AMIs and Storage: EBS-Backed vs Instance Store
~12 min read
What an AMI actually contains, and the difference between network-attached EBS storage and physically-local instance store.
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Key points
- •AMI = template (OS + software + config) an instance boots from; can be AWS-provided, Marketplace, or your own custom 'golden image'
- •EBS-backed root volumes persist independently of the instance and survive a stop/start cycle
- •Instance Store volumes are physically local, very fast, but lost on stop/terminate/hardware failure
- •Custom AMIs are the standard way to make Auto Scaling launches fully pre-configured, avoiding boot-time setup scripts