You can use the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) direct APIs to create Amazon EBS snapshots, write data directly to your snapshots, read data on your snapshots, and identify the differences or changes between two snapshots. If you’re an independent software vendor (ISV) who offers backup services for Amazon EBS, the EBS direct APIs make it more efficient and cost-effective to track incremental changes on your Amazon EBS volumes through snapshots. This can be done without having to create new volumes from snapshots, and then use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to compare the differences.
You can create incremental snapshots directly from data on-premises into volumes and the cloud to use for quick disaster recovery. With the ability to write and read snapshots, you can write your on-premises data to an snapshot during a disaster. Then after recovery, you can restore it back to AWS or on-premises from the snapshot. You no longer need to build and maintain complex mechanisms to copy data to and from Amazon EBS.
Note
Amazon EBS direct APIs does not support public snapshots and local snapshots on Outposts.
This API reference provides detailed information about the actions, data types, parameters, and errors of the EBS direct APIs. For more information about the elements that make up the EBS direct APIs, and examples of how to use them effectively, see Accessing the Contents of an Amazon EBS Snapshot in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide. For more information about the supported AWS Regions, endpoints, and service quotas for the EBS direct APIs, see Amazon Elastic Block Store Endpoints and Quotas in the AWS General Reference.
This document was last published on April 25, 2025.
