Monday, February 17, 2025

What Is Amazon EBS Volume? Benefits And EBS Volume Pricing

Amazon EBS volumes are considered ephemeral storage

What is Amazon EBS Volume?

You can connect a robust, block-level storage device to your instances called an Amazon EBS volume. An instance can be used just like a conventional hard disk once a volume has been attached to it. Volumes in EBS are adjustable. You can alter the provisioned IOPS capacity, change the volume type on live production volumes, and dynamically increase the size of current-generation volumes linked to current-generation instance types.

Amazon EBS volumes can be used as the main storage for data that needs to be updated often, like a database application’s storage or an instance’s system drive. Additionally, throughput-intensive applications that conduct continuous disk scans can make use of them. EBS volumes endure beyond an EC2 instance’s operational duration.

A single instance can have more than one EBS volume attached to it. Both the instance and the volume need to be in the same Availability Zone. You can use Multi-Attach to mount a volume to numerous instances simultaneously, depending on the volume and instance types.

EBS Volume types

General Purpose SSD (gp2 and gp3), Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1 and io2), Throughput Optimized HDD (st1), Cold HDD (sc1), and Magnetic (standard) are the volume kinds offered by Amazon EBS. Because they vary in price and performance attributes, you can adjust the cost and performance of your storage to suit the requirements of your applications.

There is a limit on how much storage you can use overall with your account.

Amazon EBS volume features and advantages

Instance store volumes do not offer the advantages that EBS volumes do.

  • Access to data
  • Data Persistence
  • Encrypting data
  • Security of data
  • Snapshots
  • Adaptability

Access to data

To guard against data loss from a single hardware component failure, an EBS volume is automatically replicated inside its Availability Zone when it is created. Any EC2 instance inside the same Availability Zone can have an EBS volume attached to it. Like a hard disk or other physical device, a volume appears as a native block device when it has been attached. The instance can then use the volume in the same way as it would a local drive. Applications can be installed when you connect to the instance and format the EBS disk using a file system, such as NTFS for Windows instances or Ext4 for Linux instances.

You can boost I/O and throughput performance by striping data across the volumes when you attach multiple volumes to a named device.

Up to 16 Nitro-based instances can have io1 and io2 EBS volumes attached. If not, a single instance can have an EBS volume attached to it.

For free, you can obtain monitoring information for your EBS volumes, including root device volumes for instances that are supported by EBS.

Data Persistence

Off-instance storage that can continue beyond an instance’s lifespan is known as an EBS volume. As long as the data remains there, you will still be charged for the volume usage.

If you uncheck the Delete on Termination check box when you configure EBS volumes for your instance on the EC2 dashboard, EBS volumes that are connected to a running instance will immediately separate from the instance with their data intact when the instance is terminated. A speedy recovery is then possible by reattaching the volume to a fresh instance. The volume(s) will be deleted when the EC2 instance is terminated if the Delete on Termination check box is selected. It is possible to stop and restart an instance that is backed by EBS without changing the data on the associated disk. During the stop-start cycle, the volume stays in place.

This allows you to use the processing and storage resources only when needed, allowing you to process and keep the data on your volume indefinitely. Until the volume is specifically removed, the data remains on it. Before being allocated to a new volume, zeroes or cryptographically pseudorandom data are utilized to overwrite the actual block storage used by deleted EBS volumes. You should think about manually encrypting your data or storing it on a volume that is encrypted by Amazon EBS if you are working with sensitive data.

When an instance is terminated, the root EBS volume that was created and associated to it upon launch is automatically removed. By setting the value of the DeleteOnTermination flag to false when you start the instance, you can change this behavior. This changed value allows you to attach the volume to another instance and makes it persist even after the instance is terminated.

Additional EBS volumes produced and associated to an instance at launch are by default not removed upon termination of that instance. By setting the value of the DeleteOnTermination flag to true when you start the instance, you can change this behavior. When the instance is stopped, the volumes are erased due to this altered value.

Data encryption

You can use the Amazon EBS encryption capability to build encrypted EBS volumes for easier data encryption. Encryption is supported by every EBS volume type. For regulated or audited data and applications, encrypted EBS volumes can be used to satisfy a variety of data-at-rest encryption regulations. 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard algorithms (AES-256) and a key infrastructure under Amazon management are used for Amazon EBS encryption. Encryption of data-in-transit from the EC2 instance to Amazon EBS storage takes place on the server hosting the EC2 instance.

AWS KMS keys are used by Amazon EBS encryption to create encrypted volumes and any snapshots that are made from them. A default AWS managed KMS key is generated for you automatically the first time you create an encrypted EBS disk in a Region. Unless a customer-managed key is created and utilized, this key is used for Amazon EBS encryption. You have more flexibility when you build your own customer controlled key. You may generate, rotate, disable, define access rules, and audit the encryption keys that are used to safeguard your data.

Data Security

You are shown Amazon EBS volumes as unformatted, raw block devices. These devices are logical devices built on the EBS infrastructure, and before a client uses or re-uses them, the Amazon EBS service makes sure that the devices are logically empty (that is, that the raw blocks are zeroed or that they contain cryptographically pseudorandom data).

You can do this on Amazon EBS if your procedures call for all data to be deleted using a particular technique, either before or after use (or both), as outlined in DoD 5220.22-M (National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual) or NIST 800-88 (Guidelines for Media Sanitization). The Amazon EBS service’s underlying storage media will be affected by such block-level activity.

Snapshots

Any EBS volume can be backed up using Amazon EBS, and a duplicate of the volume’s contents can be written to Amazon S3 and redundantly stored in several Availability Zones. To take a snapshot, the volume does not have to be connected to an active instance. You can take a snapshot of a volume on a regular basis to use as a baseline for future volumes when you write data to it. You can relocate volumes between Availability Zones or create several new EBS volumes using these snapshots. Automatic encryption is used for snapshots of encrypted EBS volumes.

A new volume created from a snapshot is a perfect replica of the volume that existed at the moment the snapshot was captured. EBS volumes are automatically encrypted when they are generated from encrypted snapshots. This feature allows you to create a duplicate volume in a different Availability Zone, which you can designate if you’d like. The snapshots can be made public or shared with particular AWS accounts.

The size of the data being backed up, not the size of the source volume, determines the charges you incur while creating snapshots in Amazon S3. Incremental snapshots are subsequent images of the same volume. Only the updated and new data that has been written to the volume since the last snapshot is included, and you are only billed for this updated and new data.

Because snapshots are incremental backups, they only save the volume’s blocks that have changed since your last snapshot. Only the 5 GiB of modified data is written to Amazon S3 if you have a volume with 100 GiB of data and only 5 GiB of that data has changed since your last snapshot. The snapshot deletion procedure is made to require that you keep only the most current snapshot, even when snapshots are saved progressively.

You can tag your volumes and snapshots with any metadata you like to help organize and manage them.

You can use AWS Backup or Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to automatically backup your volumes.

Adaptability

Live configuration changes during production are supported by EBS volumes. Without affecting service, you can change the volume type, volume size, and IOPS capacity.

EBS Volume pricing

You just pay for what you provision when using Amazon EBS. Below is a list of prices for Amazon EBS volumes. If you need more information see Amazon EBS pricing page.

Volume TypePrice
General Purpose SSD (gp3) – Storage$0.096/GB-month
General Purpose SSD (gp3) – IOPS3,000 IOPS free and $0.006/provisioned IOPS-month over 3,000
General Purpose SSD (gp3) – Throughput125 MB/s free and $0.048/provisioned MB/s-month over 125
General Purpose SSD (gp2) Volumes$0.12 per GB-month of provisioned storage
Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) – Storage$0.138/GB-month
Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) – IOPS$0.072/provisioned IOPS-month up to 32,000 IOPS
  $0.050/provisioned IOPS-month from 32,001 to 64,000 IOPS
  $0.035/provisioned IOPS-month for greater than 64,000 IOPS
Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) Volumes$0.138 per GB-month of provisioned storage AND $0.072 per provisioned IOPS-month
Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) Volumes$0.054 per GB-month of provisioned storage
Cold HDD (sc1) Volumes$0.018 per GB-month of provisioned storage
Thota nithya
Thota nithya
Thota Nithya has been writing Cloud Computing articles for govindhtech from APR 2023. She was a science graduate. She was an enthusiast of cloud computing.
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