Solutions Architect – TOGAF / AWS Gold Coast Australia

EBS is an acronym for Elastic Block Storage and is a network storage volume which is attached to an EC2 Instance.

EBS Storage allows EC2 instances to save information even after the associated EC2 instance is terminated and are bound to a single Availability Zone.

Because EBS volumes are a network drive they are able to be detached from one EC2 instance and then re-attached to another EC2 instance extremely quickly which is good for fail over.

It is feasible to attach more than one EBS volume to any EC2 instance at any one time and likewise it is possible to detach and EBS volume and not re-attach it to another EC2 instance.

When creating an EBS volume the size of the volume and the number of IOPS must be specified in advance although it is possible to increase the capacity at a later date.

Also, when creating an EBS volume there is a “Delete on Termination” attribute which when set will mean that the EBS volume will be deleted when the EC2 instance is terminated.