What is EBS in AWS?What is Amazon EBS? Types of Elastic Block Store in AWS ExplainedWhat is EBS in AWS?

September 4, 2025 by [email protected]

EBS is like a hard drive or SSD for your EC2 instances in the cloud.

Key Points:

• Block-level storage service for Amazon EC2.
• You can attach an EBS volume to an EC2 instance and use it just like a disk.
• Data stored in EBS is persistent (it remains even if you stop or restart the instance).
• You can detach a volume from one EC2 instance and attach it to another.
• Supports snapshots for backup and disaster recovery.

Common Use Cases:

• Running databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL).
• Storing application or system files.
• Handling big data or analytics workloads.

👉 In short:
EBS = Durable, scalable, and secure storage for EC2 instances.

Types of Amazon EBS volumes.
AWS offers different EBS volume types based on performance and cost.

Great 👍 Let’s go through the types of Amazon EBS volumes.
AWS offers different EBS volume types based on performance and cost.

1. General Purpose SSD (gp3 / gp2)

• Best for: Most workloads (web servers, dev/test, small databases).
• gp3 is the latest generation, cheaper and more flexible than gp2.
• Balanced price and performance.
• Can independently scale IOPS and throughput with gp3.

2. Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 / io1)

• Best for: High-performance workloads like large relational or NoSQL databases.
• Designed for mission-critical, low-latency apps.
• Offers very high IOPS (up to 256,000) and durability (99.999%).
• More expensive than gp volumes.

3. Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)

• Best for: Big data, data warehouses, log processing.
• Optimized for sequential throughput rather than random I/O.
• Lower cost than SSD.
• Not ideal for small random reads/writes.

4. Cold HDD (sc1)

• Best for: Infrequent access workloads (archiving, backups).
• Lowest cost EBS option.
• Good for large, cold datasets.
• Lowest performance among all types.

📌 Summary Table:

👉 In short:

• gp3 = Default choice for most workloads.
• io2 = For critical, high-performance databases.
• st1 = For big, sequential data.
• sc1 = For rarely accessed, cheapest storage.