Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | General

Question 1

Are Amazon EBS volume and snapshot ID lengths changing in 2016?

General

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 1

Yes, please visit the EC2 FAQ page for more details.

Question 2

What happens to my data when an Amazon EC2 instance terminates?

General

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 2

Unlike the data stored on a local instance store (which persists only as long as that instance is alive), data stored on an Amazon EBS volume can persist independently of the life of the instance. Therefore, we recommend that you use the local instance store only for temporary data. For data requiring a higher level of durability, we recommend using Amazon EBS volumes or backing up the data to Amazon S3. If you are using an Amazon EBS volume as a root partition, set the Delete on termination flag to “No” if you want your Amazon EBS volume to persist outside the life of the instance.

Question 3

What kind of performance can I expect from Amazon EBS volumes?

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Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 3

Amazon EBS provides four current generation volume types: Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1), General Purpose SSD (gp2), Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1). These volume types differ in performance characteristics and price, allowing you to tailor your storage performance and cost to the needs of your applications. For more performance information see the EBS product details page.

For more information about Amazon EBS performance guidelines, see Increasing EBS Performance.

Question 4

Which volume should I choose?

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Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 4

Amazon EBS includes two major categories of storage: SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads (performance depends primarily on IOPS) and HDD-backed storage for throughput workloads (performance depends primarily on throughput, measured in MB/s). SSD-backed volumes are designed for transactional, IOPS-intensive database workloads, boot volumes, and workloads that require high IOPS. SSD-backed volumes include Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) and General Purpose SSD (gp2). HDD-backed volumes are designed for throughput-intensive and big-data workloads, large I/O sizes, and sequential I/O patterns. HDD-backed volumes include Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1).

Question 5

How do I modify the capacity, performance, or type of an existing EBS volume?

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Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 5

Changing a volume configuration is easy. The Elastic Volumes feature allows you to increase capacity, tune performance, or change your volume type with a single CLI call, API call or a few console clicks. For more information about Elastic Volumes, see the Elastic Volumes documentation.

Question 6

Are EBS Standard Volumes still available?

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Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Storage

Answer 6

EBS Standard Volumes have been renamed to EBS Magnetic volumes. Any existing volumes will not have been changed as a result of this and there are no functional differences in the EBS Magnetic offering compared to EBS Standard. The name of this offering was changed to avoid confusion with our General Purpose SSD (gp2) volume type which is our recommended default volume type.