Are there different type of volume other than EBS

Question

Are there different type of a volume other than EBS volume in aws?

I see a term EBS volume but don't seem to recall any other volume mentioned.

Also, EBS is just a name for their volume?

EBS - volume
Hard - disk

Answer 1

It depends on your definition of "Volume". There are actually 4 types of storage available on AWS, though only Instance Storage and EBS qualify as "Volumes".

1: Instance Storage - This is storage tied directly to an instance, like a hard drive on a physical machine. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/InstanceStorage.html

2: EBS - You could think of EBS like an external drive on a physical machine. It can be detached and attached to another instance. http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/

3: S3 - This is an http based storage option. It is extremely reliable, but cannot be mapped as a volume directly, files must be retreived via an http request. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

4: Glacier - This is meant to be a replacement for backup tapes. It is very slow to access, but very reliable. It is only intended for backup purposes as there are heavy fees for frequent access. http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/

Answer 2

In terms of volumes for AWS that I know of there are two:

1. EBS Volumes. These are managed drives for your EC2 instances. You can boot off them, snapshot them, and move them between machines. EBS volumes come in two flavors: Standard and PIOPS. The billing between the two is slightly different, as are their performance characteristics. Unlike Ephemeral volumes the data written to EBS is durable. You can create EBS drives in a number of ways.
2. Ephemeral Volumes. These are volumes that come-and-go along with your EC2 instance. Anything you write to them will be lost if the EC2 instance is shutdown or moved.

AWS has a number of other storage offerings (RDS, S3, DynamoDB, Glacier) but they're not focused on offering products that act like hard disks.