Amazon Elastic Block Store Documentation

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) allows you to create storage volumes and attach them to Amazon EC2 instances. Once attached, you can create a file system on top of these volumes, run a database, or use them in any other way you would use block storage. Amazon EBS volumes are placed in a specific Availability Zone where they are replicated to help protect you from the failure of a single component. All EBS volume types offer durable snapshot capabilities.

With lifecycle management, you can create a policy designed to clean up snapshots regularly to help keep costs under control. Simply tag your EBS volumes and start creating Lifecycle policies for creation and management of backups.

Elastic Volumes is a feature that allows you to adapt your volumes as the needs of your applications change. Elastic Volumes helps you to dynamically increase capacity, tune performance, and change the type of any new or existing current generation volume. This helps you to right-size your deployment and adapt to performance changes.
The Elastic Volumes feature makes it easier to adapt your resources to changing application demands, giving you confidence that you can make modifications in the future as your business needs change.

Amazon EBS is designed to help you save point-in-time snapshots of your volumes to Amazon S3. Amazon EBS Snapshots are designed to be stored incrementally: such that only the blocks that have changed after your last snapshot are saved, and you are billed only for the changed blocks. If you have a device with 100 GB of data but only 5 GB has changed after your last snapshot, a subsequent snapshot consumes only 5 additional GB and you are billed only for the additional 5 GB of snapshot storage, even though both the earlier and later snapshots appear complete.

• Direct read access of EBS Snapshots - The service is designed so customers can use EBS direct APIs for Snapshots to read data off snapshots and identify differences between two EBS snapshots without needing to create EBS volumes and EC2 instances. EBS direct APIs for Snapshots help backup partners to track incremental changes on EBS volumes more efficiently, providing faster backup times and more granular recovery point objectives (RPOs) to customers at a lower cost.
• Creating EBS snapshots from any block storage - EBS direct APIs are designed so you can create EBS snapshots directly from any block storage data, regardless of where it resides, including data on-premises, and quickly recover into EBS volumes. This helps you to meet your disaster recovery objectives in Amazon Web Services at lower costs.
  
• Access to Amazon EBS volume data - The service is designed so that after a volume is created from a snapshot, there is no need to wait for all of the data to transfer from Amazon S3 to your Amazon EBS volume before your attached instance can start accessing the volume. Amazon EBS Snapshots implement lazy loading so that you can begin using them right away.
• Full performance on EBS volumes restored from snapshots - For an additional hourly charge, you can enable Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) capability for low latency access to data restored from snapshots. You can enable FSR on snapshots you own or those shared with you. EBS volumes restored from FSR-enabled snapshots quickly receive their full performance.
  
• Resizing Amazon EBS volumes - There are two methods that can be used to resize an Amazon EBS volume. If you create a new volume based on a snapshot, you can specify a larger size for the new volume. With the Elastic Volumes feature you can dynamically grow live volumes without the use of snapshots. Make certain that your file system and application supports resizing a device.
• Sharing Amazon EBS Snapshots - Amazon EBS Snapshots’ shareability makes it easy for you to share data with your co-workers or others in the Amazon Web Services community. Authorized users can create their own Amazon EBS volumes based on your Amazon EBS shared snapshots; your original snapshot remains intact. If you choose, you can also make your data available publicly to all Amazon Web Services users.
  
• Copying Amazon EBS Snapshots across Amazon Web Services China regions - Amazon EBS’s ability to copy snapshots across Amazon Web Services China regions makes it easier to leverage multiple Amazon Web Services China regions for geographical expansion, data center migration, and disaster recovery. You can copy any snapshot accessible to you: snapshots you created; snapshots shared with you; and snapshots from the Amazon Marketplace, VM Import/Export, and Amazon Storage Gateway.
  

For an additional low, hourly fee, customers can launch certain Amazon EC2 instance types as EBS-optimized instances. EBS-optimized instances enable EC2 instances to use the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume.

Amazon EBS offers a higher durability volume (io2), that is designed to provide 99.999% durability. This makes io2 ideal for business-critical applications such as SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2 that will benefit from higher uptime. All other Amazon EBS volumes are designed to provided 99.8%-99.9% durability.

Amazon EBS encryption offers encryption of EBS data volumes, boot volumes and snapshots. EBS encryption is designed to help with data at rest security by encrypting your data volumes, boot volumes and snapshots using Amazon-managed keys or keys you create and manage using the Amazon Key Management Service (KMS). In addition, encryption is designed to occur on the servers that host EC2 instances, to help encrypt your data as it moves between EC2 instances and EBS data and boot volumes.

Customers can enable Multi-Attach on an EBS Provisioned IOPS io2 or io1 volume to allow a volume to be concurrently attached to up to sixteen Nitro-based EC2 instances within the same Availability Zone. Multi-Attach makes it easier to achieve higher application availability for applications that manage storage consistency from multiple writers. Each attached instance is designed to have full read and write permission to the shared volume. Applications using Multi-Attach need to provide IO fencing for storage consistency.

For additional information about service controls, security features and functionalities, including, as applicable, information about storing, retrieving, modifying, restricting, and deleting data, please see https://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/. This additional information does not form part of the Documentation for purposes of the Sinnet Customer Agreement for Amazon Web Services (Beijing Region), Western Cloud Data Customer Agreement for Amazon Web Services (Ningxia Region) or other agreement between you and Sinnet or NWCD governing your use of services of Amazon Web Services China Regions.