AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS)

AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a high-performance, block-level storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. It provides persistent storage that can be attached to EC2 instances, functioning like a virtual hard drive for your cloud servers. EBS volumes are…

Key facts

First appeared
2008
Category
technology
Problem solved
AWS Elastic Block Store was created to address the critical limitation of ephemeral storage on early Amazon EC2 instances. Before EBS, if an EC2 instance stopped, rebooted, or terminated, all data stored on its local 'instance store' disappeared, making it impossible to run stateful applications like databases or long-running enterprise applications reliably in the cloud. EBS provided persistent, network-attached block storage that decoupled storage from compute, ensuring data durability even if the EC2 instance failed.
Platforms
AWS Cloud (specifically Amazon EC2)

Related technologies

Notable users

  • Airbnb
  • Capital One
  • Netflix
  • General Electric
  • Epic Games
  • Dow Jones