What is Elastic Block Storage?

Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is a block-level data storage service provided for Kingsoft Cloud Elastic Compute (KEC) instances. It features high availability, high reliability, flexibility, and ease of use. EBS uses distributed clusters and triplicate storage architecture to guarantee the reliability of data storage for KEC instances.

EBS provides volumes of different types and specifications. EBS volumes can be attached to any running KEC instance in the same availability zone (AZ) to meet the requirements for stable and low-latency storage. EBS volumes can be attached to and detached from KEC instances in the same AZ. The capacity of EBS volumes can be adjusted quickly to meet the changing requirements for data storage.

EBS can automatically replicate data into three replicas in an AZ to store your data on physical machines of different racks. This prevents data loss and other problems caused by single points of failure (SPOF), and improves data availability and persistence. Based on different performance requirements, EBS volumes are categorized into solid state drive (SSD) volumes and enhanced hard disk drive (EHDD) volumes. You can purchase, adjust, and manage EBS volumes in the console with ease.

The lifecycle of an EBS volume is independent of that of a KEC instance. The operations to create and delete an EBS volume are not affected by the running time of the relevant KEC instance. You can attach multiple EBS volumes to the same KEC instance. You can also detach an EBS volume from a KEC instance and attach it to another KEC instance. If a KEC instance expires and is released, the attached EBS volumes are not released and the data on the EBS volumes is not affected.

EBS 3.0 is the latest generation of the block storage system independently developed by Kingsoft Cloud. The underlying layer uses NVMe SSD disks as the storage medium and uses the architecture that features high availability, high reliability, flexibility, ease of use, and elastic capacity expansion. EBS 3.0 provides the snapshot feature to prevent data loss due to problems such as misoperation, tampering, and attacks. This feature allows you to restore data to the business state when a snapshot is created through rollback. EBS 3.0 uses the Redirect-On-Write (ROW) technology to create snapshots of EBS volumes. Creating snapshots does not deteriorate performance of an EBS volume and therefore does not interrupt your business.