Created EBS volume for the first time

Mohammed Mubashir — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 23:25:29 +0000

Created EBS volume for the first time

I’ve been learning AWS, and today I created my first EBS volume. Until now I had only launched EC2 instances, so I wanted to understand how storage works when you need data to stay safe even if the instance goes away.

What is EBS?
Elastic Block Store (EBS) is like a virtual hard drive you can attach to an EC2 instance. The data lives separately from the instance, so it stays even if you stop the instance.

What I did

1)Launched an EC2 instance named mo in the eu-north-1b Availability Zone

2)Went to EC2, then Volumes, then Create volume,Created a 10 GB volume

3)Attached the volume to my instance mo

4)Connected to the instance and checked the new disk with "lsblk"
Before:

After:

The mistake I made
My instance mo was in eu-north-1b, but I accidentally created the volume in eu-north-1a. When I tried to attach it, the volume didn’t show up as an option for my instance. I realized that an EBS volume can only attach to an instance in the same Availability Zone. So I created a new volume in eu-north-1b, and this time it attached without any problem.

What I learned

Always check your instance’s Availability Zone before creating a volume
Unused volumes still cost money, so I should delete the wrong one (eu-north-1a) so I don’t pay for it

If you’ve worked with EBS, what’s one mistake you made as a beginner? 🤔💭🎉

DEV Community: Mohammed Mubashir

Created EBS volume for the first time

[Boost]

Deploying a React+Vite App on AWS EC2