Amazon EBS FAQs

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

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.

Amazon EBS provides six volume types: Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express and io1), General Purpose SSD (gp3 and 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. The average latency between EC2 instances and EBS is single-digit milliseconds, while the average latency of io2 Block Express volumes is sub-millisecond. For more performance information, see the EBS product details page. For more information about Amazon EBS performance guidelines, see Increasing EBS Performance.

Amazon EBS includes two major categories of storage: SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads (performance depends primarily on IOPS, latency, and durability) 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 (io2 Block Express and io1) and General Purpose SSD (gp3 and gp2). io2 Block Express is designed for business-critical applications, offering 100X greater durability at 99.999% compared to other EBS volumes, average latency below 500 microseconds for 16KiB I/O operations, and 10X fewer I/Os exceeding 800 microseconds than General Purpose volumes. Gp3 is the latest generation of General Purpose SSD volumes that provides the right balance of price and performance for most applications that don’t require the highest performance consistency or 99.999% durability. 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).

High volume durability, snapshots, and replicating volumes across AZs protect against different types of failures, and customers can choose to use one, two, or all of these approaches based on their data durability requirements. Higher volume durability reduces the probability of losing the primary copy of your data. Snapshots protect against the unlikely event of a volume failure. Replicating volumes across AZs protects against an AZ level failure and also provides faster recovery in case of failure.

Amazon EBS volumes are designed to be highly available, reliable, and durable. At no additional charge to you, Amazon EBS volume data is replicated across multiple servers in an Availability Zone to prevent the loss of data from the failure of any single component. Depending on the degree of high availability (HA) that your application requires, we recommend these guidelines to achieve a robust degree of high availability:
1) Design the system to have no single point of failure. For more details, see High Availability and Scaling on AWS.
2) Use automated monitoring, failure detection, and failover mechanisms. See Monitoring the Status of your EBS volumes and Monitoring EBS Volumes using CloudWatch for more details on monitoring your EBS Volume’s performance.
3) Prepare operating procedures for manual mechanisms to respond to, mitigate, and recover from any failures. This includes detaching unavailable volumes and attaching a backup recovery volume in cases of failure. For more details, see the documentation on Replacing an EBS volume.

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.

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.

Provisioned IOPS SSD io2 Block Express and io1 volumes are available on all EC2 instance types. Use EBS-optimized EC2 instances to deliver consistent and predictable IOPS on io2 Block Express and io1 volumes. EBS-optimized instances provide dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS, with options ranging from 62.5 MB/s to 12,500 MB/s based on the instance type used. To achieve the limit of 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 MB/s throughput, you must use io2 Block Express volumes attached to