You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides persistent block-level storage volumes for EC2 instances. If S3 is like a warehouse of objects, EBS is like a hard drive attached to your server — fast, low-latency, and designed for workloads that need frequent read/write operations.
Block storage divides data into fixed-size chunks called blocks. Each block has an address, and the operating system can read and write individual blocks directly. This is how traditional hard drives and SSDs work.
| Characteristic | Block Storage (EBS) | Object Storage (S3) |
|---|---|---|
| Data model | Fixed-size blocks | Complete objects (file + metadata) |
| Access | Mounted as a volume | HTTP API |
| Latency | Sub-millisecond | Milliseconds |
| Use case | Databases, boot volumes, applications | Backups, media, data lakes |
| Modification | Change individual blocks | Must re-upload entire object |
An EBS volume is a virtual disk that you attach to an EC2 instance. Key characteristics:
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.