- Now let's talk about Instance Store Volumes in Amazon EC2.
Instance Store Volumes are volumes that
essentially come with the EC2 Instance.
They're what we might consider built in to the EC2 Instance,
at least those instances that actually include them,
not all of them do.
And so the nice thing about Instance Store Volumes are
one, you're not paying anything extra,
they're already included in the cost of the EC2 Instance.
We can get very high IOPs,
upwards of a hundred thousand plus IOPs,
with these particular Instance Stores.
But, what we trade for that,
is the fact that they are ephemeral.
It means that when we stop or terminate that machine,
the data on that drive will be gone.
Amazon does not give us the ability to perform
snapshots on Instance Volumes.
So there are plenty of customers that are using
these Instance Volumes so that we can get that high degree
of IOPs but they are also leveraging
some kind of other software,
perhaps a custom-written application
or a third-party application,
that helps back up that data to either S3
or the Elastic Block storage,
some other storage mechanism
that has a longer life span and more durable.
So, again, it's really important to remember
that while we do get this high degree of IOPs,
the data on this drive is ephemeral and could be gone,
it will be gone, when that machine is
either stopped or terminated.
Just as an example here, this is not a comprehensive list,
but I wanted to give you an example of the types of volumes
that we might expect to see
with different types of machines.
So one example here is the M3 Medium.
The M3 Medium would come with one
4-gig SSD volume.
Whereas the M3 Extra Large
would come with two 40-gig volumes.
And yes you could raid them if you wanted to,
you could put them into a logical volume manager.
Some of the other instances you can see here,
the D2 8 Extra Large comes with about
48 terabytes worth of volumes,
that is 24 2-terabyte devices
that are included with the hourly cost of that machine.
And that is Instance Store Volumes
within Amazon EC2.