What is Instance store disk in AWS?
- An instance store provides temporary block-level storage for your instance
- Not an normal EBS storage type
- Temporary storage device , once you stop and start the instance or terminate the instance all the data will be erased.The data in an instance store persists only during the lifetime of its associated instance.
- If you reboot the instance from OS data will be persist.
- You can specify instance store volumes for an instance only when you launch it
- Instance store is ideal for temporary storage of information that changes frequently, such as buffers, caches, scratch data, and other temporary content, or for data that is replicated across a fleet of instances, such as a load-balanced pool of web servers.
- The picture shows how instance store mapped to EC2 instance.
- The size of an instance store as well as the number of devices available varies by instance type.
- You can’t detach an instance store volume from one instance and attach it to a different instance
- The virtual devices for instance store volumes are
ephemeral[0-23] - The virtual devices for NVMe instance store volumes are
/dev/nvme[0-7]n1 (Non-Volatile Memory Express) - NVMe type instance store has SSD disk type also . Which will be used mainly in Data Base or Web server Falsh cache purpose. Ex below i3.4xlarge supports as below
-
i3.4xlarge2 x 1,900 GB (3.8 TB) NVMe SSD - Do not rely on instance store for valuable, long-term data. Instead, use more durable data storage, such as Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, or Amazon EFS.