Amazon’s Elastic Block Store volumes

Cloud Academy has added a guided tour of Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS) to its growing library of hands-on labs. Labs are a particularly powerful learning tool since they allow you to work directly with the real AWS console in exactly the same way you will in the real world. The only difference is that our lab will guide you through the process step-by-step, to make sure there’s nothing you miss.

The Elastic Block Store is an Amazon service that provides persistent block level storage volumes for use with EC2 instances. EBS volumes are virtual – meaning that they can be easily copied, “moved” from instance to instance and made into snapshots and images for use as templates.

You get full control over your volume’s type, size, and IOPS rating, and, as EBS volumes are block-level, you can format and mount them just like you would a new drive connected to your PC.

The bottom line: since Elastic Block Store volumes are the critical core of EC2 storage, you’ll need to be really comfortable with their administration.

The Elastic Block Store hands-on lab



Which is exactly where our EBS lab comes in: through the course of the lab, you’ll log into the AWS console, launch an EC2 instance with an extra EBS volume, create, attach, and detach volumes, create a filesystem on a new volume, and create a snapshot from a volume’s contents. That’s pretty much everything you’ll need to get started with instance-based data management.

For some good background information – or to flesh out the subject a bit more – you might also like to view the Elastic Block Store video from my AWS Data Management course.

Looking to move your AWS skills to the next level?

There’s no better time to start than now, and there’s no better place to do it than this EBS lab!