What is AMAZON EC2 Instance Store?
EC2 instance store provides temporary block-level storage for your instance. This storage is located on disks that are physically attached to the host computer. It is used for the temporary storage of information, where you need high-performance hardware disk with low latency such as buffers, caches, scratch data, and other temporary content.
Difference between EC2 Instance Store and Elastic Block Store (EBS)
| Elastic Block Store (EBS) | Instance Store |
|---|---|
| Elastic Block Storage is the type of persistence store (persistence store refers to data storage where data can persist independently from the life of an EC2 instance) | EC2 instance store is the type of ephemeral storage ( ephemeral storage == temporary storage which, refers to data storage where data gets deleted when an instance is terminated. When you stop an instance, the data on any instance store volumes is erased). |
| EBS volumes are network drives that result in slow performance. | Instance store physically attached to the host computer that result in high-performance and low latency. |
| It is independent of the running life of an EC2 instance. You can detach the EBS volume from one instance and attach it to another instance. | During the launch of the EC2 instance, you can specify the instance store and it is copied to the root volume (typically sda1). Later you can’t add a new instance storage volume to that EC2 instance. |
| EBS volume snapshots can be created and copied to another AWS region. It is designed for high availability and disaster recovery. | The data in an instance store persists only during the lifetime of its associated instance. If an instance reboots (intentionally or unintentionally), data in the instance store persists. However, data in the instance store is lost under any of the following circumstances: The underlying disk drive fails, The instance stops, The instance hibernates, The instance terminates |
| EBS volumes are ideal for storing any kind of data such as relational and NoSQL databases, enterprise applications, containers, applications, etc. | Instance store is ideal for temporary storage like buffers, caches, and other temporary content. |
What is AMAZON EC2 Instance Store