What kind of data generates from EC2 to EBS in AWS

Question

Hi people,

This is more a generic question about EC2  and EBS.

I think I have a good understanding of the 'theoretical' explanation of EC2. It is persistent block storage that you attach to an EC2 instance, and you basically use it as a virtual hard disk, plus you can use it to create snapshots in order to launch instances with the same image as the volume as you had in the first place etc etc

But can someone please explain what kind of data you generate from EC2 and gets stored on EBS? I understand it depends on what you are hosting with your instance but is it like the metrics that you can see from the monitoring? (cpu utilization etc) Or is it more user data that you generate from the web server? Would be great if someone could clarify

Answer 1

Hi,

First thing is EC2 is a compute service whereas EBS is a Storage service. EC2 Instances can be launched using either Elastic Block Store (EBS) or Instance Store volume as root volumes and additional volumes.

Now, an instance store is ephemeral storage that provides temporary block level storage for your instance. Instance store is ideal for temporary storage like buffers, caches, and other temporary content. After every reboot data will be lost.

And an “EBS-backed” instance means that the root device for an instance launched from the AMI is an EBS volume created from an EBS snapshot. It behaves like a raw, unformatted, external block device that can be attached to a single instance and are not physically attached to the Instance host computer. The Volume persists independently from the running life of an instance. After an EBS volume is attached to an instance, you can use it like any other physical hard drive. As EBS provides physical hard disk in instance, so it's depends on us what we want to store.

Hope it will help you

Thank You