EBS - An Hard-Drive to EC2 instance

💾 Understanding Amazon EBS: The Hard Drive for Your EC2 Instance

When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance (your virtual computer in the cloud), it needs a hard drive—just like your laptop does. That’s where Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) comes in.

Think of EBS as a virtual hard drive for your EC2 instance. It stores your operating system, applications, logs, and files persistently—even after you stop or restart your EC2 machine.

🔧 What Can You Do with EBS?

Create, delete, resize, and take snapshots (backups) of your storage
Use it as the boot partition—where the OS is installed
Attach multiple EBS volumes to a single EC2 instance if needed
Start and stop EC2 instances freely because the OS and data stay saved in EBS

So in short:
"EBS gives a hard drive to my EC2 processor."

📦 Creating Attaching and Using an EBS Volume

After creating a new EBS volume:

Attach it to your EC2 instance (from AWS Console or CLI)
Format it – Choose a file system like ext4 or xfs
Mount it – Tell the OS where it should appear in the file directory (Just like plugging in a USB and seeing a new folder appear)

📸 Snapshots: Cloud Backups

EBS allows you to create snapshots, which are like full backups of your EBS volume at a point in time.

You can even create a new volume from an existing snapshot
Great for backups, recovery, and cloning environments

🚀 Final Thoughts

Amazon EBS is the backbone of EC2 storage. It’s flexible, persistent, and behaves just like the physical hard disks we use every day—but in the cloud.

Whether you're launching a web server or building a complex app, EBS makes sure your EC2 has the storage it needs to run smoothly.