Each EC2 instance needs storage to store data and run operations. In AWS this is done via network hard drives witch can be attached to your EC2 instance. The network drives are called EBS (Elastic block storage). These drives allow us to persist data even after an EC2 instance is terminated and are available in a specific availability zone. Following are the properties of an EBS volume.
Network drive
It means that the storage is connected to our EBS volumes on the network. This provides us with immense flexibility as we can join one EBS volume to another very easily. We just point it to another EC2 instance.
Bound to an Availability zone
If you put your EBS volume in one availability zone we cannot move it to another. If you provision it to ap-northeast-1 then you can't use it in ap-northeast-2 there are some workarounds which we will study later.
Flexible Capacity
You can set the capacity of EBS volume via size in GB's and IOPS(input output operations per second).
How to port EBS data over different Availability Zones.
There is a provision by which you can backup your EC2 instances called EBS snapshots. These are very helpful in taking backups as they are async and just saves the changed data from last snapshot. These being async if you want to take a full backup of an EBS volume its recommended that you detach your volume before taking a backup. these snapshots are very helpful because using these we can move data to different availability zone. You can take an EBS snapshot of your volume in an availability zone restore your EBS volume from that Snapshot in another availability zone and voila we transferred our EBS volumes from one availability zone to another.
Next up we will do some hands on exercises to learn more about EBS volumes.
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