Amazon EBS

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a high-performance, persistent block storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. It provides highly available, scalable storage volumes that can be attached to EC2 instances, functioning like a local hard drive but with…

Key facts

First appeared: 2008
Category: technology
Problem solved: EBS addressed the critical need for persistent, highly available, and scalable block-level storage for Amazon EC2 instances, which previously relied on ephemeral instance storage that lost all data upon instance termination or reboot. It enabled running stateful applications and databases in the cloud with enterprise-grade durability and performance.
Platforms: AWS Cloud (specifically Amazon EC2)

Related technologies

Amazon EKS
Databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle)
Amazon RDS (uses EBS internally)
Docker (for persistent container storage)
Amazon EC2
Kubernetes (via CSI drivers)
Operating Systems (Linux, Windows)
File Systems (ext4, XFS, NTFS)

Notable users

Capital One
Amazon.com (internal divisions)
Many other enterprises and startups utilizing AWS
BMW
Airbnb
Netflix