Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. As written in the EC2 post, the instance stores are temporary storage. The Instance stores may get deleted if the instance terminates or of there is a disk failure. Each EBS volume is automatically replicated within its availability zone to protect you from component failure, offering high availability and durability. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes are available in a variety of types that differ in performance characteristics and price.
Types of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes
Magnetic Volumes
They obviously have the lowest performance however, they are the cheapest. This is ideal where workloads or data is accessed infrequently.
General Purpose SSD
General purpose SSD provide cost-effective storage that is ideal for broad range of workloads. They deliver strong performance at moderate price point that is suitable for a wide range of workloads. General purpose SSD can provide a baseline performance upto 3000 IOPS.
Provisioned IOPS SSD
These are designed to meet the needs of I/O intensive workloads, particularly database workloads that are sensitive to storage performance and consistency. They can provide a speed of even 20K IOPS.
Backup / Recovery
You can back up the data on your Amazon EBS volumes, regardless of volume type, by taking point-in-time snapshot. Snapshots are incremental backups, which means that only the blocks on the device that have changed since your most recent snapshot are stored.