Amazon EBS provides highly available, reliable, durable, block-level storage volumes that can be attached to a running instance EBS as a primary storage device is recommended for data that requires frequent and granular updates for e.g. running a database or filesystems An EBS volume behaves like a raw, unformatted, external block device that can be attached to a single EC2 instance at a time EBS volume persists independently from the running life of an instance. An EBS volume can be attached to any instance within the same Availability Zone, and can be used like any other physical hard drive