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Storage Options on AWS: Instance Store, Elastic Block Storage, and Elastic File System
Everything to know about storage variants in the cloud
These days AWS offers over 200 different services and the number is only increasing every year. It is getting hard to keep track of the news despite the excitement of the new features.
Yet some services are the core of AWS. Basic services such as EC2 and S3 are being used extensively by multiple businesses. The essential need for every digital solution is storing data. Data management is one of the pillars of software engineering. Collected information has to be allocated somewhere for later access. If we take any website you will find there a lot of text files, pictures, videos. All of those data have to be stored somewhere. As cloud-based solutions become popular, we need to understand the capabilities of the data-related components on AWS.
Instance Store
When we think about a running server, the first storage type that comes to our mind is an internally connected drive. It has to be fast and high performant. And this is what EC2 instances offer as one of the options. Hence, this type of storage is called “Instance Store”. It is a type of storage that is physically connected with the running EC2 instance and acts as a part of it.
Instance Store indeed has the best performance across the other storage types. However, along with that, it brings critical limitations to it.
First, as you can imagine, the storage is active only during the lifetime of the EC2 instance. Once the EC2 instance stops, terminates, or fails, the data on the drive is lost forever. As it is a part of the EC2 instance, we can’t guarantee that some piece of it stays alive and the other is returned to the pool of resources. In addition to that, it cannot be attached to another EC2 instance or re-attached to the running one in case of an upgrade.
Secondly, the size of this storage is limited only to 10 GB. In the world of modern applications and cloud solutions, it is not much. The Instance Store can be used as a root volume, but this will take extra memory from the maximum available size of 10 GB.
