Amazon today launched a new web service – EBS, the Elastic Block Store (yes I also first read it as ‘Elastic Book Store’) for EC2. EBS provides persistent storage for EC2 computing instances, and the service is public today and available to all customers after a period of alpha testing with some users.
Previously EC2 instances were able to access temporary storage as part of the compute instance, or persistent storage only on S3 – the Amazon online storage service. The difference between EBS and S3 is that EBS allows block-level access, so that it can be mounted just like any other local storage device from within EC2 and can be accessed across servers and between instances. S3 is accessed as a web service, so performance for latency sensitive applications was never optimal (such as running a database store). EBS provides a much higher level of performance comparable to high-grade local storage in terms of both access times and availability.
Persistant block-level storage for EC2 is perhaps long overdue, as one of the criticisms of EC2 when it first launched was the inability to run a fast data store across snapshots, which made running databases or other data-intensive applications slightly more complicated. Services such as RightScale have built products around helping developers scale and manage MySQL instances on EC2. Other cloud-based computing services such as Mosso or virtual servers from providers such as MediaTemple have had persistent storage options, although what Amazon have developed with the combination of EC2, S3 and now EBS is a tiered approach which provides more flexibility to developers.
Read the rest of this entry at TechCrunchIT.
I had tried EC2 sometime back but this was the exact issue that held me back. Time to give EC2 another try now that we have persistent storage!
If someone has written useful quick start blogs or guides, I would be keen to hear about it.
Thorsten, CTO from RightScale, seems to get good compliments on his blogs. He has a good post on EBS.
http://blog.rightscale.com/
Wait — you read it as ‘elastic book store’ at first, too? Good to know I’m not the only one who rarely sees ‘block’ and ’store’ put next to each other like that.
Funny, I completely ignored this news this morning as I read “book” too. Weird. Maybe it is time to have another look at EC2. I got HyperSites running on it and from fresh instance to accepting requests was about 20 seconds. Not bad… but EBS will make that a reasonable number.
Having the big missing piece of Amazon EC2 in place now, we can start enjoying the full greatness of AWS even though EBS seems a bit pricey taking I/O op-based pricing in consideration. Why did they choose the op-based vs transfer-based model?
This is great news for the EC2 platform! Having a familiar way to access persistent storage will open EC2 up to a wider audience and hopefully spawn more innovation around it.
@ Anurag, one of the best ways to get your feet wet is check out the getting started guide.
Jing jing jing…. watcha gonna do
Microsoft really needs to get it’s services up to speed in this space.
With Linux and Windows both having large and healthy market share in the web app space, hosted services is one of the fronts where one camp cannot afford to be this far behind the other.