Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for EC2 Instances.  Unlike some other types of storage volumes, it doesn’t get deleted when you terminate or stop the EC2 Instance it’s attached to.

Once you create an EBS volume, it automatically gets replicated within the Availability Zone to offer high availability and durability.  You can scale usage up or down within minutes, and pay for only what you provision.

You can think of the EC2 as the virtual machine/server, and EBS as the virtual hard drive you attach to the EC2 Instance.

It benefits application workloads that require fine tuning for performance, cost, and capacity.

Typical use cases include hosting databases, big data analytics engines, data warehousing applications, and stream and log processing applications.

Amazon EBS Volume Types

Amazon EBS has different “Volume Types” like Amazon S3 has Storage Classes, for different uses and price points. You can take a deeper dive into Amazon EBS’s volume types here: Amazon EBS Volume Types

• Solid State Drives (SSD): General Purpose SSD, Provisioned IOPS SSD
• Hard Disk Drives (HDD): Throughput Optimized HDD, Cold HDD
• Previous generation: Magnetic

Resources

• Amazon Elastic Block Store (AWS)
• Amazon EBS Volume Types (AWS)
• EBS Pricing (AWS KB)