• A network drive you can attach to your instances while running
• allow for data persistence, even after their termination
• can only be mounted to one instance at a time (CCP level)
• bound to specific availability zone

Analogy: Think of them as a "network USB stick" Free tier: 30 GB of free EBS storage of type General Purpose SSD or Magnetic per month

Delete on Termination attribute:

• by default, the root EBS volume is deleted
• by default, any other attached EBS volume is not deleted
• can be controlled by aws control / aws cli
  • Use Case: preserve root volume when instance is terminated

EBS does not support cross-region

EBS: Snapshots (backup)

• not necessary to detach volume
• can copy snapshots across AZ or Region Features:
• EBS Snapshot Archive
  • archive tier is 75% cheaper
  • take 24 to 72 hours to restore archive
• Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots
  • Setup rules to retain deleted snapshots so you can recover them after an accidental deletion
  • Specify retention (1 day to 1 year)

AMI:

• Amazon Machine Image
• Custom / Marketplace AMI
• AMI Process
  • Start an EC2 instance and customize it
  • Stop the instance for data integrity
  • Build an AMI with EBS snapshots

EC2 Image Builder

• Used to automate the creation of Virtual Machines or container images
  • Automate the creation, maintain, validate and test EC2 AMIs
• Can be run on a schedule
• Free Service

EC2 Instance Store:

• Better I/O
• Lose their storage if they are stopped
• good for buffer/ cache/ scratch data/ temporary content
• risk of data loss if hardware fails
• backup and replication are users' responsibility

EFS Elastic File System

• Managed NFS(network file system) that can be mounted on 100s of EC2
• EFS works with Linux EC2 instances in multi-AZ
• Highly available, scalable, expansive, pay per use, no cap planning

EBS vs EFS

• EFS shares across regions, EBS shares through snapshots EFS Infrequent Access(EFS-IA):
• Storage class that is cost-optimized for files not accessed daily
• 92% lower cost than standard EFS
• EFS will automatically move files to EFS-IA based on the last time they were accessed
• Enable EFS-IA with a Lifecycle Policy
• Transparent to the applications accessing EFS

Shared Responsibility Model for EC2 storage

• AWS
  • infrastructure
  • replication for data for EBS volumes and drives
  • replacing faulty hardware
  • ensure data privacy
• User
  • setting up backup/ snapshot procedures
  • setting up data encryption
  • responsibility of any data on the drives
  • understand the risk of using EC2 instance store

Amazon FSx

• 3rd party high-performance file system on AWS Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
• Windows native
• support SMB protocol and Windows NTFS
• Integrated with Microsoft active directory

Amazon FSx for Lustre

• Linux & cluster
• high-performance, scalable file storage for High Performance Computing
• usage: machine learning, analytics, video processing, financial model
• scales up to 100s GB/s, millions of IOPS, sub-ms latency