Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Each Amazon EBS volume is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability. Amazon EBS volumes offer the consistent and low-latency performance needed to run your workloads. With Amazon EBS, you can scale your usage up or down within minutes – all while paying a low price for only what you provision.
Amazon EBS is designed for application workloads that benefit from fine tuning for performance, cost and capacity. Typical use cases include Big Data analytics engines (like the Hadoop/HDFS ecosystem and Amazon EMR clusters), relational and NoSQL databases (like Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL or Cassandra and MongoDB), stream and log processing applications (like Kafka and Splunk), and data warehousing applications (like Vertica and Teradata).
High Performance Volumes
Choose between SSD-backed or HDD-backed volumes that can deliver the performance you need for your most demanding applications.
Availability
Each Amazon EBS volume is designed for 99.999% availability and automatically replicates within its Availability Zone to protect your applications from component failure.
Encryption
Amazon EBS encryption provides seamless support for data-at-rest and data-in-transit between EC2 instances and EBS volumes.
Access Management
Amazon’s flexible access control policies allow you to specify who can access which EBS volumes ensuring secure access to your data.
Snapshots
Protect your data by creating point-in-time snapshots of EBS volumes, which are backed up to Amazon S3 for long-term durability.
Elastic Volumes
Dynamically increase capacity, tune performance, and change the type of live EBS volumes.
Reliable, Secure Storage
Each Amazon EBS volume provides redundancies within its Availability Zone to protect against failures. Encryption and access control policies deliver a strong defense-in-depth security strategy for your data.
Consistent, Low-latency Performance
Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes and Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes deliver low-latency through SSD technology and consistent I/O performance scaled to the needs of your application.
Backup, Restore, Innovate
Protect your data by taking point-in-time snapshots of your Amazon EBS volumes providing long-term durability for your data. Boost the agility of your business by using Amazon EBS snapshots to create new EC2 instances.
Quickly Scale Up, Easily Scale Down
Amazon EBS allows you to optimize your volumes for capacity, performance, or cost giving you the ability to dynamically adapt to the changing needs of your business.
Geographic Flexibility
Amazon EBS provides the ability to copy snapshots across AWS regions, enabling geographical expansion, data center migration, and disaster recovery providing flexibility and protecting for your business.
Optimized Performance
An Amazon EBS–optimized instance provides dedicated network capacity for Amazon EBS volumes. This provides the best performance for your EBS volumes by minimizing network contention between EBS and your instance.
Relational Databases
Amazon EBS scales with your performance needs, whether you are supporting millions of gaming customers or billions of e-commerce transactions. Databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL are widely deployed on Amazon EBS.
Learn about Supercell's use of high-performance relational databases on Amazon EBS
Enterprise Applications
Amazon EBS meets the diverse needs of your organization by providing reliable block storage to run mission-critical applications such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint.
Learn about LIONSGATE’s deployment of SAP and SharePoint on Amazon EBS
Development and Test
Amazon EBS enables your organization to be more agile and responsive to customer needs. Provision, duplicate, scale, or archive your development, test and production environments with a few clicks.
NoSQL Databases
Amazon EBS volumes provide the consistent and low-latency performance your application needs when running NoSQL databases.
Business Continuity
Minimize data loss and recovery time by regularly backing up your data and log files across different geographic regions. Copy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and EBS Snapshots to launch applications in new AWS regions.
Learn about Haven Power’s use of Amazon EBS as part of their business continuity plan
It's easy to get started with Amazon EBS. Follow our console walkthrough to deploy your first EBS volume in a few clicks.
AWS Free Tier includes 30GB of Storage, 2 million I/Os, and 1GB of snapshot storage with EBS.
