• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a web service that provides block-level storage volumes for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances.
• Amazon EBS volumes are highly available and reliable storage volumes that can be attached to any running instance and used like a hard drive.
• EBS volumes behave like raw, unformatted block devices.
  • You can mount these volumes as devices on your instances.
  • EBS volumes attached to an instance are exposed as storage volumes that persist independently from the instance's life.
  • You can create a file system on top of these volumes or use them in any way you use a block device (such as a hard drive).
  • You can dynamically change the configuration of a volume attached to an instance.
• We recommend Amazon EBS for data that must be quickly accessible and requires long-term persistence.
• EBS volumes are particularly well-suited for use as the primary storage for file systems, databases, or for any applications that require fine granular updates and access to raw, unformatted, block-level storage.
• EBS is well suited to database-style applications that rely on random reads and writes.
  • In addition, it is a great choice for throughput-intensive applications that perform long, continuous reads and writes.