Elastic-Block-Store

Eric Hammond has taught us how to create consistent snapshots of EBS volumes. Amazon has allowed us to use EBS snapshots as AMIs, providing a persistent root filesystem. Wouldn’t it be great if you could use both of these techniques together, to take a consistent snapshot of the root filesystem without stopping the instance? Read on for my instructions how to create an XFS-formatted boot-from-EBS AMI, allowing consistent live snapshots of the root filesystem to be created. ...

There are many posts about how to mount an EBS volume to your EC2 instance during the startup process. But requiring an instance to use a specific EBS volume has limitations that make the technique unsuitable for large-scale use. In this article I present a more flexible technique that uses an EBS snapshot instead. Update December 2009: Amazon released native support for automatically mounting EBS volumes created from a snapshot, as part of supporting the boot-from-EBS feature. The techniques in this article are no longer necessary. But they’re cool anyway. ...

EBS offers the ability to have a “virtual disk drive” whose lifetime is independent of any EC2 instance. You can attach EBS drives to any running instance, and any changes made to the drive will persist even after the instance is terminated. You can also set up an EBS drive to be the root filesystem for an instance - giving you the benefits of an always-on instance but without paying for it when it’s not in use - and this article shows you how to do that. I also explore how to estimate the cost savings you can achieve using this solution. ...