What is Amazon Elastic Block Store?

Amazon EBS volumes — These are storage volumes that you attach to Amazon EC2 instances. After you attach a volume to an instance, you can use it in the same way you would use a local hard drive attached to a computer, for example to store files or to install applications.

Amazon EBS snapshots — These are point-in-time backups of Amazon EBS volumes that persist independently from the volume itself. You can create snapshots to back up the data on your Amazon EBS volumes. You can then restore new volumes from those snapshots at any time.

Multiple volume types — Amazon EBS provides multiple volume types that allow you to optimize storage performance and cost for a broad range of applications. Volume types are divided into two major categories: SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads, and HDD-backed storage for throughput intensive workloads.

Scalability — You can create Amazon EBS volumes with capacity and performance specifications that meet your needs. As your needs changes, you can use Elastic Volumes operations to dynamically increase capacity or tune performance, with no downtime.

Backup and recovery — Use Amazon EBS snapshots to back up the data stored on your volumes. You can then use those snapshots to instantly restore volumes or to migrate data across AWS accounts, AWS Regions, or Availability Zones.

Data protection — Use Amazon EBS encryption to encrypt your Amazon EBS volumes and Amazon EBS snapshots. Encryption operations occur on the servers that host Amazon EC2 instances, ensuring the security of both data-at-rest and data-in-transit between an instance and its attached volume and subsequent snapshots.

Data availability and durability — io2 Block Express volumes provide 99.999% durability with an annual failure rate of 0.001%. Other volume types provide 99.8% to 99.9% durability with an annual failure rate of 0.1% to 0.2%. Additionally, volume data is automatically replicated across multiple servers in an Availability Zone to prevent the loss of data from the failure of any single component.

Data archiving — EBS Snapshots Archive provides a low-cost storage tier to archive full, point-in-time copies of EBS Snapshots that you must retain for 90 days or more for regulatory and compliance reasons, or for future project releases.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud — A service that lets you launch and manage virtual machines (Amazon EC2 instances) in the AWS Cloud. You can attach EBS volumes to those instances and use them in the same way you would use a local hard drive, for example to store files or to install applications. For more information, see What is Amazon EC2?

AWS Key Management Service — A managed service that enables you to create and manage cryptographic keys. You can use AWS KMS cryptographic keys to encrypt the data stored on your Amazon EBS volumes and in your Amazon EBS snapshots. For more information, see How Amazon EBS uses AWS KMS.

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager — A managed service that automates the creation, retention, and deletion of EBS snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs. You can use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to automate backups for your Amazon EBS volumes and Amazon EC2 instances. For more information, see Automate backups with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager.

EBS direct APIs — A service that enables you to create EBS snapshots, write data directly to your snapshots, read data from your snapshots, and identify the differences or changes between two snapshots. For more information, see Use EBS direct APIs to access the contents of an EBS snapshot.

Recycle Bin — A data recovery service that enables you to restore accidentally deleted EBS snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs. For more information, see Recycle Bin.