Ben Cherian’s blog

This morning, Amazon publically released a new feature called Amazon Block Storage. Previously, there was no persistent storage available on EC2 instances. If you started an instance and then added files or changed the database, all the added files or database changes would be lost upon shutdown of the instance. There were kludgey ways to get around this problem, but nothing quite as nice as standard persistent storage.

With the announcement of Amazon Block Storage, EC2 instance have access to persistent storage which can be formatted in any format you desire. This was announced months ago, but released only to select users. Today is the first day Block Storage is available for everyone to work with. This is also the first time pricing for this service has been announced.

Amazon Elastic Block Store

Amazon EBS Volumes
$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage
$0.10 per 1 million I/O requests 

Amazon EBS Snapshots to Amazon S3 (priced the same as Amazon S3)
$0.15 per GB-month of data stored
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT requests (when saving a snapshot)
$0.01 per 10,000 GET requests (when loading a snapshot)(pricing info directly from the Amazon pricing page)

With public availability and ridiculously cheap pricing, Amazon has answered the biggest objection most people had with moving their application onto the Amazon cloud as well as made themselves much more competitive in the space. Go AWS team!

For more info, check out Werner Vogel’s post.