EC2 Storage

Amazon EC2 provides flexible, cost-effective, and easy-to-use storage solutions for your compute instances. Each option offers a unique combination of performance, durability, and cost. You can mix and match these storage types to meet your application’s requirements.

Common EC2 storage options:

• Instance Store
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
• Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

1. Instance Store

Instance Store volumes are temporary, high-performance disks physically attached to the host server. They deliver very low-latency I/O but are ephemeral.

Key characteristics:

• Ephemeral storage tied to instance lifecycle
• Ideal for scratch data, buffers, and caches
• Automatic deletion on stop/terminate (reboot retains data)

Use cases:

• Temporary caches (e.g., in-memory databases, processing buffers)
• Scratch disks for big data workloads
• High-speed swap or buffer space

2. Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

Amazon EFS is a fully managed, elastic NFS file system that can be mounted concurrently by multiple EC2 instances across Availability Zones.

Features:

• Elastic capacity: grows and shrinks as you add or remove files
• Shared access: mount the same file system on multiple instances
• Fully managed: AWS handles provisioning, patching, and maintenance
• Supports NFSv4.1 and NFSv4.2 protocols

Common commands:

# Create an EFS file system
aws efs create-file-system --performance-mode generalPurpose

# Mount on Linux instance
sudo yum install -y amazon-efs-utils
sudo mkdir /mnt/efs
sudo mount -t efs fs-0123456789abcdef0:/ /mnt/efs

Use cases:

• Web serving and content management
• Shared development or build environments
• Data science, analytics, and media workflows

3. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Amazon EBS offers persistent, block-level storage that you can attach to a single EC2 instance at a time. Volumes behave like raw block devices you can format, mount, and use as you would an on-premises disk.

Core features:

• Data Persistence: volumes persist independently of the EC2 instance
• High Availability: data is replicated within the same AZ to prevent hardware failures
• Encryption: AES-256 at rest and in transit (managed with AWS KMS)
• Snapshots: create point-in-time backups stored in Amazon S3
• Dynamically adjustable: modify size, volume type, and IOPS without detaching

Sample commands:

# Create a 100 GiB gp3 volume in us-east-1a
aws ec2 create-volume \
  --availability-zone us-east-1a \
  --size 100 \
  --volume-type gp3

# Attach the volume to an instance
aws ec2 attach-volume \
  --volume-id vol-0123456789abcdef0 \
  --instance-id i-0abcdef1234567890 \
  --device /dev/xvdf

Storage Comparison at a Glance

Links and References

• AWS EC2 Instance Store Documentation
• Amazon EBS Documentation
• Amazon EFS Documentation
• AWS Key Management Service
• Amazon S3