Amazon Boosts Cloud Storage Offerings

By Greg McNevin

August 25, 2008: Further extending its cloud storage capabilities, Amazon has announced the launch of its new Elastic Block Store (EBS), a persistent storage feature for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

EC2 provides resizable cloud computing capacity, and with the addition of EBS, storage volumes can be programmatically created, attached to EC2 instances, and backed up with a snapshot to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

The addition of EBS is a significant leap forward for the storage service, as previously when storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself, if the instance was terminated the data it contained would be lost. Now with EBS, Amazon says that users can choose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from EC2 instances.

Furthermore, the company says that even more durable backups can be created as EBS enables point-in-time, consistent snapshots of volumes stored on S3.

“For over two years, we’ve focused on delivering a cost-effective, web scale infrastructure to developers, giving them complete flexibility in the kinds of solutions they deliver,” said Peter De Santis, General Manager of Amazon EC2.

“Persistent block storage has been among the top requests of developers using Amazon EC2, and we’re excited to deliver Amazon Elastic Block Storage designed specifically for our cloud-based, elastic computing environment.”

The additional security will no doubt be welcomed by Amazon customers, as the company’s storage offerings have suffered some significant hiccups and several outages already this year.

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