:
Critical business applications that require sustained IOPS performance
Large database workloads
EBS Volume Type Comparison
Amazon EBS-Optimized Instances
EBS-optimized instance uses an optimized configuration stack and provides additional,dedicated capacity for Amazon EBS I/O.
Protecting Data
Backup/Recovery (Snapshots)
You can back up the data on your Amazon EBS volumes, regardless of volume type, by taking point-in-time snapshots. Snapshots are incremental backups.
Data for the snapshot is stored using Amazon S3 technology.
they arestored in AWS-controlled storage and not in your account’s Amazon S3 buckets.
Creating a Volume from a Snapshot
Snapshots can also be used to increase the size of an Amazon EBS volume.
Recovering Volumes
Because Amazon EBS volumes persist beyond the lifetime of an instance, it is possible to recover data if an instance fails.