EBS — or the Amazon Elastic Block Store — is the way you get persistence on most EC2 instances. Let's talk about what EBS is good for, what it's not good for, and why it matters to the EC2 consumer.
EBS is basically a volume system with dynamic attachment. You go into the EC2 system, select an EBS "volume", and attach it to an instance. There are additional ways, such as EBS rooting, to use EBS volumes.
EBS is implemented at Amazon via a Storage Area Network (SAN) that is dynamically attached to your instances. Each EBS "volume" you attach is a portion of the disks that make up the SAN; a portion that can and will be allocated sparsely.
This has performance drawbacks. EBS can be very slow and unresponsive at points (there are no availability guarantees on EC2 for any of its products), so it's important that your EBS-related task can handle intermittent outages even if very small. For the most part, things that need read performance or will block on writes will suffer. There are ways you can mitigate it, such as "striping" volumes, but in practice this is very troublesome.
EBS rooting is where the device that your root-level filesystem lives on is an EBS volume. This is different because instance stores are ethereal, and will disappear after the machine is stopped. Therefore, it is wise to use EBS rooted machines for machines you want to last.
In particular, the major (other than the provisioning, of course) issue is that EBS volumes will not necessarily be available at boot time, so you must mitigate that for any non-root volumes.
We use it for two roles:
We'll talk about the database management in the next article; our support machines are very simple in execution but require a lot of configuration, so automating them is a bit of a bear.
You could do that, but EBS is billed on a per-transaction (writes and reads) basis, and then there is the performance issue. EBS-rooted volumes additionally have a reboot penalty which (at the time of writing) is a dollar. That can get expensive quick! It's probably best to stick to EBS rooting where configuration management is hard and leave the rest to instance stores.
Hopefully this article has been a decent overview of EBS; next time we will cover PostgreSQL management in the cloud!