EBS Volumes are network drives with good but "limited" performance. Sometimes you want something even higher performance and that is going to be a hardware disk attached onto your EC2 intances.
If you need a high-performance hardware disk, use EC2 Instance Store.
What is AWS EC2 Instance Store?
EC2 Instance Store is the temporary block storage service offered by AWS. EC2 Instance Store, in itseft, is not a storage service but a part of the EC2 service. These storage devices physically lie on the same host that provides the EC2 instance and are useful for storing temporary data associated with the EC2 intances.
Anology: EC2 Instance Store is the hard drive attached to the physical server.
EC2 Instance Store Use Case
EC2 Instance Store volumes are highly recommended for situations where data changes frequently and high I/O performance is required.
They are especially well-suited for use as Cache of Buffer storage for your applications or use to stores scratch data, temporary content.
They are not to be relied upon for critical and long term data.
Limitations of EC2 Instance Store
As mentioned above, since EC2 instance store is temporary, it is not ideal for storing critical or important data.
In case, the EC2 Instance associated with this storage is stopped or terminated, all data on the storage is lost with no possible means for data recovery.
NOTE: Data will still be retained if your action is reboot instances
Risk of data lost if hardware fails: If the host machine providing the EC2 intance experiences a failure or crash due to internal issueds, all data stored on the EC2 Instance Storage is lost.
Backups and Replication are your responsibility.
IMPORTANCE: Instance store volumes can be attached to an instance only when you launch it. You can't attach instance store volumes to an instance after you've launched it.
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