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Amazon EBS types and use cases in AWS

What is Amazon EBS?

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a block storage service designed for use with EC2 instances. Think of it as a virtual hard drive you can attach to your EC2 server. It provides persistent storage, meaning that your data remains intact even if the EC2 instance stops or terminates (unless you explicitly delete it).

Unlike ephemeral instance store volumes which are wiped when the instance stops, EBS volumes persist independently of the EC2 lifecycle.


Key Features of EBS

  1. Persistent Storage – Data stays even if the instance is stopped.
  2. Scalable – Volumes can be resized and adjusted for performance.
  3. Replicated within an AZ – Provides durability against hardware failure.
  4. Snapshots – You can take point‑in‑time backups stored in Amazon S3.
  5. Encrypted – Integrated with KMS for data encryption at rest and in transit.
  6. Attach/Detach – Volumes can be attached, detached, or shifted between instances within the same availability zone.

Types of Amazon EBS Volumes & Their Use Cases

1. General Purpose SSD (gp2 / gp3)

  • Description: Balanced price/performance.
  • Performance: Baseline IOPS with burst capability (gp2), customizable IOPS & throughput (gp3).
  • Use Cases:
    • Boot volumes for EC2
    • Development and test environments
    • Small to medium databases
    • Web applications

2. Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1 / io2)

  • Description: Highest performance SSD with guaranteed IOPS. io2 has even higher durability.
  • Performance: Up to millions of IOPS, designed for mission‑critical workloads.
  • Use Cases:
    • High‑transaction databases (Oracle, SQL Server, SAP HANA)
    • Critical applications requiring consistent I/O performance
    • Latency‑sensitive OLTP systems

3. Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)

  • Description: Low‑cost HDD optimized for large, sequential workloads.
  • Performance: High throughput but lower IOPS (not suitable for random access).
  • Use Cases:
    • Big data processing (Hadoop, Spark)
    • Data warehousing
    • Streaming logs
    • ETL workloads

4. Cold HDD (sc1)

  • Description: Lowest cost per GB, designed for infrequently accessed data.
  • Performance: Lowest IOPS and throughput among EBS types.
  • Use Cases:
    • Infrequent data access
    • Archival storage within EC2
    • Backup repositories

5. Magnetic (Standard Volumes – Legacy)

  • Description: Old generation, rarely used now, replaced by other types.
  • Use Cases:
    • Only for older workloads that haven’t been migrated.

Common Use Cases of EBS

  • Hosting application data that needs persistence.
  • Running relational (MySQL/PostgreSQL) or NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra) databases.
  • Boot volumes for EC2 machines.
  • Creating snapshots for backups and disaster recovery.
  • Scalable storage for analytics or big‑data pipelines.
  • High IOPS storage for enterprise workloads like SAP or Oracle.