Instance Store vs. Elastic Block Store⚓︎
Preface⚓︎
Since I'm currently going through the AWS Certified Solutions Architect course offered by Linux Academy, I'm going to need to write things out so that they make a bit more sense to me. Today, it's going to be the differences between Instance Stores and Elastic Block Stores.
Instance Store⚓︎
- Provides temporary block level storage for an EC2 instance.
- Ephemeral; best used to store data temporarily that frequently changes.
- ex. buffers, cache or scratch data.
- Data will not survive if the instance is stopped, terminated or if the underlying drive just fails.
Elastic Block Store⚓︎
- Provides either SSD or traditional HDD backed volumes, depending on need, performance requirements and/or price.
- SSD volumes:
- Best for transactional workloads such as frequent read / write operations.
- Two types of SSDs — General purposed (gp2) and Provisioned IOPS (io1).
- General purpose favors balance of price and performance.
- IOPS favors high performance (mission-critical low-latency / high-throughput)
- HDD volumes:
- Best for larger streaming workloads where throughput is more desirable than IOPS.
- Two types of HDDs — Throughput optimized (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1).
- Throughput optimized is better used towards hot storage where data is frequently accessed and throughput is essential.
- Cold HDD is low cost storage designed for less frequently accessed workloads such as archiving.
I'm not going to get into IOPS or I/O credit balances since I think those topics require their own page(s). This should serve as a great reference since my understanding after watching the video was still a bit hazy.
Next up — EBS Snapshots