Introduction:

When working with Amazon EC2 instances in AWS, one important decision we'll face is choosing the right storage option.

Two popular choices provided by AWS are:

• EBS (Elastic Block Store)
• EFS (Elastic File System)

But when should we use EBS? And when does EFS make more sense?
Let’s break it down in the most beginner-friendly!

What is EBS (Elastic Block Store)?

Imagine EBS as the hard disk attached to our computer

Key points to note down:

• Block-level storage (like HDD or SSD)
• Attached to a single EC2 instance at a time
• Stores all your system files, installed packages, project folders, .git, .ssh, etc.
• Persistent — our data stays even after instance shutdown (unless deleted manually)

Example Use Case :

we're launching an EC2 instance to deploy a Flask app. we install Python, Docker, and some required libraries. All of this is stored in the EBS volume attached to our EC2. If we stop and restart the EC2, the data remains intact.

What is EFS (Elastic File System)?

Now we can think of EFS like a shared Google Drive. It's a network file system that multiple machines can connect to and use at the same time.
Key points to note down:

• File-level storage (it save's ad folder and file structure as file explorer in windows)
• Can be mounted on multiple EC2 instances simultaneously
• Accessible over a network (NFS-Network File System)
• Automatically scales as we store more data

Example Use Case :

Like we're part of a team using multiple EC2 instances to work on a shared dataset. we store that data in EFS, so everyone’s EC2 can read and write to it at the same time — like a shared workspace.

Table Comparison from Chat-GPT:

Conclusion:

• EBS → Like your personal hard disk
• EFS → Like a shared Google Drive folder for your team

If this helped you understand EBS vs EFS better, drop a ❤️ and let me know your thoughts in the comments. Happy Cloud Learning! ☁️💻