Amazon EC2 – Persistant storage in the works

Amazon announced today, via an email to its EC2 subscribers, that they are working on a persistent storage feature for their EC2 service. It seems that it would be implemented as an attached volume to your EC2 instance. It will behave like an unformatted hard drive or block device. There will also be tools to allow developers to take snapshots of these volumes and back them up to S3. Sizes range from 1GB – 1TB. Multiple volumes can be attached to a single EC2 instance. Its designed to add a high throughput, low latency storage option to EC2 machines.

Here is the full email:

Dear Amazon EC2 Developer,

Many Amazon EC2 customers have been requesting that we let them know ahead of time about features that are currently under development so that they can better plan for how that functionality might integrate with their applications. To that end, we would like to share some details about a major upcoming feature that many of you have requested – persistent storage for EC2.

This new feature provides reliable, persistent storage volumes, for use with Amazon EC2 instances. These volumes exist independently from any Amazon EC2 instances, and will behave like raw, unformatted hard drives or block devices, which may then be formatted and configured based on the needs of your application. The volumes will be significantly more durable than the local disks within an Amazon EC2 instance. Additionally, our persistent storage feature will enable you to automatically create snapshots of your volumes and back them up to Amazon S3 for even greater reliability.

You will be able to create volumes ranging in size from 1 GB to 1 TB, and will be able to attach multiple volumes to a single instance. Volumes are designed for high throughput, low latency access from Amazon EC2, and can be attached to any running EC2 instance where they will show up as a device inside of the instance. This feature will make it even easier to run everything from relational databases to distributed file systems to Hadoop processing clusters using Amazon EC2.

When persistent storage is launched, Amazon EC2 will be adding several new APIs to support the persistent storage feature. Included will be calls to manage your volume (CreateVolume, DeleteVolume), mount your volume to your instance (AttachVolume, DetachVolume) and save snapshots to Amazon S3 (CreateSnapshot, DeleteSnapshot).

This new functionality is already being used privately by a handful of EC2 customers, and will be publicly available later this year. We will be expanding the private offering as we get closer to launch. Please sign up if you are interested in participating.

We hope this information is useful to you as you plan, design and deploy your applications in Amazon EC2.

Sincerely,

The Amazon EC2 Team

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