Amazon EBS allows you to create storage volumes and attach them to Amazon EC2 instances. Once attached, you can create a file system on top of these volumes, run a database, or use them in any other way you would use block storage. Amazon EBS volumes are placed in a specific Availability Zone where they are automatically replicated to protect you from the failure of a single component. All EBS volume types offer durable snapshot capabilities and are designed for 99.999% availability.

Amazon EBS provides a range of options that allow you to optimize storage performance and cost for your workload. These options are divided into two major categories: SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads, such as databases and boot volumes (performance depends primarily on IOPS), and HDD-backed storage for throughput intensive workloads, such as MapReduce and log processing (performance depends primarily on MB/s).

SSD-backed volumes include the highest performance Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) for latency-sensitive transactional workloads and General Purpose SSD (gp2) that balance price and performance for a wide variety of transactional data. HDD-backed volumes include Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) for frequently accessed, throughput intensive workloads and the lowest cost Cold HDD (sc1) for less frequently accessed data.

Elastic Volumes is a feature of Amazon EBS that allows you to dynamically increase capacity, tune performance, and change the type of live volumes with no downtime or performance impact. This allows you to easily right-size your deployment and adapt to performance changes.