Ready to deploy your application on the Amazon Cloud? You told your service integrator to provision a machine and put up your app. Did you discuss with him what kind of storage and back up your application would get?
Most types of instances include a fixed amount of storage space on which you can store data. It is referred to as the “instance store” or an “ephemeral drive” as it is not designed to be a permanent storage solution.
If an instance reboots (intentionally or unintentionally), the data on the instance store will survive. However, if the underlying drive fails, or if you stop or terminate the instance, the data is lost. Also, the data on the instance store is not included when you bundle an AMI. For example, if you have an Amazon S3-backed Windows instance, the D: drive on that instance is by default an ephemeral drive, which is not included in an AMI that you bundle from that instance.
There are two options for your EC2 instance i.e to be backed by Amazon S3 or to be backed by Amazon EC2 and the option you select has an impact on the boot time, data persistence and cost effectiveness of your deployment..
Here is a brief from the Amazon EC2 official documentation.
An Amazon EC2 instance can be launched from an AMI(Amazon Machine Instance) backed by Amazon EBS or from an AMI backed by Amazon S3. Instances launched from AMIs backed by Amazon EBS use Amazon EBS volumes as their root devices. Instances launched from AMIs backed by Amazon S3 use an instance store as the root device (e.g., / or C:).
The following table describes the differences between AMIs backed by Amazon EBS and AMIs backed by Amazon S3.
If you are indeed thinking about going on the AWS, there are a lot of important decisions you will need to take..and we at Cennest can help you with the same..so its cennesttech@hotmail.com for AWS!!
Until next time!
Cennest