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Cloud Computing · Intermediate

Instance Store

Temporary block storage physically attached to the EC2 host, offering very high I/O but losing data when the instance stops or terminates.

Definition

Instance store volumes are ephemeral disks on the physical host. Data persists through reboots but is lost if the instance is stopped, hibernated, terminated or the underlying disk fails. They are ideal for caches, buffers, scratch data and replicated data sets that need very high IOPS.

Example

A distributed NoSQL cluster uses i4i instance store NVMe drives and replicates data across nodes for durability.

Exam tip

If data must survive a stop/start, instance store is wrong; use EBS.

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