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Amazon EC2 Storage - Basics

Let's have a look at EC2 Storage. There are different storage options for EC2 instances.

💾 EBS Volumes

An EBS volume is a network drive that can be attached to an instance. It stores data even after the termination of the instance, when you configure it to. EBS volumes are bound to a specific availabilty zone. If you want to move an EBS volume to a different Availability zone(AZ) you need to create a snapshot first and then copy it to the new AZ. You can also detach an EBS volume to attach it to a different instance.

💾 EC2 Instance Store

The EC2 instance store is a temporary storage for your instance. It is located on disks that are physically attached to the host computer. If you need a high-performance disk, this option is a good choice. The instance store gets deleted when your instance is stopped.

📁 EFS - Elastic File Storage

EFS is a scalable shared file system that can be mounted to a lot of EC2 instances. It works across multiple Availability Zones. EFS Infrequent Access (EFS-IA) is a storage class that is less expensive than EFS Standard. Its fitting when your instance doesn't access your files every day. When you enable Amazon EFS Lifecycle Management for your file system, Amazon EFS will automatically move your files to the lower cost storage class based on the last time they were accessed.

📁 Amazon FSx

Amazon FSx is a service to launch high-performance file systems on AWS. There are three different options: FSx for Lustre, FSx for Windows File Server and FSx for NetApp ONTAP. FSx for Lustre can be used for High-Perfomance Computing (HPC) and needs to run on Linux based instances.

💻 AMI - Amazon Machine image

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is an image from AWS that provides the information required to launch an instance. You can also create your own customized image. On the AWS Marketplace you can find and buy AMIs which have been created by a third party. AMIs can be build from your instances.

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