Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 is used to run business applications. EC2 needs to access to components (CPU, memory, network and storage).
Storage
EC2 Instances have hard drives
- Launch an EC2 instance get instance store volumes
- Instance store volumes are attached to host and EC2 instance
- write to it like a normal hard drive
- stop EC2 instance
- instance store volume will be deleted
- stopping or starting an instance will change host, because EC2 instances are virtual machines
- Do not write important data to the drive on an EC2 instance
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block level storage.
- Location to store a series of bites that are stored as blocks on disks (files)
- Files that are updated, only update pieces or blocks that change
- Block level storage is great for working with the following:
- Databases
- Enterprise Software
- File Systems
- Block level storage – hard drives
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
- EBS volumes not tied to host
- data can persist, if EC2 starts/stops
- define size, type, configurations
- snapshots restore data
Summary
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a service that provides block-level storage volumes that you can use with Amazon EC2 instances.
Incremental backups – Amazon EBS snapshots different from full backups.