AWS: Instance Stores

Amazon EC2 instance store

• An instance store provides temporary block-level storage for your instance.

• This storage is located on disks that are physically attached to the host computer.

• Instance stores are ideal for temporary storage of information that changes frequently, such as buffers, caches, scratch data, and other temporary content, or for data that is replicated across a fleet of instances, such as a load-balanced pool of web servers.

• Instance stores are ephemeral.

• Instance store volumes are created from AMI templates.

• When an instance is terminated, an instance store volume is lost. However, an instance can be restarted without losing an instance store.

• Instance stores cannot be attached/detached from instances.

• Only specific instance types have instance stores and the only way of using an instance store is by launching one of these instance types.

• In the “Choose an Instance Type” interface, instances with an instance store are advertised as having an SSD rather than “EBS only” in the “Instance Storage” column.