Amazon EBS persistent block storage for Amazon EC2 instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
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Amazon EBS persistent block storage for Amazon EC2 instances

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides scalable, high-performance block storage resources that can be used with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. With Amazon EBS, you can create and manage the following block storage resources:

  • Amazon EBS volumes — These are storage volumes that you attach to Amazon EC2 instances. After you attach a volume to an instance, you can use it in the same way you would use block storage. The instance can interact with the volume just as it would with a local drive.

  • Amazon EBS snapshots — These are point-in-time backups of Amazon EBS volumes that persist independently from the volume itself. You can create snapshots to back up the data on your Amazon EBS volumes. You can then restore new volumes from those snapshots at any time.

You can create and attach Amazon EBS volumes to an instance during launch, and you can create and attach EBS volumes to an instance at any time after launch. And you can create snapshots from a volume at any time after creation.

For more information about working with volumes and snapshots, see the Amazon EBS User Guide.