What data is stored in Ephemeral Storage of Amazon EC2 instance

Question

I am trying to stop a Amazon EC2 instance and get the warning message      Warning  Please note that any data on the ephemeral storage of your instance will be lost when it is stopped    My Question  What data is stored in ephemeral storage of an Amazon EC2 instance

User · Answer

ephemeral is just another name of root volume when you launch Instance from AMI backed from Amazon EC2 instance store So Everything will be stored on ephemeral  if you have launched your instance from AMI backed by EBS volume then your instance does not have ephemeral

User · Answer

Basically  root volume  your entire virtual system disk  is ephemeral  but only if you choose to create AMI backed by Amazon EC2 instance store   If you choose to create AMI backed by EBS then your root volume is backed by EBS and everything you have on your root volume will be saved between reboots   If you are not sure what type of volume you have  look under EC2- Elastic Block Store- Volumes in your AWS console and if your AMI root volume is listed there then you are safe  Also  if you go to EC2- Instances and then look under column  Root device type  of your instance and if it says  ebs   then you don t have to worry about data on your root device   More details here  http   docs aws amazon com AWSEC2 latest UserGuide RootDeviceStorage html

User · Answer

According to AWS documentation  https   aws amazon com premiumsupport knowledge-center instance-store-vs-ebs   instance store volumes is not persistent through instance stops  terminations  or hardware failures   Any AMI created from instance stored disk doesn t contain data present in instance store so all instances launched by this AMI will not have data stored in instance store  Instance store can be used as cache for applications running on instance  for all persistent data you should use EBS

User · Answer

To be clear and answer  Dean s question  EBS-type root storage doesn t seem to be ephemeral  Data is persistent across reboots and actually it doesn t make any sense to use ebs-backed root volume which is  ephemeral   This wouldn t be different from image-based root volume

User · Answer

Anything that is not stored on an EBS volume that is mounted to the instance will be lost     For example  if you mount your EBS volume at  mystuff  then anything not in  mystuff will be lost   If you don t mount an ebs volume and save stuff on it  then I believe everything will be lost   You can create an AMI from your current machine state  which will contain everything in your ephemeral storage   Then  when you launch a new instance based on that AMI it will contain everything as it is now   Update  to clarify based on comments by mattgmg1990 and glenn bech   Note that there is a difference between  stop  and  terminate    If you  stop  an instance that is backed by EBS then the information on the root volume will still be in the same state when you  start  the machine again   According to the documentation   By default  the root device volume and the other Amazon EBS volumes attached when you launch an Amazon EBS-backed instance are automatically deleted when the instance terminates  but you can modify that via configuration

[amazon-web-services] What data is stored in Ephemeral Storage of Amazon EC2 instance?

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