EC2 Instance Store Overview
Explore Amazon EC2 instance store volumes to understand their ephemeral nature, ideal use cases, and how they differ from Amazon EBS in terms of performance, cost, and limitations.
When an EC2 instance launches, depending on the instance type, AWS provides access to what’s known as instance store volumes. These are physical disks directly attached to the host machine that runs on a virtual instance. Unlike Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store), a network-attached storage option designed for persistence, instance store is ephemeral.
Instance store volumes are ephemeral and deliver extremely high performance, especially IOPS, because the data does not have to traverse a network. This makes them valuable in situations where temporary, high-throughput storage is beneficial.
In the next section, we’ll take a closer look at how instance store differs from Amazon EBS in terms of functionality and usage.
How instance store differs from Amazon EBS
Although both Amazon EBS and instance store provide block-level storage for EC2 instances, their behavior, lifecycle, and performance profiles are significantly different.
Amazon EBS is designed for persistent storage. This means our data is retained even after the EC2 instance stops or is terminated, making it ideal for databases, long-term logs, and file systems where durability is a requirement. We can detach and reattach an EBS volume to different instances, create snapshots, and scale the storage independently of the instance's lifecycle.
Instance store, by contrast, is ephemeral. The storage is available only while the EC2 instance is running on the same underlying physical host. If the instance is stopped, terminated, or migrated, the data is irreversibly lost. This makes it unsuitable for persistent storage. However, an instance store can achieve extremely low latency and high IOPS for temporary data processing.
Performance comparison: Because instance ...