Amazon EBS
AWS Cloud
Get Started with Amazon EBS

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).

Persistent block storage for Amazon EC2 delivering capabilities and performance for the most demanding applications

Hig Performance Volumes

High Performance Volumes

Choose between SSD-backed or HDD-backed volumes that can deliver the performance you need for your most demanding applications.

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Availability

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.

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Encryption

Encryption

Amazon EBS encryption provides seamless support for data-at-rest and data-in-transit between EC2 instances and EBS volumes.

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Access Management

Access Management

Amazon’s flexible access control policies allow you to specify who can access which EBS volumes ensuring secure access to your data.

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Snapshots

Snapshots

Protect your data by creating point-in-time snapshots of EBS volumes, which are backed up to Amazon S3 for long-term durability.

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Elastic Volumes

Elastic Volumes

Dynamically increase capacity, tune performance, and change the type of live EBS volumes. 

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Highly available, high performance, persistent block storage for Amazon EC2.

Reliable, Secure Storage

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.

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Consistent, Low-latency Performance

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.

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Backup, Restore, Innovate

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.

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Quickly Scale Up, Easily Scale Down

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.

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Geographical Flexibility

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.

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Optimized Performance

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.

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Amazon EBS technology is a critical infrastructure component for today's hottest companies across every industry.

Amazon EBS is an excellent choice for applications that need persistent block storage ideal for databases, data warehousing, big data applications and other low latency interactive applications that demand the highest IOPS or throughput and low latency with consistent, predictable performance.

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.

Learn about test and development environments in AWS

NoSQL Databases

Amazon EBS volumes provide the consistent and low-latency performance your application needs when running NoSQL databases.

Learn how to leverage Provisioned IOPS for MongoDB

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.

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Get Started for Free