Which is faster for read access on EC2; local drive or EBS?

Just to add a little to the consensus that is EBS faster… An important point to understand here is that instance storage speed is unpredictable – Amazon makes no guarantees about it. This information comes from the book Cloud Application Architectures by George Reese (which seems pretty good from what I’ve skimmed it so far.) … Read more

Is it possible to change the EBS volume to different availability zones?

From the AWS documentation. When you create an EBS volume in an Availability Zone, it is automatically replicated within that zone to prevent data loss due to failure of any single hardware component. After you create a volume, you can attach it to any EC2 instance in the same Availability Zone. Amazon EBS provides the … Read more

Simple Backup Strategy for Amazon EC2 instances / volumes?

Your approach sounds very good – but I can think of a possible way to improve it. To reduce the impact of data loss since the last backup, and EBS volume failure (unlikely, but still possible) you could store your data on a separate EBS volume than your system files, and back up the data … Read more

Amazon EBS charges calculation

EBS is charged per-second (as of Sept 2017, before that it was per-hour) and it’s against what you allocate. The minimum is 60 seconds. The snapshots size is supposed to only be non-empty blocks since the allocation, and each subsequent snapshot is of the blocks that have changed since the last snapshot. EBS snapshots are … Read more

How are Amazon EBS snapshot’s sizes calculated?

This may answer Q2 (from http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/): Even though the snapshots are saved incrementally, when you delete a snapshot, only the data not needed for any other snapshot is removed. So regardless of which prior snapshots have been deleted, all active snapshots will contain all the information needed to restore the volume In your example after … Read more