EC2 Storage: EBS Volumes and Instance Store

Every EC2 instance needs storage — for the operating system, application data, logs, and temporary files. AWS provides two primary categories of block storage for EC2: Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) for persistent, network-attached storage and Instance Store for high-performance, ephemeral local storage. This lesson covers both in detail.

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Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store)

What Is EBS?

Amazon EBS provides persistent block-level storage volumes that you attach to EC2 instances. Think of an EBS volume as a virtual hard drive in the cloud.

Key characteristics:

• Network-attached — EBS volumes connect to instances over the network (within the same AZ)
• Persistent — data survives instance stops, restarts, and even termination (if configured)
• Snapshots — you can back up volumes to S3 as point-in-time snapshots
• Encryption — supports encryption at rest using AWS KMS
• Elastic — you can resize volumes and change types without downtime (in most cases)

EBS Volume Types

AWS offers several EBS volume types, each optimised for different performance and cost requirements: